Some questions have been on my mind a lot in the last week around the issues of expertise and trust. Can we trust a group of individuals with accumulated knowledge of a particular area to tell us something we would not otherwise know about reality?
Those questions have arisen, of course, largely out of media coverage of the summit in Copenhagen and the fierce controversies we’ve seen around the science of climate change. It seems that just at the point when a global consensus had emerged around the need to act, there has been a surge of scepticism. And while only a very small minority of the scientific community question the convictions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the public appears to have been quite receptive to the sceptical voice. Unsurprising, since some polls suggest that up to half the British electorate are not convinced that drastic action does need to be taken to stem global warming, if they believe it’s taking place at all.
The senior clergy of the Church of England, however, are not among them, as the words of the Archbishop of Canterbury that you can read in our Advent chapel indicate. Our own Bishop of London has also been at the forefront of the Faith Communities’ response to environmental degradation. But then priests have long had their own problems around the issues of expertise and trust. Far more so than scientists, your average member of the public is unlikely to believe that someone who has studied theology and committed their life to prayer and ministry can tell them anything unique about reality that they would not otherwise know.
This anticlerical scepticism arose (very properly) after the Enlightenment as people started to wonder whether the clergy’s claim to special insight did in fact have something more to do with control then with care. And I wonder whether we are starting to see something similar now in relation to scientists: the suspicion they may be pursuing their own agendas (for professional eminence or influence) rather than genuinely having the good of all humanity at heart. In any event, there is a problem with the public trust of expert elites.
It seems to me that part of the problem with this very modern kind of scepticism is that we have very little in between the lofty sphere of technical expertise and the very parochial realm of personal experience. You do meet people who are either totally unquestioning of climate change, simply because boffins in white coats tell us that it exists (a modern day clerical dependence) or, at the other extreme, people who refuse to countenance the notion simply because, from their perspective, there was a lot of snow back in January and actually their flat feels rather chilly. There’s no wonder we have a breakdown of trust when the only perspectives from which we can consider reality are so polarised.
So what’s missing in the middle? What do we need to bridge the gap between experience and expertise, to enable us to do some thinking that might help re-establish trust? The religious answer to that question seems to me to be some notion of Wisdom. The theologian David Ford has pointed out that Wisdom has not had an easy time in recent centuries in the West: “it has often been associated with older people, the pre-modern, tradition and conservative caution”. Yet, he argues, it is becoming resurgent “in areas where knowledge and know-how come up against questions of ethics, values, beauty, the shaping of flourishing of the whole person, the common good, and long-term perspectives.” That’s the kind of tension we have seen in our financial as well as ecological system in recent months.
David’s approach is one of a primarily biblical theology that seeks wisdom beyond information or even knowledge. Scripture, he argues, “has continued to be extraordinarily generative for imagining, understanding, believing, hoping and living. Its interpretation has required the making of endless connections with past, present and future, and with a range of disciplines, spheres of life, aspects of self, religions, worldviews and experience.”
It is this kind of accumulated wisdom that gives us some kind of framework for assessing the perspective of both personal experience and expert elites. Wisdom is a big picture that takes a long time to build up and derives from a wide engagement with Scripture rather than narrow engagements with individual texts. But there does seem to be a lot to set us on that road in the passage we have to consider from Luke’s Gospel this morning.
“What are we to do?” the people ask John the Baptist in response to his proclamation of impending doom. “How are we to bridge the gap between your expert prophesies of the wrath to come and the experience of our daily lives?” And the Baptist responds with some very practical religious wisdom:
• Live generously — if you have more than you need, share it with those who don’t have enough.
• To the tax collectors he says, don’t be greedy — don’t keep for yourself what belongs to everybody.
• And to the soldiers he says, don’t allow your dissatisfaction with what you earn to lead to intimidation and extortion.
This kind of moral practical wisdom builds up into a framework of wisdom – less evident in our secular society today – within which people can discern what is right and wrong, what will cause the community and the individual to flourish or what will lead to violence and injustice. When that framework is in place we have more tools with which we can make some assessment of other people’s expert perspectives on reality.
So to address our concerns today, for example, let’s take the practical wisdom that John the Baptist sets out:
• if we live in a world where people don’t live generously and where the world’s wealthier countries refuse to share what they have with those who have nothing,
• if we live in a world where people treat the natural world acquisitively and refuse to recognise that natural resources are to be shared rather than exploited,
• and if we live in a world where people are driven by dissatisfaction with what they earn and possess rather than the sense that we only need to have “enough”,
then should we be surprised when experts say that our ecosystem is becoming disordered? I, for one, am not.
Of course, I could not assess all the scientific research that is underpinning the actions that will hopefully be taken at the Copenhagen summit, but it does seem to me that the tradition of Christian wisdom about human flourishing and sustainable order gives little cause for scepticism about what the consensus of experts is saying. And what that Wisdom ought also to reinforce is our perception of what cause people might have to be sceptical of those telling them that their lives need to be radically altered in a sacrificial way. Interesting that there doesn’t seem to be much climate change scepticism among the educated of the developing world.
Wisdom is a big Advent theme, personified in the first of the great ancient Advent antiphons, O Sapientia:
O Wisdom, coming forth from the mouth of the Most High,
reaching from one end to the other mightily,
and sweetly ordering all things:
Come and teach us the way of prudence.
So, this Advent, let’s celebrate the wisdom that the Christian faith can provide for our world in which mistrust and scepticism of expertise have become rife. Let’s pray that wisdom may bring sweet order to our world through the decisions taken at the Copenhagen Summit. And let’s commit ourselves afresh to re-receiving that Wisdom through our imaginative re-engagement with the Scriptures through the mediation of the one who is to come, Jesus Christ the Redeemer of the world.