Education, New Technology, and the Paranoid Politics of Disinterested Objectivity

Expertise is increasingly seen as suspect, particularly on the political right, because experts are presumed to have interests and agendas. The majority of registered Republican voters believe that higher education is "bad for America";¹ only 27% of Republicans trust scientists, and only 31% trust medical science.² As of this writing, a majority of Republican voters believe that the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent and stolen despite evidence provided by policy experts, academic experts, and thorough investigations, recounts, and audits by Republican officials at the state and local level. In May of 2021 the party purged its congressional leadership for refusing to accept the stolen election lie. As of late March 2021, a quarter of Republican voters believed in the fantastical Qanon conspiracy (that includes evidence-free allegations of baby-eating Democrats running vast pedophilia rings), and this major U.S. political party has become beholden to Trumpism with or without Trump. The 2019 book Qanon: An Invitation to the Great Awakening by WWG1WGA (Where We Go One We Go All) was a top 75 selling book on Amazon.com and included these allegations: "'that prominent Democrats murder and eat children' and that the U.S. government 'created AIDS, polio, Lyme disease, some natural disasters, two Indiana Jones movies and the Pixar movie Monsters Inc.'"³ The majority of Republican congresspeople (52% in the house and 60% in the Senate as of the 117^th congress)⁴ reject the scientific consensus on global warming. Established scientific advice from public health officials to wear masks and keep a distance during the COVID 19 pandemic was rejected by rightist politicians as an infringement on individual and commercial liberty as the scientists and public health officials are accused of political partisanship and being commercially interested.

This article argues that contemporary crises of hegemony, material and symbolic precarity, and agency have fostered rising distrust of experts and specialists. An expanding distrust of experts and specialists opens questions about the relationship between knowledge and interests and calls into question the longstanding political uses of the guise of disinterested objectivity in public life. I argue that people can be educated into very different interpretations of surfacing doubts about expert knowledge and the interests behind it: a reactionary politics of paranoia, a liberal doubling down on the guise of disinterested objectivity, or critical consciousness and political agency. The first section of this article addresses the crises that are calling into question the guise of disinterested objectivity. The second section contends that the politics of paranoia can only take hold if it has been taught and learned. I identify three dominant tropes through which doubts about disinterested objectivity are translated into paranoia, and I detail three ways that paranoid modes of interpretation depoliticize politics, rendering collective democratic action difficult or even impossible to conceive or enact. The third section runs these issues through the recent expansion of a number of contemporary educational technology products that rely on the guise of disinterested objectivity to further commercial ends yet build the elements of paranoid politics and pedagogy into their products. I pay particular attention to the example of the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development's (OECD) discursive production of an allegedly disinterested and objective science of Social Emotional Learning. The conclusion calls for critical pedagogical projects that can translate doubt about disinterested objectivity into critical consciousness and radically democratic politics while avoiding the alluring promise of total security with its authoritarian guarantees.

The Crisis of Disinterested Objectivity and Distrust of Specialists

In his 1995 book Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life, science historian Theodore Porter attempts to account for the prestige and power of numbers. Porter argues that forms of quantification are "strategies of communication" that are "intimately bound up with forms of community" (Porter 1995, viii). The reliance by public officials on numbers produced by experts, for Porter, reduces the need for "intimate knowledge and personal trust" (1995, ix). The authority of scientific or quasi-scientific pronouncements in public life depends upon claims to objectivity and the exclusion of subjectivity and judgement (ix...