This is why we can’t agree

Attitudes about issues and problems that have profound consequences for society and culture are polarized in ways public opinion pollsters have rarely seen. Among the best examples is the way opinions have become polarized about climate change.

Gallup Poll director Frank Newport interviewed experts who explain this polarization as the result of partisan politics, changes in news media, and the influence that political elites have on loyalists’ attitudes. I want to suggest another reason: the dramatic changes that have occurred in what counts as legitimate knowledge.

Institutions of higher education were founded, in some cases over 200 years ago, on a belief that knowledge could further the public good. Historically, Americans believed that life could be better for all through public and private investment in higher education. Not only were universities supposed to arbitrate through scientific research and archived knowledge, they were to recommend best practices where applicable. Ideally, institutions of higher learning were to serve as objective or at least impartial purveyors of knowledge and practices.

Life-changing discoveries and new ways of knowing about the world and the universe have their origins in research and teaching at institutions of higher learning. However, when trust in public institutions declines, as is the case today, alternative organizations emerge to produce knowledge and information that serves the specific interests of particular groups, businesses or corporations.

These new purveyors of “knowledge” are often called think tanks or institutes. Some are affiliated with universities, but most are not. They go by names such as the Tax Foundation, Heritage Foundation, Cato, and Heartland Institute. These organizations have proliferated over the past decades until today they challenge and even supplant the roles that universities once played. The findings of their research may serve the interests of a sponsoring organization and support particular public opinions, but often do not meet the standard for peer-reviewed impartial knowledge and policy. Often, research results follow the money that funded the study.

A handy way to assess the validity of any study, in addition to the usual methods of scientific and critical thinking, is to look at the goals and missions of the organizations that conduct the studies. For example, the Tax Foundation, which has been around since the Great Depression, now has on its board of directors representatives from PricewaterhouseCoopers, Microsoft, PepsiCo, and Eli Lilly. It advocates for “good tax policy [that] promotes economic growth by focusing on raising revenue in the least distortive manner possible,” which usually means advocating on behalf of business endeavors.

The Heritage Foundation promotes “public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense.” Heartland Institute’s mission is to “discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems.” To these ends, the Heartland Institute convenes a yearly conference on global warming with the expressed intent to discredit the evidence that climate is changing, and in particular that human activity has anything to do with it. In fact, they maintain a website that posts papers refuting every conclusion of the United Nation’s report on climate change, even touting the benefits of increased CO2 to human life.

These conferences invite politicians and scientists who often cheer denunciations of “conventional” science. The Heartland Institute supports existing “free-market” solutions to climate change by denying that a solution is necessary.

The mission statements of institutions of higher education read very differently, often with words and phrases such as the common good, creativity, opening minds and enacting core values such as integrity, inquiry, service, and public affairs.

Universities and colleges are true institutions. Think tanks and institutes are pseudo institutions; they do not function as taken-for-granted arbitrators of knowledge. In a society with declining or loss of trust in core institutions, they are often cited and even have become part of “balanced” presentations in news, and now, in the Trump administration, in the formulation of government policies.

These well-funded research organizations, each with their insular interests, have professional spokespersons for their research and their interpretations of empirical research. For example, it is not difficult to identify the agenda that the Heritage Foundation espouses when its senior fellows interpret tax legislation, income distribution or, say, the U.S. prison system.

My point is not to rail against these organizations or to suggest they should not exist, or even deny that they might align themselves with findings from the scientific community on a specific issue. It is to raise a red flag on behalf of the public good that they have managed to assume equal footing with universities and professional associations of scientists, thereby eroding the legitimate role that established universities heretofore played.

Universities still contribute to knowledge and evidence-based decisions made by businesses and governments, but their legitimacy has been challenged. To compete, they too may distort their foundational values; that is, play the role of “debater” against the pseudo institutions.

German sociologist Jurgen Habermas suggests that Western societies are experiencing a “legitimation crisis.” This crisis is one reason that ordinary citizens cannot seem to agree even on consensual scientific findings such as the causes of climate change.

According to the concept, a crisis exists whenever an institutional structure of society, such as higher education, no longer has the authority to control or govern its domain. Authority depends in large measure on the taken-for-granted trust that citizens have in their institutions.

Universities or professional associations are then in crisis whenever their research and their interpretations are so challenged that they become impotent.

Institutions of higher learning assumed legitimate authority through a long and complicated process that spans at least two centuries and culminated in science and technology that allow our modern way of life. The values of honesty, impartiality, and the unfettered pursuit of truth served as the foundation for institutional legitimation. Today we face global problems that may be cataclysmic, and at the very least demand collective solutions. As long as these problems have partisan interpretations supported by institutes with special interests, legitimate collective solutions will be difficult if not impossible to achieve. Too many experts from too many think tanks may well be one more reason we can’t agree.

Jeff Nash is a retired sociologist living in Maumelle.