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A few years ago, the editor of The Skeptic (“pursuing truth through reason & evidence since 1987”) served notice to those who considered the English spelling of scepticism to be chiefly a geographical affair. As she explained in The Guardian,
As novel as this distinction was, the definitions were depressingly narrow and oversimplistic. To someone with imagination, the more interesting side might even be Team Sceptic, who at least have the good sense to query the status quo, whereas the Skeptics’ commitment to the tenets of ‘evidence-based’ everything mires them in the history and politics of knowledge that has recently spilled out into society from medicine and the sciences. Indeed, though they have a reputation for producing objective and rational conclusions, our modern evidence-based knowledge-making practices are inextricably tied to early 20th century industrial standardisation practices, created to bring about the same revolution in medical productivity that was achieved in the factory. The top-down adoption of standards didn’t necessarily gift medical or scientific practices with ‘rightness;’ instead, it simply, albeit quite usefully, gave them ‘sameness.’ This was a process not limited to the early 20th century: in the 1970s, Archie Cochrane, one of the purported founders of evidence-based medicine (EBM), endorsed the practice of randomised controlled trials, EBM’s signature methodology, as a solution to the wildly out-of-balance relationship in the NHS between the massive input of resources and the small output in health outcomes (he likened this imbalance to a crematorium). Cochrane didn’t think much of the effectiveness of the NHS in general, but he saw the repair to this problem not in the intensification of scientific or technological study, but in the same rationalizing processes that transformed medicine in the early twentieth century. He touted EBM for its ability to rationalize and streamline, to use less input per output, and to make medicine thereby more productive by making it more the same.
It seems hardly possible that a ‘skeptic,’ wherever they hail from, would want to hew so closely to this industrial lineage, one also closely linked to the rise of capitalism and neoliberalism that has also been the 20th century’s legacy. And yet there persists among the enlightened classes the view that real Scepticism, with a capital S and possibly a k, derives from objective science the authority to discount any view that looks ‘irrational’ or fails to pass the ‘evidence-based’ sniff test.
What an impoverished world we live in that this is what the sceptic has become. For one thing, this sceptic cannot be a scientist. For, rather than testing the limits of the world around us – which is what ‘science’ at its most thoughtful does - the sceptic submits to the prevailing authority of the ‘expert,’ whose role is not mainly to parse and thoughtfully consider, but to adjudicate and pronounce. Out of science’s own embrace of scepticism, inbuilt in the scientific method’s requirement for falsifiable hypotheses and replicable outcomes, the expert emerges as the person who proclaims what is, rather than the more creative and open-ended ‘what is now’ of the experimental scientist, with its attendant, unspoken and tantalizing promise of ‘what might be later on.’
The sociologist Bruno Latour has told us, in regard to climate change especially, that seeking the truth may not in fact always be the right answer, and that a useful barometer for knowing may perhaps be found in our familiarity and comfort with a scientific process whose qualification of knowledge – the ‘now’ of what we know now – is its own guarantor of the trustworthiness of its findings. Though a sceptic should embrace this, this nuance has been lost on the ‘skeptics’ who would like to displace the intrinsic and useful uncertainty of science’s knowledge-making processes with a certain certainty that, whatever its inaccuracies, inconsistencies, or inutilities, has the benefit of total stability.
There is some wisdom to the notion that the sceptics’ questioning of accepted beliefs is problematic. In some ways, good governance requires some willingness on the part of the people to agree at least to a common pool of knowledge, if not a common set of ‘facts.’ But the question is how to get this balance right. As the wonderful Patricia Kingori has pointed out sometimes the conspiracy theorists are right, the rumours are true, the suspicions of the ‘sceptics’ are borne out. The dynamics of power here play out spectacularly - in the borderlands of the disenfranchised, where trust in experts, infrastructures and government have proven time and again to be dangerous and ill-advised, scepticism especially and rightly reigns.
Among all of the revelations that the recent pandemic has produced, at the fore is the realisation that there is no real stability in evidence, no certainty in knowledge: our sense of the pandemic has vacillated widely, from no threat at all in the early days, to a disaster of monumental proportions, to moderate concern as it seems to moves on toward those borderlands. We have agonised over the simplest of all virus protectors, the face mask, precisely because the evidence involved is so murky, as if evidence for and against everything did not often look more or less look like this, as if mask-wearing were not fraught primarily for reasons that have nothing to do with evidence. And we should have realised what the sceptic always knows, that we will only really know what happened in retrospect, though even then our memories, collective and personal, will play tricks.
The ‘healthy’ sceptic knows that knowledge-making is a fraught process, that scepticism itself is a marker of good science, that questioning what one knows now is the productive basis required for knowing more, differently or otherwise in the future. We need scepticism, or skepticism, depending on where you live, despite its sometimes antithetical and antagonistic persona, its contrarian tendencies, its occasionally downright unhelpful and dangerous proclivities.
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