President Biden in his first speech to Congress on April 28, 2021: “Independent experts estimate the American Jobs Plan will add millions of jobs and trillions of dollars to economic growth in the years to come.”
“Experts”, it’s become a cliché, a buzzword, famous for its new-found vapidity and banality. All apply because its meaning has been soiled by media-hungry activists, politicians exploiting the moment to foist their fanatical vision on the country, and far too many technocrats and technocrat wannabes stepping outside their lane with disastrous results. The word has been stripped of its force in the language. It’s developed a darker connotation to those who happen to fall on the wrong side of the fashionable zealotry of the age.
Part of the problem lies with our misplaced faith in a technocracy, the tendency of seeing nearly all issues as if they were matters to be addressed by technical expertise. Values such as liberty, decency, self-reliance, civil society, faith, personal achievement, cultural preservation, etc., are reduced to a secondary role. Questions are reduced to mere calculation, the calculus of the technical expert.
Funny thing, though, most everyone with an animating cause or set of zealous ideological commitments desires the security from challenge that the moniker “expert” confers. Partisan, ideological crusaders seek protection from opposition under a pseudo-expertise invented for the purpose. It’s how they make their positions unassailable. The drive for paper credentials (college degrees, certification) – that staple of the expert class – is extended to cover good old-fashioned extremist provocateurs. Thus, the expert umbrella is stretched into a canopy sheltering everyone from the lab coats to the fanatical huckster.
No doubt, the pandemic has diminished the value of the word “expert”. Doctors Fauci and Birx in the previous administration, and the ubiquitous Fauci and Walensky in this one, have made “expert” a matter of scorn for many. The reputations of many “experts” are sullied when they conveniently forget their place. Policy – meaning the directions and actions of government’s decision-makers – must consider more than the physical “science” of an issue. “Science” is a necessary but not sufficient factor in developing a course of action. Certainly, it’s more at the top of the list in some matters than others. But the last time that I checked, Fauci, Birx, and Walensky aren’t Constitutional scholars, social psychologists, economists, and cultural anthropologists who understand the high priority of liberty in our society. “Science” in their hands becomes cold, hard government aggression. As one sensible pundit put it – I paraphrase – we should consult their expertise, not submit to it.
Speaking of submit, right now, the “science” of the “expert” is a form of Islam, in the purest definition of the Arabic word. Its literal translation is “submission”. For a Muslim, it’s submission to Allah. For our power-hungry collectivists, it’s submission to their version of “science” under the cloak of their coterie of “experts”, as if no other voices matter, so long as it produces submission to the orders of the powerful. It conjures images of conversion by the sword sweeping the Middle East to the plains of France and gates of Vienna of centuries past. Only in this case, the hardy activists in the seats of power, with their politicized “experts” in tow, are scything any opposition to their authoritarian edicts. It’s shocking to watch the overturning of the Founding by this bastardized form of “science”.
The bastardization sullies its reputation, but the interference of politics isn’t the only cause for the decline in the status of “expert”. The inherent value of the college degree – the base requirement for “expert” – has an inverse relationship to its ease of acquisition. The college degree in the ever-growing panoply of fields, in its current state of depressed value, still strives to share in the glow of a PhD in nuclear physics. In fact, PhD’s are offered in nearly everything, but without the rigor. Much of the coursework is balderdash, sophistry, or disguised ideology. Yes, ideology, as in a systematized but shallow viewpoint masquerading as a form of higher thought.
Enter “Doctor” Jill Biden, an archetype of the genre. She’s an obsessive/compulsive hoarder of degrees with two masters in reading and English and a “Doctorate” in educational leadership. Does all that time and expense in a college classroom designate competence? Maybe, maybe not, many times not. As a 30-year veteran as an instructor in public high schools and a community college, in many leadership posts, I’ve seen this breed of cat many times. With their advanced sheepskin in Education, many with the Jill accolade (Education PhD, empty awards and certificates) on their résumé, they prance before the faculty in training sessions with their alleged silver bullet for reform but can’t handle penetrating questions into their scheme. It quickly becomes obvious that their “competence” is actually a faith in a set of highly tendentious assumptions for which they are ill-prepared to defend when confronted by skeptics. They stammer, unless they stand before a staff equally in the dark. It’s an embarrassing charade.
Don’t trust the presenter to realize the embarrassment and then expect that to be a corrective. Some are so immersed in their loose theory that they are oblivious. Some go so far as to mistake a dubious ideology for scholarship. Indeed, some manage to parlay the cognitive blur into a sweet faculty gig, like Nikole Hannah Jones, author of the discredited “The 1619 Project”, now a professor at UNC-Chapel Hill. It’s easy to becloud the boundary between political dogmas and scholarship when you don’t know any better. I suspect that she doesn’t know any better.
Either she doesn’t know any better or she does but has forsaken truth-seeking for political activism. The reality is that she’s more of an advocate of a political dogma than a real scholar. Scholarship, like science, is a coherent search for truth. That’s not for her. She has built a career on the false analysis of starting with a conclusory dogmatic belief (“systemic racism”), then engages in an extrapolation from that unproven assumption (the need for “equity”), and then moves onto unfounded speculation to serve her preordained political vision (racial reparations). It’s perfect for protracted political agitation. And it’s an insult to scholarship.
Her affront to logic is astounding. As a point of comparison, the form of truth-seeking and sound logic in the field of science is the scientific method. It begins, absolutely begins, with a testable hypothesis. The proposed answer to a problem (hypothesis) must be stated in a testable manner. A person can’t start with “systemic” as a governing adjective. It’s too ill-defined to be subjected to verification. Jones’s method of thinking has more in common with the Buddhist Sutras than rigorous scientific analysis. She, like others of her ilk, simply claim a “truth” and then run with the ball.
She is part of a tribe of abusers to serious scholarship. Like them, she tries to present an ersatz proof in the form of “statistical disparities”, which are unequal socio-economic measures by demographic group. Blacks suffer a higher rate of maternal deaths for instance. Okay, now what? She jumps to her favored conclusion of “systemic racism”. But that’s not proof of a “system” disfavoring Blacks. She hasn’t even dealt with the question of whether the possible causes are external or internal to the group. That would require a legitimate process of elimination which she doesn’t even attempt, or can’t perform.
If our “system” is a knee on the neck of Black America and a fixed competition to advance whites as Jones claims, why aren’t whites doing better? Going back to those maternal-mortality rates, whites don’t lead the pack with the smallest maternal death rate. They are tied with Asians, and Hispanics are at the head of the pack with the smallest number. When Jones bellows that she wants “white people to give up whiteness”, does she now mean that “brown people give up their brownness”?
The bankruptcy of “statistical disparities” doesn’t stop there. Average life spans by race don’t cooperate with the Jones’s hallowed belief in “systemic” white supremacy. Whites have been on a slide in longevity for a couple of decades since the onset of the opioid epidemic’s “deaths of despair”. Whites, as in maternal-mortality rates, aren’t on top in life expectancy. The peak is occupied by Asians (89), followed by Hispanics (83), and whites (79) and blacks (73) finish behind. Should “Asians give up their Asianness”?
She gets away with it because she, like her prototype, Jill Biden, has buried the incompetence in a layer of sheepskin and paper in the form of awards from organizations that are equally as corrupted by the fashionable political manias of our time. Corruption begets corruption.
It extends to the academy that hired her, UNC-Chapel Hill’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media. A freebooting activist like Jones, masquerading as a scholar, will face many journalism students who avoided the rigor of an academic core, maybe like her. The School removed the requirements for Econ 101 (basic econ principles and concepts), History 128 (US History, 1865 to present), and Poli Sci 100/101 (US government/state and local government). Forget about any expectation of any learning in Western Philosophy and Civilization, and Logic. They are primed for her nonsense.
The core can be dodged by adhering to a curriculum more attuned to political activism in courses such as “Defining Blackness” (African Studies 50), “Environmentalism and American Society” (Anthro 51), “Collective Leadership Models for Community Change” (Comm 53), “Supernatural Encounters” (Rel 246), and “Emotion and Social Life” (Soc 51). See where Biden’s extra four years of taxpayer-funded education in his “American Families Plan” leads? It heads straight to academic charlatans like Jones, transcripts littered with radical infatuations of the moment, and an untrained and empty head ready to fill slots in the newsroom at The New York Times.
And just think that the Jones brigades of critical race theory (CRT) are spreading into your kids’ primary and secondary schools. Yeah, the schools down the street. “Equity” is CRT’s cover for the use of statistical disparities to force a levelling. That means in today’s doublespeak that your kids, if they are white or white enough, are going to go through Maoist struggle sessions to force them to admit their role of oppressor. Take for instance , the Inclusion and Equity officer for the mostly white Hamilton Southeastern School District, northeast of Indianapolis.
She promises an eternal crusade for “equity”. She boasts, “You’re on a journey but you never arrive, you get closer [to equity], but you never really get there. It’s continued work, it doesn’t stop, because I think the moment that we stop is the moment that old systems can come back.” The poor kids are being set up to get an unending dose of this lefty indoctrination, or until parents get wise and yank their kids out of this ideological hothouse.
If you’re looking for the clean-cut, button-downed alternative in your “expert”, not the kind in college faculty posts that give birth to the Marxist hoods manning the BLM or Antifa barricades in our big cities, you’ll turn to the bland representatives of McKinsey & Company, a multi-national consultancy operation. Here you’ll find the morally, but appropriately certificated, empty suit. McKinsey puts a premium on the prestigious paper, prestigious degree, from the prestigious university. Pedigree matters more than moral depth. They’ll even take those Humanities majors. From there, McKinsey alumni frequently gravitate to government or to the heavily bureaucratized Fortune 500.
No better example can be found of the McKinsey Associate in government than our first gay Transportation Secretary, Pete Buttigieg. The callousness of the tone-deaf empty suit can be seen in this exchange between Sen. Ted Cruz and Buttigieg on Biden’s order to cancel the Keystone pipeline:
Cruz: “So for those workers, the answer is somebody else will get a job?”
Buttigieg: “The answer is we are very eager to see those workers continue to be employed in good-paying union jobs, even if they might be different ones.”
“Different ones”? Once you kill 11,000 jobs, Buttigieg and the rest of the gang over at Biden central can’t guarantee the avoidance of economic despair for the 11,000 now having to resort to unemployment benefits. He can’t wrap his head around the human cost of playing the demi-god with the lives of others.
The mindset around Biden, including Buttigieg’s, is a military one. The workforce is a mass of cogs in a machine who are treated like grunts in the Army, ready to be shunted around as needed. For the Buttigieg types, highly specialized welders are a number to be moved from one column to another in their Excel spreadsheets. Indeed, it’s as simple as Excel to our Harvard and Oxford-trained alumnus of McKinsey and Company. Flesh and blood, personal aspirations, and family welfare be damned for this disconnected careerist. It’s shallow thinking at its harshest and worst.
John Maynard Keynes wrote The Economic Consequences of the Peace to explain the troubling outcomes of the Carthaginian peace at Versailles in 1919. Keynes followed the academic script by clinically focusing on the economic consequences, but at least he was aware of serious fallout from the decisions made at Versailles. Buttigieg is also probably aware, but seems not to care. For him, he thinks that he can add another field to his Excel federal spending spreadsheet for a retraining program for defunct workers in defunct-by-edict jobs. He hits the enter key and it’s off to the gym as if “problem solved”.
McKinsey-style aloofness, almost callousness, isn’t due to the lack of goals. If anything, this suit is all about goals in his means-ends analysis. However – and I paraphrase James Carville – it’s the goals, stupid. In this manner, he’s like our newest faculty member at UNC-Chapel Hill. Both take a tendentious claim – Jones’s “systemic racism”, apocalyptic climate change for Buttigieg – and run to its mitigation no matter the destroyed livelihoods and ruinous ramifications from their suicidal jihad against the whole of the American way of life. For Jones, it’s “burn baby burn”. For Buttigieg, it’s a cold calculus toward dubious ends. Both will burn down the house.
America is in the grip of a death cult, one that originated on the campus and spread to big philanthropy, the Fortune 500, big sports, and the big-moneyed class in trendy places. The cult is partly populated by a compromised and myopic claque of experts, too many of them caught up in a fanaticism-of-the-moment and cruising way out of their lane. Others in the sect have the accoutrements of “expert” (a degree) but, in reality, are revolutionary firebrands. It’s as if we have created for ourselves a pseudo-technocracy gone mad, or, more specifically, gone woke.
RogerG
*Sources:
https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/05/17/inequality-of-equity/
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/reject-the-mckinsey-mindset/
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/04/critical-race-theory-the-enemy-of-reason-evidence-and-open-debate/
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/university-of-north-carolina-disgraces-itself-with-latest-faculty-hire/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first
https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2021/05/school-of-journalism-or-ministry-of-propaganda/