Chris Uhlmann wrote a column in The Australian this week that ought to be required reading in every Year 7 science course. I doubt it will be.
He began with a marine biologist telling the media that climate change is driving a rise in shark attacks off Western Australia. Read the full quote and the biologist concedes, ‘We just don’t exactly know.’ Uhlmann could have stopped there and reached for [Christopher] Hitchens’ razor: what is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. Instead he did something rarer. He went looking for a better explanation.
He found one in about the time it takes to read a press release. In 1997, Western Australia made the great white shark a protected species. Before then, hundreds were caught every year in the waters between Western Australia and South Australia. Since 1990 the state’s population has grown by about 80 per cent. More sharks, more people, same beaches fronting the same ocean. The record follows: two deaths and 19 injuries from shark attacks in WA in the three decades to 1999, and 23 deaths and 99 injuries since 2000. Twenty-one of those deaths are attributed to great whites, the very species we stopped killing.
That is William of Ockham at work. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, start with a duck. But what struck me most was his restraint. He claimed to have proved nothing. Correlation is not causation, he wrote, but it warrants investigation. He held his own theory at arm’s length while he tested the other fellow’s.
That is scepticism. It has become so rare that a columnist practising it looks almost subversive.
I/We (the Royal version) need to know why.
For most of recorded history the burden of proof sat with the ordinary man. The Church, the Crown, and the guilds held the truth, and you were expected to accept it. The Enlightenment turned that around. A claim earned belief by surviving a test, whoever made it. Kant put it in two Latin words in 1784, sapere aude, dare to know.
Form a hypothesis, then do your best to break it. Popper later gave it its sharpest edge: a claim earns the name of science only when some evidence could prove it wrong. If more shark attacks prove climate change, you are dealing with faith.
The philosopher who best understood the sceptic’s temperament was David Hume. Every idea we hold, Hume argued, is built from impressions, the raw material of perception. We can combine ideas, run two or three together and imagine something we have never seen, but every one of them begins in what we perceive.
What he defended was mitigated scepticism: modest, practical, aware of the limits of what we know, and willing to act on the best evidence to hand. ‘A wise man,’ he wrote, ‘proportions his belief to the evidence.’
Put those two ideas side by side and you have the problem of our age. If ideas are built from impressions, then whoever supplies the impressions supplies the raw material of thought. And most of what people now perceive about the world arrives curated by vested interests and is already interpreted for us, especially in schools and universities.
The world before 1980 was a different place. The institutions that told people things were fewer, slower, and easier to see. Then the decade broke open. Markets were disintermediated, capital flowed freely, the dollar floated, tariffs fell, and the old cartels were broken up. Technology put a computer on every desk. In 1989, the Berlin Wall came down and closed a chapter that arguably opened at Versailles. Francis Fukuyama called it the end of history.
That decade was a burst of what Adam Smith called the progressive state, which he thought the cheerful and the hearty state for every order of society. People had to compete, think and take risks, and a great many did very well.
The trouble is what the winners did next. Having climbed the mountain, they set about pulling the ladder up behind them. Comfortable societies collect organised interests, each defending its share, and the whole thing slowly sets like concrete. Its cycle the ‘80s unwound, only to be repeated from the nineties onward.
Regulation, and we know how fat the Corps act has become, written in the name of protecting the public ends up protecting incumbents, because incumbents can afford the compliance and newcomers can’t. Smith saw that coming too. Any proposal for a new law that came from the merchant class, he wrote, should be examined ‘not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention’. The father of the market economy was the first sceptic of the people who win in it.
The stationary state, Smith said, is dull. A society busy protecting what it already has wants operators.
That is the part of this I keep coming back to. I wonder whether we are at the end game of the industrial revolution, and whether it is now being played out in our heads.
Specialisation was the great engine of prosperity. Smith opens The Wealth of Nations with a pin factory, where ten men dividing the labour make tens of thousands of pins a day. What fewer people remember is the warning he gave several hundred pages later. The man whose whole life is spent on a few simple operations, he wrote ‘has no occasion to exert his understanding’, loses the habit, and ‘generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become’.
We like to think we escaped that. We have titles, degrees, professional designations, and complicated-sounding jobs. But look at what most of those jobs involve. The law is codified, the process is mapped, the box is ticked, the file is closed and the next one opened. Much of what passes for sophisticated work is the repeated application of somebody else’s rules to a narrow slice of a problem, and we put a value on it that. Few explore most operate.
Scepticism needs a vantage point. To ask whether something smells right, you have to see enough of the whole to notice when a piece doesn’t fit. A fully specialised society removes the vantage point. Everyone sees their own box and assumes someone else is watching the whole.
Strangely enough, the repeated application of codified rules is precisely the work machines are now taking over. Noticing when the whole thing doesn’t add up is still a human job. The sceptic may turn out to be the most human part of us, and the last to be automated. Who knows, the Speccie may last another 100 years of challenging authorship.
Smith had a remedy for the pin-maker’s dulled mind. It was education. Schooling was meant to be the counterweight, giving people the general understanding their work no longer did.
What happened instead is that education specialised too. An economy built for scale and compliance needs people who fit the model, and over time the schools obliged. The point of a liberal education was to give you the tools to find the answers yourself: logic, argument, how to test a claim, how we got here. Somewhere along the way the content became the point. Students are taught what to think and examined on whether they can remember it. The method that produced the knowledge has been quietly dropped.
Hume would have predicted the result. In the Treatise, he observed that education works on the mind much as custom does. Repetition alone can produce belief, with no evidence behind it, and he reckoned that more than half the opinions that prevail among mankind are owing to education rather than reason. A system that repeats conclusions manufactures believers.
John Stuart Mill put the deeper point in a single sentence: ‘He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.’ You understand your own position only once you have heard the strongest case against it, from someone who actually holds it.
I have been selling things for 46 years, from encyclopaedias (Britannica, thank you) right through to sophisticated financial solutions and I can tell you Mill was right. The best salesmen I have ever met were the ones who knew their competitors’ products better than the competitors did. They could tell you exactly why theirs was better, and when it wasn’t. Sales is the trade everyone associates with spin. Yet the people with every incentive to believe their own pitch did best by testing it against the alternative. If that discipline is good enough for a salesman, what is the excuse for a school, a regulator or a government?
I learnt the same lesson on a football field.
Randwick was the best rugby club in the country through the 1970s and 80s. It produced more Wallabies, more international coaches, more premierships and, frankly, more begrudging resentment than any club in the land. I know that club from the inside and I’m sure others could say the same about other great clubs or teams.
I was president of Randwick Juniors, when we had more than 600 kids playing and close to 500 families involved, and I watched, along with a good many others, as the club moved from the great era into a more normal part of the bell curve for winning and producing champions.
In 2014, a friend wrote to me after a grade game at Coogee Oval. Randwick had won every grade, and won well. He didn’t see a single junior club jersey at the ground. The barbecue had been replaced by a pie van, and the club captain gave his speech to a near-empty back room at the bowling club because the actual clubhouse had to be sold off. The scoreboard said the club was fine. Everything else said it wasn’t.
In my reply I wrote that the hallmarks of decay come early, but are easily papered over by recent success. I was convinced the stalwarts of old thought they had simply been good rugby players. The truth is the club was built by people whose names never made the honour boards: the early juniors presidents, the two famous secretary-managers, the allegiance with the surf club, the parents and volunteers, and hundreds more I couldn’t name. Randwick could remember that it was great, it had dominated but it forgot why.
Reviewing, I wrote, is part of renewal, and the custodians of the myrtle green were either unaware of that or too proud to accept it.
I closed the letter with a poem I had written a couple of years earlier, in an Irish pub in Wan Chai, Hong Kong during the sevens tournament in Hong Kong. Two lines from it have stayed with me:
‘We live with boundaries that seem set in stone, repulsed by thoughts that challenge our own,
‘Indescribably brittle but confident too often, the thinking one is long forgotten.’
I was writing about a football club. I could have been writing about the West.
Here is what I think has happened, at a club, in a profession and in a society. In a healthy community, belief sits on something like a bell curve. At one tail are the true believers, who accept whatever authority tells them. At the other are the cynics, who accept nothing authority says. Some of the middle belongs to the sceptic: the person who hears a claim, asks for the evidence, weighs it, and changes his mind when the evidence demands it.
Over 40 years that middle has been hollowed out. On one side we have something close to indoctrination, positions held because they are the right ones to hold, repeated rather than examined. On the other we have cynicism and its louder cousin, the conspiracy theory. Hume would recognise both. The indoctrinated have stopped doubting. The conspiracist doubts everything except their own theory. Neither proportion belief to evidence.
The conspiracy theorist is what you get when the sceptic disappears. People sense they are being spun, have lost the habits to test the spin, and lurch to the other tail. The extremes then feed each other. Every wild theory becomes proof that dissent is dangerous, and every heavy-handed orthodoxy becomes proof that something is being hidden. The division we lament is simply the shape of the curve once the middle has gone.
Into that hollowed-out middle comes the oldest political tool there is.
Uncertainty is the natural condition of human life. We don’t know what next year holds, whether the job will last, whether the savings will be enough. A good part of what civilised institutions do is help us live with that uncertainty. But uncertainty is also the easiest thing in the world to exploit. Offer people certainty and they will pay for it, in money, in votes, and in liberty.
The instinct is as old as politics. What has changed is the reach. A politician once had a newspaper. Today he has a device in every hand, and an audience that has lost the habit of asking where the fear came from.
Uhlmann’s column shows the mechanism at work. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, hardly a sceptics’ club, carefully grades its findings into what is established, what is projected and what remains uncertain. It finds no consensus on whether warming will strengthen El Niño, and expects fewer Australian cyclones.
The Prime Minister took that graded assessment and delivered it as political certainty, a summer of floods, cyclones, and extreme heat foretold by the science. Treasury, supporting the government’s Net Zero Plan, produced a chart of rising disaster losses that starts in 1985 and leaves out storms and hail, which happens to exclude Cyclone Tracy and the 1999 Sydney hailstorm, two of the costliest events on record. The Insurance Council, when asked specific questions, issued a general statement.
All it takes is an environment in which nobody expects to be questioned, and over 40 years we have built, one, unchallenged claim at a time. Security. The war on drugs. Deficit spending, always justified by the emergency of the day. Migration and globalisation. Lockdowns. In each case, right or wrong, the policy was placed beyond argument, and anyone who asked for the evidence was treated as a heretic rather than as a mitigated sceptic.
I chair the Institute of Financial Professionals Australia, a body that has represented Tax practitioners and others for 104 years, and I see the consequences every working day. Decades of politically cheap bracket creep and unchallenged good intentions have produced a labyrinth of legislation and regulation in which vested interests are now set in concrete: And those vested interests are necessarily corporate; they are bureaucratic.
The Minister for Financial Services, Daniel Mulino, talks about throwing ‘sand in the gears’ when Australians try to move their own retirement savings. Strip away the language and the premise is plain: Australians cannot be trusted to make decisions about their own money.
The justification on offer is the collapse of the Shield and First Guardian funds, and people did lose a great deal of money, more than a billion dollars. But Shield and First Guardian were scams, end to end. No rulebook stops a fraud that elaborate.
If anything, the rules helped it along. Every party in the chain, the lead generator, the adviser, the platform, the trustee, the research house, did its specialised task and ticked its box. Nobody owned the whole, so nobody asked the obvious question. That is Smith’s pin factory with other people’s life savings on the line. Compliance became a substitute for judgement, which is exactly what happens when the sceptic is removed from the room. Someone in the chain asking whether it smelt right would have done more than any new rule.
Mill warned that an opinion, however true, if it is never fully and fearlessly discussed, will be held as a dead dogma rather than a living truth. A society can keep all the right conclusions and still lose the capacity to reach them. Randwick kept its jersey and its honour boards and forgot what built them. As a director of the Gallipoli Memorial Club, I serve an institution founded on the opposite instinct, the duty to remember who did the work and what it cost.
So now we are in danger of doing the same with the Enlightenment.
The remedy is to restore the middle and put the burden of proof back where the Enlightenment left it: on whoever makes the claim, and above all on whoever wants our money, our vote, or our freedom on the strength of it. Reviewing is part of renewal. That is as true of a nation as it is of a football club.
The Romans had a test for this. Cicero, quoting the judge Lucius Cassius, asked of every case: Cui bono? Who benefits? Our grandfathers called it following the money. It used to be common sense. It ought to be again.
Scott Heathwood is President and Chairman of the Institute of Financial Professionals Australia, a director of the Gallipoli Memorial Club and a former president of Randwick Juniors. He has spent 46 years selling.
