Panocracy 69

The Credentialed Class

“When you can score 9 (out of 10) you'll be entitled to an opinion. When you can score 9.9, we'll listen to it” - advice to students at a gymnastics club

“You cannot understand how an ant colony works by becoming an ant” - Bill Bonner

This time we're looking at opinions and in particular trying to understand the opinions and motivations of the credentialed class – that body of men and women who have (1) attained the right to put letters after their name by passing exams and (2) used those letters to enable a career in the professions.

We lump all such people together under the same banner despite there being huge variances in their qualifications, their experience and their competence. Stereotyping is what we all do when talking about the 'working class' or 'the elites'. It doesn’t mean we think a group is all the same, merely that we believe its members to share more opinions with each other than they do with other groups.

Over the past few years it's become obvious to many that various government interventions have received the support of many in the credentialed class. From broadcasters and journalists to doctors and even science journals, such support has been in the form of promoting the benefits while playing down or even ignoring the problems.

This time we want to examine the issue via a specific case showing the mindset of a member of the credentialed class who I know personally. We'll call him Robert because that's not his real name and I want to protect his identity.

Case Study

I came across an interesting move called Climate The Movie -The Cold Truth which I found to be a watchable piece of journalism about the Climate emergency.

It might be useful to watch the movie and form your own view of it (which I'd love to hear in the comments) before proceeding further. As a piece of sceptical journalism it doesn't set out to give a 'balanced' view but instead examines some of the objections to the IPCC, mainstream narrative or so-called scientific consensus.

So I sent the above link to some friends and acquaintances many of whom are credentialed to ask them for their opinions.

This is the response I received from Robert:

“Hello Jim,

I started watching the video you sent and stuck with it for about the first eleven minutes before giving up. You say that it is a "very clear exposition" of the case against climate change. Since I gave up after 11 minutes, I'm not entirely sure whether they are trying to say that the climate isn't changing due to human activity, or that it may be changing but it doesn't matter. In any case, I would like to comment on this first short section of the film, explain why I stopped at this point, and then back off onto some more general comments about how I view this sort of stuff and the way your own thinking has gone over the past few years.

The film starts with a whole raft of typical conspiracy theory statements: the climate emergency is a hoax, the careers of climate scientists depend on them towing the climate change line, it a massive "business opportunity", there's a huge amount of money involved, it's an assault on individual freedom, it's a wonderful way to increase government power, and there is bullying and intimidation of anyone who dissents from the standard view.

[As an aside here, the idea that there is big money to be had from asserting that we are starting to experience dangerous climate change as a result, primarily, of burning fossil fuels, seems laughable to me given the huge wealth and power of the fossil fuel lobby, which has spent the past 30 years or more pushing in the opposite direction.]

The film then introduces their initial raft of persona. This collection of individuals consists of three aging [sic] physicists and a retired meteorologist. Their credentials are emphasized in terms of having worked in prestigious US institutions, and in one case having a Nobel prize. With the exception of the meteorologist they cannot really claim any serious expertise in climate science. Of course, if you believe that climate science is all a racket then this is a positive feature, but I don't see why we should regard their pronouncements on the subject as being of any greater weight than those of any other intelligent layman.

The film then starts to tell us that previous geological epochs have been warmer than the present. It's a fair point, which anyone with a reasonable grounding in geology could tell you is well-known. (I attach a plot taken from the Wikipedia article on the "Geologic temperature record".) Geologists often divide climate history into "hot house" and "ice house" phases. The Earth has been in one of the latter for the past 30 million years or so, but is arguably being driven towards flipping into a hot house phase by the current warming, induced primarily by the rise in CO_2 concentration resulting from human exploitation of fossil fuels. The film then starts to argue that this is all a good thing, since it will be nice and warm and we can all go about comfortably without any clothes, and it introduces Patrick Moore in support of this idea. He is described as a "co-founder of Greenpeace". I found this rather surprising, so I looked at what Greenpeace has to say about him. You can find this at https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/news/greenpeace-statement-on-patric/.

A couple of relevant quotes: "Although Mr. Moore played a significant role in Greenpeace Canada for several years, he did not found Greenpeace. "

"Patrick Moore has been a paid spokesman for a variety of polluting industries for more than 30 years, including the timber, mining, chemical and the aquaculture industries. Most of these industries hired Mr. Moore only after becoming the focus of a Greenpeace campaign to improve their environmental performance. Mr. Moore has now worked for polluters for far longer than he ever worked for Greenpeace."

It was at this point that I gave up on the video. Why waste my time and raise my blood pressure when it is clear to me that it's a piece of unreliable rhetoric? Of course, you will interpret my unwillingness to engage with it any further as evidence that I am lazy and blinkered, so let me say a bit about how I view this sort of thing.

I see just the same pattern here as with the COVID debate. The approach of the contrarians, in which world you now seem to be embedded, seems to be as follows. If there is a scientific consensus which has social implications which are unpalatable to you then the first step is to discount that whole scientific discipline (first epidemiology, and now climate science) on the basis that it has been irretrievably corrupted by self-interest/big money/government pressure. Having thus discounted all the "experts" one is then free to listen credulously to anyone with an axe to grind in the area. Such people might be motivated by a whole range of factors - quite likely they share your distaste for the social implications in the area in question (lock-downs, vaccination, carbon controls, renewable energy, "sustainable" life-styles...), but they may also turn out to have vested interests (e.g. financial support from oil companies), or simply be the sort of people who like the feeling of being public enfants terribles.

At the root of all this, I see the ghastly hand of post-modernism, which argues (inter alia) that science has little to do with any search for truth, but rather is like any other human activity - it's all about power, money, prestige and control. I have always detested this viewpoint and am dismayed to see you won over to it. I don't think that I am starry-eyed about the way science works. It is a human activity, of course, and scientists are subject to the same frailties as all humans. However, I believe that the great majority of scientists are attracted to it by a wish to understand the Universe, rather than to make lots of money or acquire power, and I also believe that the scientific method is the best method homo sapiens has yet developed for winnowing out incorrect ideas and bad work and reinforcing good ideas, and hence getting us closer to a genuine understanding of the world.

Of course, scientific ideas have to be subject to sceptical enquiry and intelligent challenge, as do policy pronouncements derived on the back of science. The Great Barrington Declaration was a good example of this in the area of the response to COVID. The authors of this knew what they were talking about, and made some very valid points about the danger of factors other than COVID mortality being given insufficient weight in the political response to the pandemic. So, if you have well-grounded arguments like this to present then I am happy to hear them. I am obviously no expert on climate change, but I know a lot more about it than I did about epidemiology. However, based on what happened in our COVID conversations, I have no interest in debating climate change with you, since I think that it will be unproductive and unpleasant. I dare say that you think of yourself as an independent thinker, whilst I am one of the sheep hoodwinked by the conventional view. My view is that neither of us are independent thinkers. The difference is that I allow my view to be informed by the consensus of scientific opinion in areas where I am not expert, whereas you allow your views to be informed by a merry band of online contrarians. If you are going to dismiss whole fields of science out of hand then there is no useful basis on which we can have a discussion. The only outcome for me from trying is that I become angry and sad, and I don't want to waste my life on anger.

Best wishes,”

Congrats if you got this far. Award yourself a foil hat!

Now I'm not trying to single out Robert here – but it seems to me that he has expressed views that are commonly held by the credentialed classes. His eloquence has been a factor in a successful career (from which he is retired). He and I differed in our response to Covid where he adopted the mainstream view and I was sceptical. For example, I signed the Great Barrington Declaration but he dismissed it out of hand at the time.

I don't wish to bias your opinions by stating mine (although I have plenty!) as I'd love to hear your own take on this – as a member of the 'merry band of online contrarians' or otherwise.

I'm interested in how this plays out against our panocracy in which the positions held by the credentialed classes would be very different.