Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason

“The sense that language itself is being weaponized, so as to undermine trust and provoke fear, has become prevalent with the spread of social media and the trolling practices that go with it. Part of the problem consists in our never quite knowing where the boundary between speech and violence lies. This is particularly difficult to establish online, where metaphors of violence are common, but where threats of violence can still be a criminal offence.”

“The article was widely read as a way of understanding Russian tactics and strategies in the context of cyberwar and other covert hostilities, such as those that have sought to disrupt elections in NATO countries. The “Gerasimov Doctrine,” as it became known, has helped to explain why Russia seems to be using a wider range of nonmilitary means, such as online trolling, data breaches, and “fake news,” to sow civic and political unrest. If fact-based consensus is becoming harder to establish, this may be partly because there are forces at large on the international stage that are deliberately seeking this outcome.”

“Many contemporary attacks on scientific expertise share certain elements of Hobbes’s suspicion of the Royal Society. The sense that experts are a privileged “elite” who then instruct the rest of us what to believe is prevalent in many reactionary and populist movements such as the Tea Party and the alt-right. Dominic Cummings, campaign director of Vote Leave which campaigned for Britain to leave the European Union, is routinely dismissive of “cargo-cult science,” a charge that compares established scientific circles to religious cults, impervious to the critiques of outsiders. Climate-change denialism depends on the idea that climate scientists are an inward-looking community, who only seek evidence that reinforces what they’ve already declared true. And yet when climate scientists don’t offer consensus, they are attacked on the opposite grounds, that their facts are fraught with politics and nothing is agreed. These attacks cast doubt on the ability of scientists to separate their opinions and tastes from their observations, and treat disciplines merely as private clubs.”

“resistance to medical research illustrates an important point regarding the status of experts and the cultural acceptance of progress. The modern medical vision of the body, as an inert and physical specimen, is not intuitively appealing.”

“In 1647, for example, he produced a report suggesting hospitals maintain systematic, centrally administered patient records. Not only would this allow doctors to ‘see the history of the patient most exactly and constantly kept’, it would also allow public officials to spot trends in public health and their correlations to weather.25 Facts would become a basis for progress.”

“A fact is simply a type of report that is free from distortion by the person making it.”

“The quest for rapid intelligence has major implications for the status of knowledge in society. Once knowledge becomes valued for its speed, rather than its public credibility, this transforms the status of science and expertise in society.”

“There is a visceral, bodily dimension to how people engage politically with new populist movements, especially those with an authoritarian streak. Health inequalities are fuelling this, a trend that has been found across numerous nationalist movements.”

“In an influential article published in 2013, the Russian general Valery Gerasimov argued that “in the twenty-first century we have seen a tendency toward blurring the lines between the states of war and peace. Wars are no longer declared.” The example of the 2011 Arab Spring suggested to Gerasimov that “nonmilitary” means of war could be far more threatening to state powers in the future than traditional military ones. All political regimes have points of acute vulnerability, he argued, of which they themselves may not be aware because they’ve never considered them in terms of war. Small acts of transgression can have major political effects, if the right tool and target are carefully selected.”