Not long ago, I learned of a person who was recently berated by an older acquaintance for his parents not practicing the dictats of shelter-in-place and the wearing of masks. The story is believable in the context of citations and/or arrests of a dad teaching his daughter to throw a baseball in a “closed” park or a surfer trying to catch a wave off a “closed” public beach. The pundit Kevin D. Williamson says that this is “ratfink” America at work. Today, America seems to be experiencing a major rat infestation. Why so many rats? The problem can be laid at the feet of the cult of the “expert”. Let me explain.
I’ve written of this before. America has acceded to the rule of “experts”, and the defenestration of popular sovereignty. Cop, prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner are united in the person of a civil service employee or political appointee wrapped in protection from popular accountability. We as citizens are increasingly out of the picture. We are left to the election of the participants in an increasingly meaningless debating society called Congress. We are habituated to the situation by the unceasing pounding of all things progressive in public schools’ curriculums and teacher training. The same weltanschauung permeates the popular culture.
The “expert” is at the root of the scheme. The “expert” is degreed, preferably with a PhD. How did the master climb the mountain of high status? First, he or she jumped through the hoops of college general ed courses heavily burdened with victimology. Speaking of a pathogen, the matriculant was inculcated with the ideology by exposure to entire academic departments that are infected with it. Some owe their existence to the ideology: the Rainbow Coalition departments (Women’s Studies, etc.). They aren’t “studies” as much as they are ideology platforms. The Humanities and Social Sciences are particularly fetid. Remember this the next time you are treated by a doctor (MD that is) younger than you.
For instance, History – a subject I am most familiar – is often treated as a Progressivism apology tour. Nothing good happened till Eugene Debs, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and the beatification of environmentalism in the sixties.
There you have it for the typical college student before they devote the rest of their university sojourn – the majority of it – to their area of expertise, now that the corrupted general ed stuff is out of the way. That other stuff (general ed) is in the rear view mirror as they motor to their graduation and post-graduate destinations. The degree will certify their place in the pantheon of “experts”.
The word “expert” is an interesting one in today’s world. Really, in essence, an “expert” is a specialist. They have to be; the human mind is capable of absorbing only so much. For example, the explosion of knowledge in Biology has led to sub-categories, with sub-sub-categories, broken into sub-sub-sub-categories. Ditto for Computer Science and every other department in the college catalogue. The longer one stays in college to get that souped-up graduate degree, the more specialized the subject gets.
The intelligent design folks – much despised by died-in-the-wool Darwinists – have popularized the concept of irreducible complexity: a cell retains its complexity as we go deeper into its structure, thus drawing into question the necessary small adaptions for traditional Darwinian evolution to function. But the subject’s complexity also leads to a profusion of specialties. More true today than ever, experts are specialists!
Soon we get the denizen of the administrative state whose forte is commonly limited to a very narrow slice of life. Yet, they have exaggerated importance in policy making that effects all aspects of a people’s existence. During this period of pandemic, naturally, experts whose bias is oriented toward epidemiology and medicine – and some things ideological as well – dictate policy that can destroy the economic and social parts of life. That’s the danger posed by specialists.
Ergo, the Great American Shutdown. For the expert, it’s an essential response. For everyone else facing their dictats, it’s a ravaged existence. A degreed, salaried, high-income person with substantial financial assets can afford to ride out the storm. It isn’t true for anyone whose kids, mortgage, and car payment requires a regular paycheck. These folks are ruined.
The specialized expert defines the parameters of risk when a situation falls within their wheelhouse. As one would expect, their explication of risk conforms to the sole regard of medical health. Their definition is much less considerate of different levels of risk due to circumstance. People who ride bikes run a higher risk of getting mauled by a 2-ton car than an aged pedestrian on his evening constitutional. An independent plumber comes into contact with more pathogens than a Google coder. Some are more willing to accept risk because their livelihoods require it. But the plumber doesn’t have the ear of Trump, Pelosi, McConnell, or Schumer as much as Anthony Fouci and the faculty of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Understandable? Yes, but the stew of policy demands other ingredients. Without the other additives, you might get poison.
What does the exalted role of expert get us? We all too often get a dose of scientific fact with a large smattering of personal bias. The hyper-charged politics of crafting policy brings out the worst in everybody, including our “experts”. Confirmation bias runs wild among media mavens who are on the lookout for experts to help them wield their ideological axes. So, if you are a writer with homeschoolers in his or her crosshairs, there’s no shortage of ed and psyche types with PhD’s attached to their names who are nothing but activists masquerading as experts.
If you are looking for an egregious example of same, look no further than Harvard Magazine, May-June 2020, “The Risks of Homeschooling”, by Erin O’Donnell (thanks Kevin D. Williamson for the heads up). The whole thing is a tome for ripping children from their parents and home and placing their upbringing in the hands of the government’s employees and schools. Stalin, Mao, and the rest of the 20th-century’s walk of shame would be proud.
Fact: Human beings with PhD’s after their names are still human beings. Plus, their specialties come with blinders. An epidemic should place public health experts at the head of the table. Just make sure that the other seats are filled with people of more well-rounded perspectives. If done right, we might come to conclude that the Great American Shutdown was a huge mistake.
RogerG