The culture war has its grand battles, and it has its minor skirmishes. One of the latter happened recently, of all places, in a debate about anthropology. In a study of the "state of scholarship in the humanities and the humanistic social sciences," a panel found that field to be egregiously politicized:
In the most extreme cases (e.g., anthropology), we see a widespread deterioration in scholarly standards grounded in a pervasive repudiation of ideals of objectivity together with a toxic intellectual climate in which reasonable dissent on politically charged topics is routinely suppressed and punished.
In response, Carolyn Rouse, the head of the American Anthropological Association, gave an interview to the Chronicle of Higher Education. It was a bad performance, and did less to address the report than to provide a target for commentators looking to attack.
And they did attack: the style, the substance, the politics. One of those attacks, by Megan McArdle in The Washington Post, focused on Americans' loss of trust in academia (and elite intellectuals more broadly), and Rouse's failure to say anything that might restore it:
At a time when academia is under unprecedented attack, it needs public relations adepts who can sell the value of higher education to the masses.
I agree. But McArdle pressed the point further:
Academics need to sell the public on the value of their project. They must convince people that the radical pronouncements of the Great Awokening were a terrible mistake, now corrected, and that they are pursuing truth, not political agendas. Many people in academia do understand this, including the administrators who commissioned that report.
But many others are still clueless. Even if they grasp, dimly, that something is seriously amiss, they do not understand what it will take to fix the problem. Their idea of a solution is to imperiously inform Americans they are wrong: wrong that academia has let politics infect its work, wrong that reform is needed, and wrong that there are two sexes, male and female.
This is a foolish, destructive line of thought. It may succeed in helping universities secure their funding and stay out of the crosshairs of commentators and politicians, but it will weaken not only academia but America altogether.
Populism is ascendant in our time, across the political spectrum. Donald Trump's re-election is the obvious data point, but it was also there in the victories of Zohran Mamdani, Graham Platner, and many others. Its definition isn't easy to pin down, but most broadly it's a belief in popular sovereignty: the right of common people to set the course of the nation. Go one level deeper, and it is specifically that right in opposition to the power and preference of an elite. Still deeper, it is not only a statement of who decides, but about which preferences are correct: popular beliefs are correct because they are popular, and elite beliefs are incorrect because they are held by the elite.
Popular sovereignty should be sacred to anyone who believes in democracy, as I do. But the strength and security of a nation depend on more than popular will and popular beliefs. I'm moved by Ronald Dworkin's idea that the purpose of the law is to provide a "forum of principle," where decisions are made in adherence to principle regardless of power or popular prejudice. It doesn't matter if every member of the community wants to see the defendant hang. If they are not guilty under the law, they can walk free.
We have other forums, other spheres, that we insulate. In science and journalism, truth matters above all. In business, efficiency and value matter. In athletics and other meritocratic competitions, excellence matters. Even our democratic government contains these spaces. Popular will wins in elections, but we expect (or should expect) deliberation and compromise among lawmakers and expertise among regulators.
None of these spheres is perfect, of course. Researchers, reporters, and judges can give in to biases; businesses can freeze out competitors; athletes can cheat. Still, they often do live up to the ideal, and even when they don't, it matters that we try. We need these spaces, all of them. We can't have prosperity, or truth, or capability without the spheres that protect these values.
They're not easy to preserve. Many of the most challenging problems for our civilization happen at the interfaces between those spheres: businesses capturing regulators, journalists trading favorable coverage for access to the powerful. When President Trump intervened on behalf of the American team at the World Cup, it was shocking because it was exactly that kind of violation: political power invading and corrupting a space meant for celebrating excellence.
It is miraculous that we have divided these spheres and preserved them for as many generations as we have, because they are always in danger of collapsing. We have names for the threats. Autocracy is when concentrated political power spreads into every sphere, so that values like truth and justice are set aside in favor of what the autocrat wants. Oligarchy, at least as we use the word today, is when concentrated wealth achieves the same goal. Under the Trump Administration, they go hand-in-hand.
Populism is another of these threats. It is when the popular will invades every sphere and supersedes the values protected there. It's why law enforcement follows public anger instead of the rule of law. It's why dangerous junk science has taken over our public health agencies. It's why truth is dissolving as we turn to viral posts instead of journalists for news.
And, it's there in McArdle's demand that academia bend its knee to the public.
Scientists do need to reach out to the public, but the way to rebuild that relationship is not to recant controversial beliefs. It is to remind the public that academic freedom, and the space to pursue truth, even when scandalously unpopular, is at the heart not only of our national values but of our national strength.
That isn't to say that scientists are infallible. They are human. They can get swept up in intellectual fads and charge into blind alleys. Sometimes they lie, or cheat, or are simply wrong. Sometimes, as that report indicates, they become politicized. But the standard that matters is whether they have strayed from the pursuit of truth, not whether they deviated from popular opinion. I don't care if scholars are out of touch with mainstream America, because truth is not determined by vote.
There's a contradiction here. What can it mean to be committed to popular sovereignty and yet believe that there must be boundaries on the public's will?
The resolution is in the craft of citizenship. In our politics, we've come to see citizens as political consumers, customers who are always right and must be catered to. But in a democracy, citizen is an office and it bears responsibilities. The first among these is to take the job seriously enough to put in place a government that can accomplish its goals. As a nation, we haven't been doing well. We can blame the election of Donald Trump on credulous media, or a spineless Republican Party, or a feckless Democratic Party. Above all, it was a failure of citizenship, and it has not been the only one.
We should all expect more from ourselves and from one another. The last time an American leader demanded something of us, it was so inspiring that school children can quote it to this day. We can recapture that. Instead of asking scientists and journalists to tell us what we'd like to hear, let's defend the search for truth from interference by any power — including our own.