Academic Government and its Pretensions

More so than its predecessors, the current administration is administrative, with an academic twist. It makes decisions for you because it can discern what is truly good for you, in a way that you cannot. Many of its posts are filled by ex-professors, of law, of economics, of various sciences. Though some have slunk back into the ivory-tinted shadows, and others have left for more alabaster pastures, many remain; and at the head still sits the Great Lecturer, President Obama, the Professor-in-Chief.
But the administration’s composition is incidental to my point.  I am more concerned with its academic character—how greatly it stakes the authority of its policies on the expertise of its policy-makers. This was especially apparent in its advocacy for its health-care program—during which President Obama expressed his longing to have “some very elegant, academically approved approach to health care, [which] didn’t have any kinds of legislative fingerprints on it, and just go ahead and have that passed”—and in its handling of the Great Recession, during which it pled for the public to trust its brain-trust. But the point can be extended generally.
Such expertise is shaky ground on which to found authority. For the expertise of an administrator is the expertise of a social scientist, the ability to generalize about human affairs in both past (explanation) and future (prediction). These generalizations supposedly have the same law-like character of those in the natural sciences: they must be obeyed by those to whom they apply, as a matter of natural necessity. And it is the legal character of these generalizations on which the administrator founds his authority. He is allowed to determine policy for you because he has access to a body of knowledge which you do not, the secrets of what will happen if one policy is chosen rather than another. He is able to compare those counterfactuals and identify the best solution.
The (living) Anglo-American philosopher Alasdaire MacIntyre attacks this myth in one chapter from his first great book After Virtue. Though administrators stake their authority on the legal character of their generalizations, if we look to find any such generalization in the social sciences, we can find none of any interest. Why? Four reasons:

1. Radical conceptual innovation. You cannot predict a radically new innovation, for once you do you have already invented it. Say we live in some pre-metal, post-lingual society. You and I are gassing on about the future. I predict that a knife will be invented within the next monsoon. You have no idea what I’m talking about. You ask “What’s a knife?’ And I go on to describe a knife—sharp iron blade, handle, rivets. And then—aha!—I realize that no one will invent the knife, for I have just invented it. So the administrator cannot predict radically new innovations, the actual effects of which are obvious.
2. You cannot predict all of your own actions. If you haven’t made up your mind, you cannot say what you will do. This may seem to be a trivial truth. A knowledgeable enough observer may be able to predict what you will choose to do, even if you cannot. But the point applies to him: he cannot predict the effects that his own (unpredictable) actions will have on others’ decisions. And the effect of decisions from administrators, those who wield power, will often be great.
3. The game-theoretic character of social life. The artifices of game theory are a well-loved grounding for the social scientist’s predictions. This tool’s edge is dulled—perhaps irredeemably—by three roughs. First, the situations of game theory are infinitely reflexive: I will act based on my prediction of how you will act, which you will choose based on your prediction of how I will act, which I will choose…Second, we the living, as opposed to the imaginary game’s players, often deliberately deceive each other. Third, it is never quite clear what game we are playing in any given situation. Social life is far less tidy than the textbook intrigues of Smith and Jones.
4. Pure chance, and its reverberations. One cannot predict that Napoleon will be sick at Waterloo, or that Antony will find Cleopatra’s nose so lovely, or that Deepwater Horizon will explode. And so one cannot predict fortune’s great effects.

For all these reasons the ability of the administrator to make law-like generalizations is puffery, his authority illusory.
Now a friend of this government might say that this argument attacks a straw man: no administration, Obama’s included, actually claims the expertise that the argument attacks; no one founds his authority on his ability to make law-like generalizations about human affairs. They are more modest; they stake their authority on public consent.
As a philosophic point about the legitimacy of our government, that argument may be true, especially for the government’s more public embassies. But there is still a point to be made about how to treat what happens deep in the crevasses of thousand-page bills and the folds of the Federal Triangle’s concrete palaces. There the people and the media cannot easily penetrate. There the government becomes an administration. And so its pronouncements ought to be treated with a proper skepticism–the concern due to chambers of men entrusted with the public good, deliberating on uncertainties.
Photo credit: http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2009/01/08/midmorning2/