Save Us from the Experts, and Save Us from Those Who Bash Expertise
A pandemic of groupthink
Nobody likes a know-it-all.
What’s worse is when know-it-alls don’t really know it all. What’s worse still is when they fall on their faces again and again and refuse to admit their blunders.
No wonder so many Americans have soured on experts, and the souring is especially pronounced in the heterodox community and on the right. Consider a recent three-hour debate hosted by Joe Rogan.
Douglas Murray and Dave Smith were set to tangle about the Israel-Hamas War, but much of the exchange focused on the role of experts in shaping opinion. Douglas Murray, an accomplished war correspondent, was agitated by the fact that he found himself engaged with Smith, a comedian who has never even visited the Middle East.
Smith doesn’t consider himself an expert, but clearly hopes to persuade people to his side. Rogan also defended the right of non-experts to have a seat at the table. I respect all three men a great deal, but thought their exchange about experts mostly missed the mark.
Don’t get me wrong — if you want to pile on the expert class, you will find a friend in me. Zero in on just one dark chapter, COVID, and you will find yourself overwhelmed by people in white coats with lots of initials after their names who got it wrong. What’s even worse than getting it wrong is their reluctance to learn from their mistakes. They fail, fail again, avoid reflection, and still demand our continued respect.
So please, someone save us from the experts! But don’t stop there. Please also save us from those who condemn expertise.
Our beef shouldn’t be with experts as such, but with the sloppy deployment of experts. Our beef should be with our cultural gatekeepers and their selective appreciation for expertise. They promote certain experts and suppress others. These Eight Percenters try to create the illusion that experts endorse their worldview, the progressive activist worldview that roughly 92 percent of us reject.
The Making of a Monoculture
I attended college in the mid 90s, and my favorite instructor was a learned young scholar who got me to fall in love with subjects I had previously regarded as boring. He excelled at what universities value so much. He was well published and popular among students. And his devotion to fostering an intellectual community extended beyond the classroom.
He hosted salons and arranged for scholars from other campuses to deliver guest lectures on Friday afternoons. We’d pepper the speakers with questions and our discussions would continue at a nearby pub. It was there — outside of the classroom — that I first engaged with grad students and professors in a conversational way. I realized I was attending these lectures not because I had to but because I wanted to. I realized I enjoyed the life of the mind. I thought maybe I would pursue a career in academia.
But the gatekeepers had other plans.
Instead of giving the young scholar the promotion he deserved, the decision makers denied him tenure. He was a classical liberal in the tradition of Adam Smith and F.A. Hayek, and they couldn’t have that. Never mind that the young scholar was open about his point of view and encouraged debate in class. He even made it clear he would grade us down if we regurgitated his perspective in exams. He urged us to disagree with him.
When I heard the news about the tenure decision, my brief flirtation with academia ended. And looking back decades later, I see the episode as a microcosm of how the monoculture came to dominate academia.
Although universities had long leaned left, enough dissidents remained to keep Eight Percenters (somewhat) honest. If they veered too far toward extremism, they risked being called out by colleagues. But, over time, faculty members became more likely to grant tenure to junior scholars who conformed to the majority view.
Back in the mid-90s, it was typical to find academic departments with Democrat-to-Republican ratios of 2 to 1 or 3 to 1. But today, ratios of 10, 20, even 50 to 1 have become commonplace. Certain disciples, such as anthropology and sociology, have all but banished dissidents.
It seems academia has also purged on the basis of temperament. For instance, University of Pennsylvania Professor Alan Charles Kors reckons that leftist professors who valued debate have been replaced by leftist professors who enforce conformity.
A Pandemic of Conformity
By the time COVID emerged in 2019, Eight Percenters had largely refashioned the expert class in their own image. But even that wasn’t enough. Gatekeepers demanded more conformity.
Consider how they responded to a trio of academics with impeccable academic credentials.
One hailed from Stanford, another from Oxford, and the third from Harvard. They all possessed PhDs or MDs (the first had both). All correct-thinking people had been taught to genuflect to highly educated experts affiliated with such prestigious institutions. But the group offered even more for Eight Percenters to love. The first two scientists—a person of color and a female person of color—fit perfectly with gatekeepers’ mounting obsession with identity politics. Yes, the third was (alas) a white male, but at least he came from Sweden, the nation so often associated with enlightened progressivism.
In 2020, the three issued the Great Barrington Declaration, an open letter that challenged the quickly-agreed-upon public health consensus that called for lockdowns, school closures, and vaccines for all demographic populations. Our cultural gatekeepers should have regarded Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Dr. Sunetra Gupta, and Dr. Martin Kulldorff as secular saints, but instead the monoculture scorned them as sinners. Eight Percenters demanded the rest of us ignore everything they had preached about the importance of elite universities, advanced degrees, and diversity because the trio failed the monoculture’s most important test — politics.
Again and again, political conformity trumped open inquiry. Again and again, groupthink crowded out debate.
The public health community had long opposed lockdowns, but that position quickly reversed. Why? It’s unclear, but it probably had a lot to do with the fact that China—China!—locked down so quickly. The six-feet rule for social distancing, which doomed so many businesses, quickly became dogma, even though Dr. Anthony Fauci would later admit that it wasn’t backed by sound science. “It sort of just appeared,” he said.
Monoculture bungling, obfuscation, and double-talk about issues such as masks and vaccines eroded public trust in public health institutions, and scientists often seemed more preoccupied with saving their reputations than saving lives.
Consider the lab leak fiasco. When the pandemic first emerged, only a Trump-loving racist would give the theory an honest hearing. But once Biden moved into the White House, scientists suddenly rediscovered their commitment to science.
Alina Chan was one of 18 scientists who published a letter in the journal Science calling for a more in-depth investigation into the origin of the virus. Why did so many scientists wait so long to get curious?
"At the time, it was scarier to be associated with Trump and to become a tool for racists, so people didn't want to publicly call for an investigation into lab origins," Chan said.
Imagine if the public health community had welcomed freethinkers such as Bhattacharya, Gupta, and Kulldorff.
Imagine the madness we might have averted.
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Assigning Blame
My story isn’t all sad.
In a deliciously ironic turn, Bhattacharya now heads up the National Institutes of Health. And the young professor who got me thinking about a career in academia was eventually granted tenure at a different university.
We should celebrate such good news, but let’s not lose sight of the fact that these happy endings represent only the silver lining of a big, dark cloud. And let’s also not lose sight of where we should assign blame.
“Experts” didn’t stick us with the COVID madness, Eight Percenters did. “Experts” didn’t enforce groupthink, Eight Percenters did. “Experts” didn’t erode public trust in once-revered institutions, Eight Percenters did.
Eight Percenters will keep trying to make their worldview synonymous with expertise, and it’s up to the rest of us to recognize their hocus pocus.
Our beef isn’t with those who know a lot about a certain subject. After all, even Joe Rogan wants experts sitting ringside to judge UFC fights.