The Suicide of Expertise

By David Harsanyi

Thursday, November 12, 2020

 

Americans live in a truly interconnected world. And, honestly, getting to know everyone has been quite unpleasant.

 

“With democracy, all the dirt comes out,” the poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger once noted. Never has this been more apparent than in the age of democratized media. The real crisis of Twitter isn’t, as so many pundits have contended, that Americans confuse social media with the “real world.” Rather, it’s that all the people spouting off on Twitter actually reside in the real world. And often not just anywhere, but in some of our nation’s most important institutions.

 

Few things corrode public confidence more than transparency. Perhaps the most notable consequence of social media has been to rip off the patina of media impartiality so that the hoi polloi can see that these institutions are teeming with janissaries of left-wing causes. Mere media “bias” is a quaint notion at this point.

 

Then again, we sort of suspected this all along. At the 1964 Republican National Convention, Dwight Eisen­hower was already revving up crowds by disparaging the “sensation-seeking columnists and commentators.” Twitter has confirmed that entire newsrooms are now teeming with adoration-seeking columnists and commentators. No writer, of course, likes an editor. Every writer needs one. The problem is that the digital mob now edits the New York Times.

 

Not so long ago the phrase “experts say” would generate respectful consideration from most Americans. Nowadays, every time a professor drops a 20-tweet conspiratorial thread treating net neutrality or a marginal-tax-rate cut as if were a Hitlerian plot to subdue “democracy,” that trust is eroded. And if you believe this kind of hysterical theorizing is the bailiwick of the gender-studies department at Oberlin rather than of historians at Princeton, it probably means you’re not on social media.

 

A few years back, you might remember, we were subjected to one of those navel-gazing D.C. polemics lamenting the “death of expertise.” Know-nothing proles had been showing less than appropriate reverence for the expert class — even though it continues to get so much wrong. In reality, it’s been more a “suicide of expertise.”

 

When allegedly erudite social scientists with big platforms make hyper-partisan arguments from positions of authority — “Hey, sociologist here . . .” — they do their already untrustworthy disciplines no favors. It’s not just that a Nobel Prize–winning economist such as Paul Krugman has adopted the malicious rhetoric of shrieking activists; it’s that his partisan-fueled predictions are so often and exhaustively wrong that he’s probably set back trust in economics by decades. (So maybe Twitter isn’t all bad?) Same goes for constitutional scholars such as Laurence Tribe. Once respected on both sides of the ideological divide, he is now sometimes barely distinguishable from @notmypresident6758we9a, the account that is raging deep in your feed late on a Saturday night.

 

It’s not all bad news. Sure, in the old days your children might have come back from college with exotic ideologies and degrees in psychology. But now, through the magic of digital transparency, you can witness the insanities of the professors who will be bankrupting you before they have even started to destroy your kids’ critical-thinking abilities.

 

This week, for instance, I ran across a tweet from Har­vard’s continuing-education program for doctors — the jewel of the American higher-education system — in which I learned that “ethnic minority pregnant and birthing people suffer worse outcomes and experiences during and after pregnancy and childbirth.”

 

Now, troglodyte that I am, without Twitter I wouldn’t have known that we needed to make distinctions between “birthing people” and women. In general, I’m not tremendously bothered by woke-ish role-playing. Do what you must. But this was Harvard faculty? Is anyone surprised that Americans are becoming skeptical of “science” and “higher education”?

 

It’s true that we still have a president who drops all-caps tweets to grab our attention. That’s still surreal. To peek inside the minds of those who run the most powerful nation in the history of mankind — a group that includes presidents and senators — is an experience I’m not sure we deserve.

 

“Imagine prospects for world peace, prosperity, & security if Joe Biden were President of the United States & Alexei Navalny the President of Russia,” tweeted John Brennan recently. “We’ll soon be halfway there. ‘Imagine all the people Living life in peace You, you may say I’m a dreamer But I’m not the only one.’”

 

What a person thinks of the lyrics of John Lennon’s “Imagine,” perhaps the most nonsensically vacuous ever written, might be the best gauge of whether he has the bare intellectual capacity and wisdom to serve in public office. And John Owen Brennan, the man who was once director of the Central Intelligence Agency — a man who had the power to drone humans thousands of miles away with a mere phone call — believes these lyrics not only make sense but are profound.

 

Imagine there’s no countries? It isn’t hard to do if these are the people running them.

 

I thought of all this when I heard that Pfizer was moving forward with a promising COVID-19 vaccine. It hit me that some of us still do truly amazing things — life-saving things — while others of us argue about proper pronoun usage and whether a hot dog is a sandwich. In many ways, Twitter is nothing but a giant airing of societal grievances. But imagine, I thought, if all those political-science and journalism majors had earned engineering and science degrees and done some good instead. Then it hit me that perhaps Twitter is just God’s way of reminding us that most men are flawed, depraved, and not nearly as bright as they think they are.