Don't Trust the Experts

 

Until a short time ago the word "misinformation" referred to statements purporting to be factual which fell short in some way, whether in letter or spirit, of the ancient and ageless transcendental landmark known as truth.   "Disinformation" meant the same, but with the additional connotation that the erroneous information was being spread in mala fide by those with a deliberate intent to deceive.   Both words have been in the soi-disant news far more frequently in recent days than has been the norm in the past.   Indeed, it would almost seem that other words have dropped out of the vocabularies of our regular commentators on passing events, because they have been using these multiple times per day.   It would appear, however, that the words have undergone a change in meaning.   They now seem to mean anything which differs or disagrees with whatever the media's approved experts happen to be saying at any given moment even if it conforms with what they had been saying in the moment immediately prior to that one.

 

 

This is indicative of just how far we have apostatized from the wisdom of the ancients who sought the illumination of the eternal beacons of Goodness, Beauty and Truth to light their path.   To the extent that the media, the information machine which has far too much influence over how we perceive and think of the world, acknowledges truth today, it is truth in the old leftist sense of whatever advances the cause of the revolution.   This, of course, is not truth at all in the proper and older sense of that permanent standard, recognized as a basic aspect of being itself, which we strive to attain by conforming our indicative or descriptive speech to reality, i.e., things as they are in themselves.

 

 

Ultimately what we are seeing is the result of centuries of assault on the foundations laid for Western thought, at least in its Classical and Christian phases, by the Attic philosophers, specifically the Socratic school and especially Socrates himself.   I addressed this matter earlier this year in an essay about how Western academe has betrayed the very foundation of its venerable tradition, the first of a series that scrutinized the corruption of the various branches of the universities.   It is worth revisiting now as the media is once again telling us to blindly trust the experts as they impose all sorts of invasive restrictions on us in total disregard of our prescriptive and constitutional civil rights and basic freedoms in the name of keeping us safe.

 

 

If the message of the Socrates who has come down to us primarily through the writings of Plato could be summarized in one sentence, which, of course, it cannot, that sentence would be "don't trust the experts".   For Socrates' career as a philosopher basically consisted of going around and pestering experts, those who claimed to have authoritative knowledge about courage, justice, piety and the like, with questions that demonstrated that the experts didn't really know what they were talking about and didn't possess the kind of knowledge they professed.   He was, in other words, someone who spent his entire life doing the exact opposite of what those who say "shut up and listen to the science" tell us to do when we question the climatologists' prophecies of doom by pointing out holes in the theory of anthropogenic climate change or question the epidemiologists' insistence that we must sacrifice all of our freedoms and necessary social interaction and put ourselves in house arrest for weeks and months at a time to prevent the spread of the Chinese bat flu.   

 

 

"Isn't it true that human beings have historically thrived better in warmer periods than colder periods?"

 

 

"Isn't it true that climate has been constantly changing through history and that this has affected how people live rather than the other way around?"

 

 

"What about that Danish study from this summer in which masks were found not to reduce the spread of the virus?"

 

 

"What about all the deaths that lockdowns cause?"

 

 

"Why should we believe that the same health authorities who support abortion and euthanasia are taking our freedoms away because they want to save lives?"

 

 

"Why all this hype about a virus that is non-lethal for well over 99 percent of people under 65 and in good health,  most of whom will experience only mild symptoms or none at all?"

 

 

The answer we hear to these questions and countless others like them is always "Shut up, listen to the science, and trust the experts".

 

 

Some might raise the objection to my point that today's experts differ from the ones to whom Socrates was, in his own words as recorded by Plato in the Apologia, a "gadfly", in that they have science to back up their claims to authoritative knowledge.

 

 

Let us consider that argument and see whether it can bear up under scrutiny.

 

 

Science, although it bears the Latin word for knowledge as its name, is not synonymous with knowledge but is rather a specific type of knowledge.   The admirers of Modern science see the history of its development as one of unprecedented and exponential expansion of human knowledge to the benefit of the species.   This is not, however, the only way to look at it.   From a different perspective Modern science can be seen as a contraction rather than an expansion of knowledge.   Furthermore, it is rather difficult to deny that science has done harm to the species as well as good.

 

 

Whether science is an expansion or contraction of knowledge depends on what measuring stick you are using.   Allow me to illustrate.  Imagine two men with studies in their home in which their personal libraries are kept.   The one man keeps all of his books in a single bookcase.   The shelves are crammed full and overflowing.   The other man has several bookcases around the room, but none of them is full and there is plenty of space for other books.    Which of the two has the larger library?

 

 

The answer depends upon how you are determining library size.   If the measurement is in bookcases the second man obviously has the larger library.   If, however, we are measuring in number of books, the first man might have the larger library.   Indeed, for the sake of making the point of the illustration let us stipulate that he does have more books in his one bookcase than the other in his many.  Therefore the answer to the question of which has the larger library is different when size is measured by bookcases than by books.

 

 

Now here is how that illustration applies to science: pre-modern science was integrated into philosophy which concerned itself with the whole of reality.   Pre-modern science like Modern science, involved specialized knowledge of different aspects of reality, but, being integrated into philosophy as it was, it recognized the general knowledge of the whole that philosophy sought after to be the higher and greater knowledge, and therefore did not exclude any part of that whole as an area of interest for its more concentrated study.   The science that emerged from the transition into the Modern Age, by contrast, was far less integrated into philosophy, which itself was undergoing a radical transformation, and not, in my opinion, for the better.   Neither Modern science nor Modern philosophy shared the pre-modern hierarchical ranking of general knowledge of the whole as higher and superior to specialized knowledge of the parts.   Furthermore, Modern science narrowed the areas in which it was interested, excluding several parts or aspects of the whole of reality that pre-modern science had not so excluded.

 

 

In other words, when it comes to the parts of the whole of reality that science concerns itself with, Modern science is actually interested in less than pre-modern science.   This is often overlooked since Modern science has subdivided those fewer parts of reality that have retained its interest into multiple fields to facilitate its scrutiny of each.   Think of it as being like a food store that originally sold all different kinds of food – meat, fruit, vegetables, dairy, grains, etc. – then limited itself to fruit, but multiplied the kinds of fruit it offered, now including all the exotic varieties alongside every available type of the staple apples, oranges, pears, peaches and bananas.   Although it has actually narrowed what it has to offer, someone who only ever entered the store to buy fruit might miss this because for him the variety has increased.   The point is that when measured by the criteria of the portion of reality that Modern science takes an interest in compared with pre-modern science, the development of Modern science is clearly a contraction of knowledge rather than an expansion.

 

When it comes to the areas in which Modern science has retained an interest, it has, undeniably, expanded one type of knowledge about those areas, and that exponentially.   That type of knowledge is the kind that answers such questions as “How does this work?” and “What is this made of?”    That providing highly detailed answers to such questions in no way answers such questions as “what is this thing in itself?” and “what is the good of such things?” was beautifully illustrated by C. S. Lewis in the exchange on the nature of a star between Ramandu and Eustace in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and explained more prosaically in a number of his non-fictional writings.

 

 

The reason Modern science can answer the one type of question well and in great depth but is hopeless at answering the other type of question is the same reason why it is interested in some parts of the whole that is reality and not others.   Finding the answers to the first type of questions with regards to the areas in which it is interested serves the end of Modern science.   Finding the answers to the second type of questions does not serve that end.   Nor is there anything in the areas of reality which Modern science has excluded from its interest that would serve that end.

 

 

This is because the end of Modern science, that for which it seeks and strives, is not truth at all, but power and control.   As C. S. Lewis opened his lecture on “The Abolition of Man”, the third of the lectures transcribed and published together under the same title in 1943, “’Man’s conquest of Nature’ is an expression often used to describe the progress of applied science”.   Lewis’ entire lecture is well worth reading to understand the implications, positive and negative of this, as is the entire book in which it can be found and, for that matter, his treatment of the same subject in That Hideous Strength, the third and longest of his “Space Trilogy” in which theological and philosophical discussion is presented in the form of science fiction.   That this is the goal of Modern science, however, rests not merely on the assertion of one of its more distinguished critics.   We also have the word of one of its earliest advocates.   Sir Francis Bacon famously expressed the end of Modern science as the mission statement of his fictional Salomon’s House in his unfinished novel The New Atlantis (1626), “the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.”

 

 

It is because this is its purpose that Modern science is interested only in those parts of reality which it can bend to serve the human will and only in the kind of knowledge that serves that purpose, such as what those things it wishes to bend and harness into service are made of and how they work.   Answers to the questions of what things are in themselves, what their good is, how they fit in to the larger whole of reality, and how they contribute to the good of that whole, are entirely irrelevant to that purpose, as indispensable as they are to Truth.   Indeed, true knowledge of the good of things in themselves and the part they play in the order of reality as a whole, would in many cases run counter to the goal of Modern science for it would identify a good for all things which is not imposed upon them by the will of man, and to which man is obligated to bend his will.

 

The history of Modern science itself demonstrates that truth is entirely irrelevant to it at the theoretical level.   Theory is the essential link between scientific fact gathering – observation and recording – and scientific application – the use of those facts to bend the nature of things into the service of the will of man.   It begins as hypothesis – an interpretive explanation of what has been observed – which, if it survives testing by experimentation, becomes theory, that is to say, an explanation that is accepted and taken to be true for the purpose of devising further hypotheses and developing practical applications.   This is the means whereby science has obtained its great success at manipulating the nature of things to serve man’s will.   This success, however, has never required that the theories underlying human invention actually be true.    Indeed, most if not all of what are considered to be Modern science’s greatest successes, are the culmination of a series of advancements, each based upon a theory that has subsequently been shown to be false.    Success for Modern science is measured by whether it works, not by whether it is true.   The philosophy of science took a major step towards acknowledging this in the twentieth century, when Sir Karl Popper successfully replaced “verifiability” with “falsifiability” as the litmus test of whether a theory is truly scientific or not.   To be scientific, Popper argued, a theory must be falsifiable, that is, susceptible to being shown to be false.   Logic, of course, would tell us that if a theory is capable of being shown to be false, it is, therefore false, and, indeed, Gordon H. Clark argued convincingly that all scientific theories are false, by the standards of logic, for they all involve the fallacy of asserting the consequent.

 

 

Now perhaps you are wondering whether any of this matters or not.   Since science presumably aims at using the mastery over nature it seeks to benefit mankind is not the question of whether it works all that really matters?  This objection would have more validity if everything science had accomplished had been beneficial.   Some things science has given us – the ability to preserve food longer for example – are unquestionably beneficial.   Other things science has given us – nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction – are decidedly not so beneficial, quite the opposite as a matter of fact.

 

 

This is directly related to everything we have seen about how Modern science has divorced its inquiries from an appreciation of things as they are in themselves, contemplation of the whole, and Truth as it was classically and traditionally understood.   A science that seeks only such knowledge as can be used to bend nature to man’s will is a science that recognizes no limits on man’s will.   Such a science is incapable of distinguishing between a good use of its mastery of nature and a bad use.   Goodness like Truth, from which it can be distinguished but never separated, is a transcendental, an element of the permanent order of reality that cannot be bent to serve human will but which requires man to bend his will instead to his own peril if he refuses.  Since Modern science is based upon an assertion of the will in rejection of these limitations it dooms itself to using its power in an evil way, as in the example given in the previous paragraph.

  

I offer the above as grounds for continuing the Socratic tradition of not trusting the experts.   Modern science, for the reasons given, is cause for regarding today’s experts as being less reliable than those of Socrates’ day, not more.  

 

Someone may, however, object that this does not apply to the medical experts we are being told to trust today because their science is devoted to the end of saving people’s lives and health and that this ensures that medical science cannot serve evil ends like the science that went into creating the nuclear bomb.   The response that jumps to mind is to point to all the harm and destruction done – small businesses going bankrupt, massive job losses, mental health breakdowns, alcohol, opioid and other addictions, suicides, the erosion of social capital, distrust of family, friends, neighbours, the development of a snitch culture, the trampling of basic freedom and constitutional rights, the cruel locking away of people in the last days of their lives from their loved ones, the brainwashing people into regarding such things as a friendly handshake or a warm hug as sources of contagion, the cancelling of weddings, birthday parties, holidays, and all the joys of life, forcing people to merely exist rather than truly live, etc. – by the lockdowns that so many of these medical experts have been demanding and imposing for the sake of preventing the spread of a disease that most often produces only mild symptoms, has over a 99 percent survival rate for those under 65-70 and in good health, and which poses a threat mostly to the very old and very sick.   Medical experts who would recommend such a thing demonstrate thereby that they are completely unworthy of our trust.

 

 

George Grant devoted his philosophical career to the contemplation of the significance of the transition from ancient to Modern thinking, focusing specifically on the shift from the view in which the permanent order of reality held us accountable to standards such as goodness, justice, and truth to the view in which the only “goodness”, “justice” and “truth” are values we impose on reality by bending it to our will.    He frequently quoted Robert Oppenheimer's statement "When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it" as encapsulating the thinking behind Modern technological science and showing why such thinking precluded bending and submitting to the order of the universe.   He contrasted this unfavourably with the old adage a posse ad esse non valet consequentia as epitomizing the older and wiser way of thinking.  He spoke and wrote frequently about the troubling paradox of freedom, wherein the prevalent liberalism of the Modern Age made freedom its highest value, but understood freedom as the unshackling of the will from the constraints of the order recognized by ancient wisdom, and in developing the science and technology necessary to so “free” the will as to make every desire attainable, created the conditions for unprecedented levels of social control that were eliminating freedom in the older sense of protected civil liberties and rights and ironically, in the name of freedom, were moving us closer to tyranny.   That medical science was as much a part of this problem as any other he recognized when he wrote:

 

 

The proliferating power of the medical profession illustrates our drive to new technologies of human nature.  This expanding power has generally been developed by people concerned with human betterment.

 

Yet nevertheless, the profession has become a chief instrument for tightening social control in the western world, as is made evident by the unity of the profession’s purpose with those of political administration and law enforcement, the complex organization of dependent professions it has gathered around itself, its taking over of the cure of the ‘psyche’, and the increasing correlation of psychiatry with a behaviourally and physiologically oriented psychology. It becomes increasingly necessary to adjust the masses to behave appropriately amidst such technological crises as those of population and pollution and life in the cities. (“Thinking About Technology”, in Technology and Justice, 1986, pp 16-17.

 

How the Universities Have Betrayed The Founding Principles of Academia

Last week, the local representatives of that quasi-official Ministry of Disinformation known as the press or the media got themselves all worked up into a tizzy over the provincial government's revelation that it was cutting funding to public education. The bulk of the uproar had to do with the reduction of the University of Manitoba's operating grant by five percent, four percent for this year alone, one per cent on an ongoing basis. Translated into a dollar amount this, according to the University's president David Banard, amounts to a $17.3 million reduction of their budget. The University is now contemplating layoffs.

While Wab Kinew, the leader of the socialist party, has been wringing his hands in despair over how the government is "making everyone in the province of Manitoba worse off," my thoughts on the matter have fallen more along the lines of "well, its a start at least". Don't get me wrong. I am not yet ready to forgive Brian Pallister for bringing Big Brother to Manitoba, especially since at the same time he announced these cuts he also increased the number of gestapo empowered to enforce his draconian rules against ordinary social behaviour. However, he would never have been able to get away with this if the education system, especially the universities, had not long ago betrayed its founding principles. The unhealthy cultural climate of the day, in which we are encouraged to shut off our brains and our common sense when an "expert" is speaking, accept what he is telling us no matter how ludicrous and easily debunked it may be, and obey his every command, is almost entirely to be blamed on this betrayal by our universities.

There were "experts" back when the foundations of the Western university tradition were laid two and a half millennia ago. The institutions in this tradition are collectively known as "academia" after the school which Plato founded in 387 BC and which took its name from the Ἀκαδημία in which it met, an enclosed olive grove outside the city wall of Athens and dedicated to the city's patron goddess. A. N. Whitehead wrote that "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato” (Process and Reality, 1979). This is very true, but if Plato built the Academy it was his own teacher, Socrates, who laid the foundation.

The founding of the Academy has been compared to the founding of the Church. The parallels are striking, although there is a danger of blasphemy if we press them too far. In the case of both institutions, the true founder was a teacher who stood out from the other teachers of his day with whom he was often in dispute, who was put to death democratically by the demand of a populace stirred up by his enemies, and whom we know primarily through the writings of his disciples. In both cases there was one particular disciple who more than all the others combined shaped how subsequent generations would view his teacher. In both cases, contemporaries outside of the founder's own disciples often viewed him as a member of the group with which he is most often depicted as clashing in the writings of his followers. In Socrates' case, Aristophanes famously depicted him in The Clouds as being a prime example of the sophists who are his chief opponents in Plato. (1)

The Socrates we know from Plato earned his nickname "the gadfly" in the agora - the Athenian marketplace and its social hub - by challenging the experts of his day. He would engage in dialogue with them, taking the position of a humble inquirer who lacks knowledge but wishes to gain it by learning from those who lay claim to it. The subjects vary, from the interpretation of Homer in the Hippias Minor to friendship in the Lysis. Most often they have to do with virtue, whether it be generic virtue as in the Meno, or specific virtues such as courage, temperance, and piety in the Laches, Charmides and Euthyphro respectively. His questions inevitably reveal that his interlocutors don't really know what they are talking about.

Foremost among the experts of Socrates' day were the aforementioned sophists. Most of the people whose ignorance he exposed, such as those who feature in the dialogues mentioned in the previous paragraph, were either minor sophists or young aristocrats who had studied under the sophists. In the Protagoras and the Gorgias, however, he tangled with the two leading figures of this school. These were the teachers whom the wealthy and noble families of ancient Greece hired to train their sons for their expected roles as statesmen, lawyers, and military leaders. The virtues which the Greeks prized and Socrates liked to talk about were an important part of this curriculum. The most important part, however, was the art of rhetorical persuasion. This is the subject of the dialogue between Socrates and Gorgias. It is also the art by which Socrates is depicted as corrupting Pheidippides in the Clouds. The criticism levelled against this art in the Gorgias - and the Clouds - was that its purpose was to make the weaker side of a dispute sound like the stronger side. Indeed, this is what the term sophistry suggests to this very day.

The significance and relevance of this will be made clear at the end of this essay. Let us know turn to the Western academic tradition that was built on the foundation laid by the Socratic school and especially Plato. Philosophy means the love of wisdom. Wisdom and knowledge, as has often been pointed out, are not the same thing. The Oracle of Delphi had proclaimed Socrates to be the wisest man in the world and his motivation, according to his account of himself at his trial in Plato's Apologia, was to discover what this could possibly mean because in his own estimation he was ignorant. While that might suggest to some that the difference between wisdom and knowledge is such that wisdom can be found in the absence of all knowledge it can also be taken as pointing to a difference between true knowledge and knowledge that is not worthy of the name. Wisdom, by this latter interpretation, is either true knowledge as opposed to the lesser knowledge or it is something that is greater than true knowledge but which true knowledge leads to, whereas all the lesser knowledge in the world can never approach it. This, of course, is Plato's understanding of the matter. His master disavowed knowledge because he placed no value on the lesser sort and was too humble to lay claim to the true knowledge, which humility indicated that he possessed it to a degree that justified the judgement of Delphi on the matter.

A full examination of the difference between true and less - not necessarily "false" - knowledge would require a longer and less polemical treatise than this one. To illustrate the aspect of the matter that I wish to highlight, however, allow me to pose the following question:

Who knows more: a) someone who knows a little bit about almost everything or b) someone who knows a lot about one small area?

If you answered a) then you are in sync with the great Western academic tradition established by Plato and his Socrates. If you answered b) you are more in line with the thinking of the Modern Age, especially the sort of modern thinking that produces scientism, technocracy, and the idolatry of the expert.

The justification for answering a) is that the person who knows a little about each of a lot of subjects is likely to have a far more accurate grasp on the "big picture", that is, truth and reality conceived as the whole into which everything fits, than someone who has devoted his life to accumulating massive amounts of information about one small part of that big picture. By the standards of the Great Tradition it is the knowledge that leads you to the big picture that is the true knowledge, and the other kind the lesser.

As Stephen Leacock put it in an essay that appeared one century, decade, and year ago:

The older view of education, which is rapidly passing away in America, but which is still dominant in the great universities of England, aimed at a wide and humane culture of the intellect. It regarded the various departments of learning as forming essentially a unity, some pursuit of each being necessary to the intelligent comprehension of the whole, and a reasonable grasp of the whole being necessary to the appreciation of each. It is true that the system followed in endeavouring to realise this ideal took as its basis the literature of Greece and Rome. But this was rather made the starting point for a general knowledge of the literature, the history and the philosophy of all ages than regarded as offering in itself the final goal of education. ("Literature and Education in America", 1909)

At the time the Canadian educational system was much more closely integrated with the British, with Oxford or Cambridge being the next step after obtaining a college or university degree here. In the intervening century the rival view of education that Leacock associated with America came to permeate the educational systems of Canada and the United Kingdom. Although Leacock would have lamented this development in Canada it would not have shocked him - by America he meant the continent not the country. By 1953, historian Hilda Neatby was already warning about how progressive educational reforms to the Canadian primary and secondary schools based on the ideas of American pragmatist John Dewey meant that these institutions were no longer preparing students adequately for the kind of university education described in the above quote from Leacock. (So Little For the Mind, 1953) The decline of classical education in the United Kingdom would have surprised Leacock more. One can only guess at his astonishment to learn that in 2020, technical experts of the type the American system was designed to produce would be treated with a greater, almost absolute, deference in Canada and the UK, than in the United States.

The roots of all this go back much further than the last century. Richard M. Weaver in his Ideas Have Consequences (University of Chicago, 1948), traced academia's departure from this foundational understanding of knowledge back to the thirteenth century nominalism of William of Occam. Whether he was right in identifying the starting point or not is debatable. More germane to this discussion is how he traced through history the decline of the priority of the generalized education that leads to wholistic knowledge to where it took its last stand in the ideal of the Renaissance Man before being replaced by the ideal of specialized knowledge. Note that Weaver's book was published three years after the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Weaver was looking for the answer to the question of how a civilized society could arrive at the point where it would do something so barbarous as to invent such a device. He saw it as the result of the shift towards specialization in education. The scientists working on the project were so focused on the part of the task assigned to them that they missed the larger picture, including the ethical ramifications, of what they were doing.

The complete reversal of the Socratic/Platonic view of knowledge is clearly on display in the way the word "science" is now used. This is the Latin word for "knowledge." At one time even in English it encompassed knowledge of all sorts. The subjects studied by today's "science" were then considered to be the "natural" or "physical" sciences, a mere branch of science or knowledge as a whole. Today science in the way it is ordinarily used does not include knowledge of all sorts, nor is it even to be taken as shorthand for the older sense of "the natural sciences" but refers instead to a particular methodology for studying the latter. This methodology, which could be described in layman's terms as taking things apart to see how they work then trying to put them back together again, calls for the accumulation of vast amounts of information about smaller and smaller aspects of the natural world that have been subjected to minute scrutiny. It requires, in other words, the extremely specialized knowledge that can only be obtained at the risk of losing sight of the big picture that is the path to wisdom. Those who think that Modern science is the path to greater knowledge and wisdom are mistaken. It was never intended to be such. The end of Modern science, as Sir Francis Bacon spelled it out for us in the incomplete novel The New Atlantis that was published after his death, is the exertion of the dominance of the human will over the natural world. (2) There are two sides to this. Through pursuing this end science has been able to exponentially improve the tools by which he sustains his life in this world and makes it more bearable and comfortable. The flipside is that he himself becomes increasingly the subject of science's drive for mastery which recognizes no limitations on the human will. For an excellent discussion of the implications and ramifications of this see George Grant's essay "Thinking About Technology", the first in his Technology and Justice (Anansi, 1986). Note especially the contrast he draws out between the Modern scientific mindset represented by Robert Oppenheimer's statement "when you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it" and the ancient wisdom of a posse ad esse non valet consequentia. Unsurprisingly, totalitarian governments have always had a high regard for science. Even if they get the details astonishingly wrong, as in the Lysenko period of the Soviet Union, or Mao's disastrous agricultural experiments in China, they understand the purpose of Modern science, probably better than anyone else.

Today's "experts" are the products of an academia that has rejected its founding principles and embraced the specialization of education. Socrates expressed his scorn for people who had acquired a lot of information about one small thing and then claimed to be authorities on everything at his trial in Plato's Apologia. Today our universities churn out such "experts" and teach everybody else to defer to such people to the point of giving them the kind of power over our lives that Hitler and Stalin could only dream of if their expertise is in the area of public health.

Yet it is even worse than that. It would be bad enough if the "experts" were people who really had mastered all the information in their small branch of knowledge. The evidence is growing, however, that the academy has been in decline in even transmitting this form of knowledge and has substituted instead the mastery of techno-speak, whereby someone is able to pass, to the public at least, as the master of a particular branch of knowledge, when he is really just a master of the specialized jargon, lingo, and rhetoric that is associated with the field. In which case, the academy has come full circle and restored the sophistry that had been demolished by Socrates to make room for the foundation of the edifice of the Western academic tradition that Plato would erect over the ruins.

A five percent reduction of their funding? That's a start and it is only just considering that it is the experts they have been producing and telling us to listen to who have done so much unnecessary damage to the economy that supplies the government revenues that pay for their grants. It would be better to cut them off altogether until such time as they return to the principles of the Great Academic Tradition.




(1) Keep in mind that this example of the Old Comedy was what we would call a "roast" today. Aristophanes knew Socrates well, as Plato demonstrated in the Symposium, although judging from the Apologia's implication that The Clouds influenced the trial and execution of Socrates a quarter of a century later, he never really forgave Aristophanes for this slight against his master. It has been related since ancient times, however, that Socrates himself was present at the play's first performance, where he sat in the front row laughing louder than everyone else and at the end stood up and took a bow to the audience.
(2) "The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible." The New Atlantis (1626)

Counting the Cost

Let us suppose that tomorrow Justin Trudeau were to make the following announcement:

I have good news and bad news. The bad news is that the experts have told us that it will take twenty years of extreme social distancing for us to be certain COVID-19 will not resurge. The good news is that we have developed the technology to fully automate production of all essential goods and the delivery of the same. Everyone is therefore ordered to remain in their homes for the next twenty years. All of your needs will be met. Robots will produce all the food and toilet paper and everything else you need and bring it to your home. There is no need for you to go outside. Armed drones will patrol the streets nonstop to enforce your compliance with this order. I am sorry that you will not be able to see your friends or loved ones outside of your immediate household who live with you again, except through video communication, for two decades, but it is necessary to prevent COVID-19 from resurging and flooding our health care system. I will remain in office for the duration of this period to see to it that everything functions smoothly. See you in twenty years.

Would we tolerate this?

Would we agree that the total loss of our freedoms of movement and association for two decades was a price worth paying in order to protect us from this virus?

I hope – which is probably a safer word to use here than assume – that most of us would answer “no” to both of these questions. Yet, with one significant exception, the differences between the hypothetical announcement and what we are actually being told are ones of degree rather than kind. It appears, however, that most of us would answer these questions “yes” had they been asked of what the government is actually saying.

This raises the interesting question of where the line falls between what we are willing to put up with from the government in terms of suppression of our basic freedoms in order to contain or combat this pandemic and what we are not. At what point does the price become too high?

The reluctance of many to think in terms of this question comes from the mistaken notion that the cost of the measures that our country and many others are taking to combat the COVID-19 pandemic is entirely, or at least mostly, economic. Those who hold this mistaken notion, then argue from the maxim that lives are more important than money, property, the economy and the like, that no economic cost is too high to achieve the end of saving lives from COVID-19. As I observed in my last essay, the premise of this reasoning is a lie concealed behind a moral truism. While it is true, of course, that lives are more important than material goods, if you wipe out material goods you will end up destroying lives.

Let us consider the point that I sought to make in the hypothetical Trudeau speech above by that one item that is a significant exception to the rule that it differs from what he is actually saying only by degree rather than kind. In the speech, Trudeau has found a technological solution to the problem of providing people with their essential needs while everyone is locked in their homes for their own good. Robots will do it all. No such solution is available in the real world. If it were, however, it would remove the economic element from the equation entirely. Yet the problem remains. How many, even with the assurance that all their material needs will be met, would consider living under a house arrest enforced by the most Orwellian of means for twenty years to be an acceptable cost to pay in order to stop COVID-19?

My point is that the cost of “extreme social distancing”, “isolation” and “shut down” over too long of an extended period of time, even with the economic element subtracted from that cost, is too high a price to pay. It is not a rational solution to the problem of the pandemic. Which is not surprising considering that it was quickly put in place by governments, on the advice of epidemiological experts, when they suddenly found that their earlier inattention to the outbreak when it was confined to China had brought it to their own doorsteps. Decisions made in haste are not likely to be thoroughly thought out rational decisions. Especially when you are trying to compensate for having earlier underreacted to a potential crisis. That is what leads to overreaction.

Andrew Cohen of the Ottawa Citizen in his recent comparison of the Canadian and American methods of handling this crisis clearly expresses his preference for the Canadian way of doing things over the American. I too prefer the Canadian way, although for me, that way is and always will be, defined by the Canada of 1867, whereas for Cohen, the Canadian way seems to be defined by whatever the Liberal Party says Canada is all about in the present moment. He mentions that Canadians tend to listen to and respect experts more than Americans, or at least the sitting American president. Perhaps that is true. In this case, however, the Canadian government is acting like it has been listening to only one kind of expert.

The kind of people we call experts today are the result of the centuries long process of the specialization of knowledge. If you are looking for something to do in your time of isolation you might want to consider reading Richard Weaver’s discussion of this process in Ideas Have Consequences. We have gone from prioritizing the ability to see the big picture to prioritizing the mastery of small subsets of knowledge. The person who has so mastered his own field of knowledge is the expert. Being an expert in one field does not translate into being an expert in all, or even competently knowledgeable in fields other than his own, and, while this is an over-generalization, of course, it is nevertheless the case that experts tend to have a kind of tunnel vision and are often grossly ignorant of other fields than their own.

Thus, the epidemiologists called upon to advise on how to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic and prevent the medical system from crashing by being swamped have provided a solution that would work according to the knowledge available to them. That knowledge is limited to their own field. They are incapable of calculating the number of lives that would be lost due to problems such as mass starvation if we crash the economy in order to practice extreme social distancing. Note that the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization is already warning of a looming global food shortage caused by these Communist anti-COVID measures. Indeed, they seem incapable of understanding that if you crash the economy to save the medical system, you lose the medical system too, because it is the economy that pays for the medical system. The people advising this strategy clearly do not possess even a basic understanding of economics, history (other than the history of disease outbreaks), and constitutional law. The government is clearly not listening to experts in these fields. If it was, it would not be so quick to take measures that could potentially recreate the Great Depression and the inflation of the Weimar Republic. Nor would it have attempted, as it did earlier this week, to pass a bill eerily similar to that which made Adolf Hitler into the dictator of Germany eighty seven years ago.

The government needs to listen to voices knowledgeable in these areas as well as those knowledgeable in containing epidemics. It would do well to pay heed to Dr. Garrett Hardin’s First Law of Human Ecology – “You cannot do only one thing”, which means that anything you do to produce a particular end or solve a particular problem, will have other repercussions elsewhere.

We also need to be listening to those who can tell us something about the long-term consequences of conditioning people to fear normal human contact – the friendly handshake, the warm hug, etc. – as the harbinger of death, and to treat electronic, long-distance, communication as an adequate substitute to be preferred. We had a big enough problem with people gluing their eyes to their smartphones or other electronic devices, immersing themselves in an online virtual world, and shutting themselves off from the real world and the living, breathing, people around them, before this crisis. “Extreme social distancing” will only make it worse. Perhaps someone can tell us what the likely repercussions will be of instilling in our populace the exact opposite mindset to those who went to war for us in 1939, willing to sacrifice themselves and die a horrible death rather than that we lose our freedoms. Karen Selick has made a convincing argument that one of the results of the shut down and stay home approach will be a huge rise in domestic violence. Obviously she is talking about the effects on people who have families. It would also be good to know from mental health experts what the effect on single people who live alone – a much larger percentage of our population than ever before – of cutting them off completely from human contact for months will be. How long will they be able to keep their sanity? How long before the suicide rates skyrocket? How long before people start to snap and do terrible things?

All of this must be factored into the cost that the government is forcing us to pay for stopping COVID-19.

One wiser and more knowledgeable than all the experts put together once said:

“For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.” (Matt. 16:25)

He was speaking of those who believe in Him and are martyred for their faith. Perhaps we should be considering the broader implications of the principle.