Great article and I’d love to believe the author’s argument that the expert class are failing at managing the “narrative.”
I’m not quite sure, though. The expert class keeps growing, populated mostly by otherwise unemployable liberal arts graduates who are only good for unproductive activity aimed at controlling productive members of society. They’re like zombies: easily dealt with in ones and twos but potentially overwhelming as a herd.
I sometimes despair of my country, the US, but I also feel it still has enough independent-minded people to resist the dead hand of bureaucracy and the relentlessly smug, self-regarding technocrats. The culture wars might be that very battle.
But what about countries such as Italy that’s featured in another Unherd article today? They appear to be irrevocably under the thumb of the technocrats in Brussels and their proxies such as Draghi. For my entire life Italy’s politics and economy have been a shambles. The Italians would have to endure some very lean years to wean themselves off dependency on Brussels. Do they still have that much fight left in them? Even mighty Germany has allowed technocratic logic regarding climate change to drive them to the point where they no longer have a reliable source of energy.
All of which is the long-winded way of asking are the technocrats really losing?
Do you believe ‘You will own nothing, but be happy’? Because that is what they say is our lot. I think they will fail in the second half of the phrase.
It would easy to laugh at Schwab as he just seems like such an over-the-top Bond villain type — it’s almost beyond parody.
But he is a scary man, and his worldview (and the fact that he’s now openly sharing it) are truly terrifying. In his book he calls people “useless eaters”, which really sums up his view of those outside his technocratic class.
Interesting comment and link. I would need plenty of evidence before believing a Reuters fact check is anything more than woke drivel (like the BBC fact-check operation which is childishly risible) but I wonder if there is actually any evidence of Mr Schwab expressing the views I have frequently seen attributed to him. I’m keen to look at both sides of this.
J Bryant, good points.
Barnes Wallis ” Everything I have achieved is in depsite of the experts, not because of them “. Experts aquire power and prestige due to some knowledge. If further knowledge comes along which diminishes their power and prestige, they try stop it spreading. B Wallis in his eighties was working on designing planes which could fly at 275,000 ft and 14,000mph; he started his life working on destroyers. Truly great minds do not rest on their laurels and continue innovating until they die. Experts are like misers hoarding what little knowledge they have aquired.
A truly great mind such as Einstein said ” Never stop asking the question Why?” Maynard Keynes said ” When the facts change , I change my mind, what do you do sir?”. A German mathematician was in dispute with B Russell. The German admitted he was wrong and this meant years of work was void. B Russell said this was the greatest act of intellectual honesty of the modern era.
Lord Rutherford said to a conference of physicists said ” If you cannot explain to your cleaner what you are doing, you do not understand what you are attempting to do “.
Since 1945, with the expansion of tertiary education we have created a vast plebian clerisy who are desperate to justify their salaries which invariably come from the state and hence from taxes. Wallis, Einstein, Keynes, Rutherford and Russell are the product of free societies where a plebian clerisy ( a modern version of The Inquisition) does not try to impose a Totalitarian Regime. The modern expert is like the vast horde of people who claimed benefit of clergy, such as Pardoners, in the late Middle Ages, which led to the Reformation.
Credentialed, that’s the word. In compliance regimes that often they devised. I guess it’s a testament to the value of functioning enterprises that they can stagger on while supporting all these parasites.
The historian G M Trevelyan in the 1940s described them as intellectual proletariat. Perhaps plebian cleresy could be used.
The situation is similar to the late Middle Ages, say 1340s to 1540s where up to 20% of men claimed benefit of clergy, this included priests, monks, friars, pardoners, clerks in holy order plus other professions.
It seems this trend might be turning around. There is positive industrial production activity in a number of (red) US States now.
On the wider point, I think there is a big difference between the US and Sweden that deserves mention. The US is a much looser federation of States, with effective power further devolved to the local level.
This impedes the ability of the professional expert class to control events ‘on the ground’, outside of those local jurisdictions where they are a powerful plurality / majority (NYC, LA, DC).
For example, I spent some time around New Years in New Hampshire, where this divide is very much in evidence. If you pass from (liberal enclave) Exeter NH to (traditional NH conservative) Milford NH, the facemasks disappear, the hand sanitizer is forgotten and nobody much cares, despite what lies the liberal covid fear machine continues to propagate.
This will ultimately give rise to a natural experiment, and people will vote with their feet. Smart people are already leaving New York City and heading to Nashville and Austin, because they want to be able to have a beer and watch a movie without a face diaper or a QR code.
In a place like Sweden (or for that matter France) the high degree of centralised control makes such an experiment impossible.
Interesting reply Graham. In England we have a government of “experts” who would dearly love to keep the population compliant. Fortunately we have a group of 10 or so backbench Members of Parliament who currently have huge power over the Prime Minister (they can force a leadership contest) and these wonderful people, such as Steve Baker, have effectively ended all covid restrictions in the country. No mask or vaccine mandates. Without these “anti-experts” we would be in the same sorry state as the rest of Europe (except Denmark Happy Freedom day guys!).
Yes, I must say Mr Baker and company are a beacon of light for all of us now.
Sadly, the relationship with the UK and the continent has been so soured over Brexit, that even the clear evidence that such a strategy is superior will be cast aside.
I am considering moving to England to escape my current circumstances.
“The US is a much looser federation of States, with effective power further devolved to the local level.” Precisely the reason why the Dems want to nationalize elections with all the robust rules, regulations and integrity of a Chicago voting machine.
I take it that you’re not actually very familiar with the way Swedish governance operates: on a very decentralized basis.
Sweden’s public health authority (and central government, in general), for example, doesn’t have the same authority as their equivalent in the UK. Which is one reason why the best it has offered in response to COVID are recommendations, not actual legal prohibitions (and why you’ll not see many face masks at all throughout Sweden, in marked contrast to the rest of Europe). Also, the rollout of vaccines is entirely handled at the regional/provincial/county level. This process is controlled and budgeted by the regional/provincial/county government, which is controlled by the local political party with a majority electoral mandate.
Stockholm, for example, is long a bastion of the Conservative Moderates. Some northern industrial regions are controlled by the (formerly-Communist) Left Party. In the south, near Denmark, there is control by the far-right ethno-nationalist party, the Swedish Democrats. There are *extremely* different local regulatory and political conditions throughout the country. Just as in the United States.
It’s tiresome (but very career-enhancing for a pundit) to make Sweden this foil for the simplistic political binaries of the Anglo-American world, as the unfortunate author has made a career of. Sweden is a country that most Americans (like myself) don’t know much about, even though it hangs heavily in our consciousness, because very little Scandinavian history, sociology, political, or (until the last decade) literary or filmic works make it into English translation. Until we actually move there (as I have) with an open eyes and realize that the historical, cultural, and political conditions of other countries are not best viewed through the prisms of our own national psycho-dramas! Don’t trust everything you hear about Sweden on Fox News or the Daily Mail or CNN or the Guardian, for that matter.
I don’t think this is right Geoffrey.
The key distinction is between a unitary state and a federated state, wherein the former may have administrative subdivisions – but the point is that the authority is ultimately vested in a single central state apparatus. Central government is supreme.
Sweden is a unitary state, and the powers of the municipalities are granted under the Local Government Act; they tend to be quite far-reaching, it’s true, but they can be taken away or changed with an amendment to this act by the Riksdag.
Contrast with the United States, where (the constitution sets out that) supremacy depends on the policy area under consideration, but unless explicitly set out in the constitution, the powers are assumed to be with the States or the people. (See the 10th amendment of the United States Constitution, or for that matter Article 107 of the Australian constitution)
“They’re like zombies…” Excellent! In fact, based on current neuropsychiatric models of the human mind and of consciousness, these experts (see McGilchrist’s new book), with their inability to see beyond conflict, anger and identity, their inability to see that shades of grey DO exist and that over-arching narratives are almost certain to be wrong, ARE a kind of zombie. They walk amongst us.
Agreed lots of the ‘experts’ are highly qualified academically who feel they are undervalued economically and need to be highly valued in some other way,word power.
In the longer term the “experts” will lose. They will likely succeed in creating the next big mess – which may well resemble a hybrid movie with zombies, bio weapons and a few modern “experts” in their armbands and jackboots. Once they have done so history suggests the grown-ups will re-assert themselves for a generation or two. There may be trials, there may be a bit of old fashioned venganza but “lessons” will not be learned and there will be no “truth and reconcilliation”, no “never again”. Perhaps the only true words Obama ever spoke were “progress isn’t linear”. It would have been more accurate if he’s said “humanity isn’t linear, it’s too human for that”
What will cause this collapse, in your opinion? My biggest worry along those lines is a lack of energy, whether from Peak Oil, Peak Coal, etc., or from restrictions to combat Climate Change, but there are other possibilities for societal implosion. I’m curious to see what you think.
“The expert class keeps growing, populated mostly be otherwise unemployable liberal arts graduates who are only good for unproductive activity aimed at controlling productive members of society.” This is a very helpful summation, and should appear as the definition of “the Blob” in dictionaries henceforth – with a nod to Blair for helpfully injecting it with steroids. Thank you.
Paddy Taylor
2 years ago
“This campaign was bolstered by an open letter signed by 270 “experts” …. ….. Interestingly, the list of signatories was not populated by people actually working in virology or vaccine research. “
And this is where we need a media class to do their job, to see past the obvious agenda at play and filter these bad faith actors out.
But few, if any, media outlets actually do this now. If an “open letter”, or the findings of some dubious research, or even just the maunderings of a self-styled “expert”, fit with the narrative stance of that media organisation then they will reproduce it and use it as the basis of several op-ed pieces to push their worldview. It is not simply poor journalistic practice, it is often done completely cynically in a way that is knowingly dishonest.
People who read and write comments on sites like Unherd are likely to be more critical consumers of news and are therefore less likely to take all “expert” opinion at face value. But most people, if told that something is the current medical view, will not stop to question if there is an agenda at play, and will accept it as objectively true.
A few years ago there was an open letter, much touted in the media, and signed by 70 “Doctors” calling for a ban on contact Rugby for all children. A mere 5 minutes on Google would have demonstrated to any journalist that this was an agenda-driven piece of activism rather than medical advice, yet none seemed to spend those 5 minutes and instead there were articles referencing this “medical report” in most papers. I wrote the following to various media outlets at the time, but it took more than a week for any journalist (actually Piers Morgan was the first that I saw) to begin to question the veracity of their claims……
Many parents will have been very concerned at this open letter, supposedly supported by 70 “Doctors”, calling for a ban on tackling in junior rugby, which featured prominently in Wednesday’s news cycle.
Depressingly, most newspapers have been running follow-up stories but, as yet, few have looked at the report in detail and more particularly at the people behind it, who are mostly academics, involved in gender and identity politics rather than “Health Experts”. If this report goes unchallenged then it can easily become the consensus view – parents may even feel they are being irresponsible by letting their child play Rugby. So, before concerned parents decide their children need to be protected from the dangers of contact Rugby it might be instructive to take a look at the report’s authors and co-signatories.
American Sociologist Dr Eric Anderson, the man behind this letter, currently holds the post of Professor of Sport, Masculinities & Sexualities at the University of Winchester. There is an ongoing campaign to oust this man from his position at Winchester University, which follows a successful campaign that saw him ‘chased out’ of Bath University. He holds some deeply unsavoury views and is a self-confessed sexual predator with a predilection for teenage boys. In lectures he claims that the damage caused by child molestation is ‘merely a social construct.’
Anderson’s co-author is Dr Alysson Pollock, who has been on a mission to ban contact Rugby since her son suffered a fractured cheekbone at the age of 14 during a game. She has asserted in the press that 1 in 5 children playing Rugby will, in the course of a single season, suffer a concussion or a broken bone. She offers no data to back up this frankly hysterical claim, yet continues to peddle the line to the news media.
Whilst there is no doubt that children will occasionally get injured playing Rugby, every parent has to weigh up the Risks vs Rewards associated with any activity. Playing Rugby carries a certain level of risk, as does playing Cricket, as does riding a horse, as does skiing, walking down the stairs or being driven to school.
Responsible parents make these sorts of judgements all the time – what troubles me about this letter is that we are offered no contextual analysis of the argument it makes, we are merely told that children face a very real chance of catastrophic or life changing injury.
As a society we are conditioned to trust the word of medical doctors and we value their opinions, so when confronted with news reports that 70 doctors have backed a move to ban Contact Rugby we, as parents, will naturally sit up and take notice. Would we feel quite so inclined to take their opinions as seriously if we knew that they were not Medical doctors or experts in the area of sports science or medicine? It might be illuminating to take a quick look at a few of the co-signatories of this letter and see their field of expertise:
* Dr Ken Muir – Author of “Homophobia, Misogyny, and Machismo in a Deviant Athletic Subculture: A Participant-Observation Study of Collegiate Rugby.”
* Dr Patricia Griffin – Author of “Strong Women Deep Closets,” A critical analysis of discrimination and prejudice against lesbians in sport.
* Dr Shaun Filiault – Published “Finding the Rainbow: Reflections upon Recruiting Openly Gay Men for Qualitative Research“
* Dr Michael Kimmel – Gender studies. Dr Kimmel is a spokesperson of the National Organization for Men Against Sexism.
* Dr David Birks – Specialises in Fashion Marketing
* Dr Joy Carter – A Environmental Geochemist
* Dr Michael Messner – Sociology and Gender Studies – Recently worked on a study exploring strategies to “stop men’s violence within shifting historical contexts of gender formation”
* Dr John Nauright – Author of “Making Men: Rugby and Masculine Identity” Which explores how an understanding of rugby can provide insight into what it has meant to “be a man” in societies influenced by the ideals of Victorian upper and middle classes.
* Dr Anne Bolin – Cultural Perspectives of Human Sexuality
* A number of other co-signatories hold PhDs in a variety of unrelated fields, the common denominator being that their Doctoral theses were supervised by Eric Anderson.
Undoubtedly they are all experts in their fields but perhaps we should view their backing of this campaign in a new light. ….. Oh, and while we are at it – you can get the full context of his position in Dr Anderson’s must read publications – “Cuddling and Spooning: Heteromasculinity and Homosocial Tactility Among Student-Athletes”, and “Openly Lesbian Team Sport Athletes in an Era of Decreasing Homohysteria.” …. Worthy subjects, I’m sure you’ll agree, and ripe for academic analysis.
Before I’m accused of playing the man and not the ball, there is a serious point to this – the RFU, through the clubs, has implemented a structured progression through age group Rugby of training, coaching and refereeing to minimise the chances of serious injury. Whilst there is always the possibility of getting hurt that is the same for all physical activity, but we don’t ban swimming when we hear a tragic story of a child drowning, nor take away our children’s bicycles because we hear about a traffic accident.
All the scientific and medical evidence points to the fact that the benefits children gain from physical activity, particularly team sports, far outweigh the potential dangers. Of course young Rugby players need to be coached appropriately to learn how to tackle and take contact to mitigate these risks but when you take into consideration the thousands of children who play Rugby every weekend up and down the country, see what valuable lessons and skills they derive from the game – sportsmanship, teamwork, trust, self-reliance, discipline and confidence, not to mention physical exercise – then the benefits surely outnumber the statistically minimal risks, …though naturally that is for every parent to decide for themselves.
I think the media has been more than a tad irresponsible pushing this sensationalist report without laying out the counter arguments from experts in perhaps more appropriate fields of study.
The RFU, and the medical profession in general, need to refute this deeply unscientific report and we can only hope that the media would give as much prominence to that rebuttal as they have to these “Doctors”.
It would be a great shame if any well-intentioned parents decide to stop their children from playing Rugby based on what they mistakenly believe is the best medical advice.
Very well put. This follows on from boxing, which the BMA campaigned for years to be banned. Even when these experts have qualifications and experience, they tend to view things from their own narrow outlook. While undoubtedly children and adults are injured by boxing, this must be weighed against the merits of the sport. Kids, who would otherwise have probably entered a life of crime and violence, finding an outlet for and a way of controlling their aggression is surely a major good.
All effective medications have untoward and sometimes serious side effects in some people and the same is surely also true of sports. When will we start to see calls for cycling to be banned? Lots of people are killed and injured while cycling and by cyclists every year. Let’s not go into why cyclists are a protected species!
Medicine used to attract tough boys; J P R Williams comes to mind. St Mary’s Medical School at one time boasted four British Lions under the age of fourty years, J P R Williams amongst them. Two brilliant JPR Williams tries against England in 1976 | Guinness Six Nations – YouTube
Boxing taught smaller and weaker boys the ability to defend themselves against larger stronger boys, hence it was called the noble art of self defence. It also gave them the physique which made them attractive to women.
I must acknowledge that I usually don’t read responses that are longer than the original essay, but I’m glad I stuck it out with this one.
We live in a narrative driven, electronic screen world with hardly a tad of critical thinking. If people would just stop staring into the tiny electric screen and focus on what is actually happening in front of their eyes, for one moment, they might see reality.
The best example I’ve seen recently is of a man sitting in the prime seats at a football game watching it on his phone. If the announcers were telling him that his team was winning, he would have believed it, as his team was actually losing right in front of his face in real time.
Thanks for this post…. I had a chuckle or two as well as feeling a bit enraged. Dr Anderson’s publications look like the spoofs put out by Pluckrose et al!
This is a good post, well-presented and full to the brim of knowledge. I decided to test a few people (I live in Wales where rugby is the sport of the working man, not true of England unless you include the 13 man variety).
I asked my daughter and her view was that she would not encourage her son to play any sport but would not stop him either; my son-in-law was all for rugby. I asked four other parents and they had a negative-ish view about all sports. I also have my own view.
When I was young I played cricket at every opportunity. One Saturday afternoon a member of our team was fielding at square leg and got hit in the temple by a slog. He just stood up and we carried on playing. The next day he died. I told my parents and they were concerned but the next week I just carried on playing as normal. Today, all parents would have stopped their children playing.
Why the difference? My theory is that in the past children came along as an afterthought, part of the baggage of being married. Today, people decide to have children; they are a prize to be sheltered and protected from every risk. When you listed the names and occupations of the people who had signed the letter, the correct question to ask was, “Are they parents?”
Also, and you will disagree, in England rugby is a middle-class sport and middle-class parents would get involved. These parents would have checked on Google but, like most people, would not have gone past the first page. Research on Google is not good research. In Wales they wouldn’t have bothered to open the computer because all children are encouraged to play rugby.
Is it correct to capitalise rugby (Rugby)?
Not Rugby League. In in South Wales, Union was played by miners and steel workers; In Gloucestershire and Devon by farm hands and in Cornwall by miners.
Absolutely brilliant comment. The fact that this position: “Professor of Sport, Masculinities & Sexualities at the University of Winchester” exists in the first place tells us so much about the modern University
I can’t help but feel pity for these people. Imagine this was your job, and you had to pretend you were doing something worthy and important that pressed forward the human genius. It must be exhausting
Really excellent comment/article, thank you. The standard of comment and research we get from the national media (well, I can only judge from the BBC) is atrocious, every day something reminiscent of what you describe here.
Saul D
2 years ago
Academic truth comes in two forms: artistic and scientific. In the artistic world, which includes politics and philosophy and bleeds into the social sciences, truth is about the collective view of experts. You can’t just have an opinion (I like this), you have to have an opinion founded on pre-existing expertise and elite expert opinion. And to become an expert yourself you have to know the canon, before you might be allowed to engage and critique the leading expert class.
In science, truth is based on data and the emphasis is on continually testing and checking that data for new insights because it might be wrong (even stuff as basic as gravity). And if you’re wrong, you’re wrong – it doesn’t matter how expert you are, so an expert in science will always show the data to explain the mechanics of their ‘truth’, not just rely on their opinion. Data first. Everything up for challenge. Science can be done by brewers, school-kids and patent clerks.
But experts in the arts are effectively a clerical class, preaching a mutually agreed interpretation of ‘the story’ with minor variations as schools of thought. Heretics must be overcome as they threaten the status quo, and established hierarchies and career paths. If you fall to the temptation of counter-interpretations or alternate viewpoints without higher expert guidance, you will be shunned and expelled. Preach and support the liturgy as you have been shown and glory will be yours. The interpretation must be mastered, and other forms must be rejected. Data is not relevant until the experts have told you how to interpret it.
Your point is correct in theory, but as we have seen over the past two years regarding the pandemic (and earlier on other politicized science issues) there has been a conflation of this “accept the collective orthodoxy of designated experts” you ascribe to artistic opinion and the “scientific” opinion. Now, we see that Science (as opposed to lowercase science) is defended without data as if it is an institution and not a process of enquiry. And data is not permitted to be presented that contradicts the collective orthodoxy of designated experts (sometimes designated as misinformation or simply expunged from journals, etc.)
Totally agree. But part of this is because we have people educated in the artistic mode, where expertise sits in a citadel, in charge of policy that relies on a scientific basis, but who are unskilled in how to address legitimate data-based criticism other than in the artistic mode of “Who are you to criticise an expert?”
In science, truth is based on data and the emphasis is on continually testing and checking that data for new insights because it might be wrong (even stuff as basic as gravity). And if you’re wrong, you’re wrong – it doesn’t matter how expert you are, so an expert in science will always show the data to explain the mechanics of their ‘truth’, not just rely on their opinion. Data first. Everything up for challenge. Science can be done by brewers, school-kids and patent clerks.
That’s how things ought to be, yes, but it’s not how they actually are. Climate science, COVID responses, social psychology, much medical research, and anthropology are are so riddled with leftism that they have ceased to function as sciences, and are simply savage and repressive religions obsessed with gaslighting, spreading lies and denying obvious truths.
Broadly I agree with your observation but in fact much that should fall within the scientific category in fact is dominated by artistic thinkers in the sense that there is a canon of scientific truth that goes unquestioned among them. When the true scientific researchers (who are normally a minority among the profession in question) raise doubts about the conventional canon of knowledge they are often fiercely resisted by those clinging to the orthodox explanations.
Semmelweis’s work took years to be accepted and, for example, Freedburg was discouraged from researching bacteria as a cause of ulcers in 1940 and Barry Marshal and Robin Warren first successful treated a peptic ulcer patent with antibiotics in 1981 but their work was fiercely resisted by those espousing conventionally accepted stress/ acid explanation for ulcers and it was not until 1994 when patents for acid reducing drugs expired, removing financial incentive to resist antibiotics as treatment of stomach ulcers, that a conference held by the National Institute of Health (USA) demonstrated the general acceptance of H. pylori as a cause of stomach ulcers. Fleming’s observations regarding penicillin did not produce practical results until war accelerated the need for antibacterial solutions to reduce deaths of servicemen through infection following war wounds.
Men of science do not automatically proceed scientifically but tend to stick to conventional scientific explanations as long as possible. However, they are, of course, less resistant to the discovery of inconvenient truths than popular social “sciences” where the truth is often less important than the ideological narrative.
One of the things Joe Rogan is attacked on is interviewing Dr. Robert Malone, an mRNA vaccine pioneer researcher, who is not sold on the efficacy and safety of the current vaccines. This is a scientific dispute, but The Science (TM) has already been decided. The Science (TM) says Dr. Malone is wrong, and must be censored.
On man-made global warming, The Science (TM) is also settled, even though the original data is famously missing. The original data for Mann’s Hockey Stick graph was “lost,” and never produced. Only the “adjusted” data is available. That sounds like what we used to do as high school student when our experiments turned out wrong.
Hmm….as a scientist and one-time expert, I would say things are not so simple – science has become heavily politicised. It was scientists who asserted from minimal genomic evidence that the Wuhan virus could not have come from a virology lab. That was published in the top science journal Nature. Much later, more data, and the narrative has shifted to ‘maybe it did’ (i think the evidence is more conclusive that it did). In my current field of ‘climate’, the UN special panel holds the authority worldwide, and all science academies kowtow. Go back to 2001 and a former president of the US National Academy of Sciences opined publicly that the UN system of peer review on climate was the worst he had seen – but when the US eventually signed the UN protocols, the academies toed the line; likewise in the Russian Academy, where the vice-chair of the UN’s panel, in that same year. could said openly: ‘ In Russia we all think climate change is over-hyped and that natural cycles dominate’. Then Putin signed up for carbon credits and that professor got a fat contract to chem-trail barium sulphate to see if it could cool the planet. At the Chinese Academy, as late as 2013, papers abounded on the long-term cycles that can account for the current warm peak – not anymore.
Covid, climate, 5G….all new issues with vast investment funds at stake. Way back when I was more active, there was one lone expert epidemiologist who could see from the data that children of x-rayed mothers had a higher incidence of leaukaemia – it took 15 years to shift that paradigm. Science does not publicise its errors and particularly not at the UN, which has an appalling record – having licensed CFCs years before banning them, likewise PCBs, X-raying the pregnant women, acid rain and dumping nuclear waste in the ocean. The problem lies not just with interpretation of data, but with lines of authority, group think and vested interest.
The internet is creating a change that is equivalent to the Lutherian or Tyndale revolution. Mass printing of the Bible in the common language enabled lay people to challenge the interpretation of the expert clerics.
The equivalent here is that the internet has given lay people widespread accessibility to data that previously was only available in libraries and privileged places, or simply not available, and the ability to cross-check that data, and publish counter-results quickly.
So instead of accepting an expert view on according to who said it, people ask to see the data and the logic – to cross-check and validate. We’re at a chaotic stage at the moment, full of false theories, deadends and mis-understandings, but as it settles and data-literacy becomes more widespread, the effect will be a massive change in how we deal with expertise, just as profound as the change that eventually lead to the Enlightenment.
I just hope this time that it comes without the wars of religion that saw the establishment fighting the protesting anti-establishment, or the flights to sanctuary required for disbelievers to escape persecution by the believers.
Annemarie Ni Dhalaigh
2 years ago
Very interesting to read the Swedish experience.
In Ireland we are here:
“From 2015 to 2018, the entire Swedish expert class closed ranks, mobilised every single institution they controlled, and joined with the state in an attempt to combat “misinformation” and prevent wrongthink on the topic of immigration.”
We celebrate the “diverse” names of men who attack, abuse and rape Irish women while Irish middle class muddle headed low T liberals write newspaper columns confessing their “toxic masculinity”. It’s all going to be interesting in a few years. All the dull witted middle aged fools holding signs like ” no human is illegal” at pro government protests are going to get quite a rude awakening.
Interesting Annmarie. Ireland of course, rushed headlong & brought in poorly thought out legislation of gender identity, only to find that predatory men, convicted of crimes, identified as women so they were sent to a female prison. Several attacks on women in prisons followed & there was little they could do about. Nowhere is the narrative more contested now, than the issue of gender identity.
Yes. And our professional feminist class with PHDs in gender studies or some other nonsense boast about how we have the most progressive gender identity legislation in the world, while throwing female prisoners to the mercy of convicted male sex offenders. These people disgust me. They will reap what they sow.
My heart bleeds for what is left of Ireland; a country I once loved (and really still do), and whose past history inspired such pure and wonderful poetry. When I see these woke-sters sell out to Big Tech and Big Pharma and the illiberal narratives that underpin the whole system of corporate capitalism, I shed a tear for that forgotten place of my romantic youth. Those dingy inner city pubs where sessions came alive and fights broke out. That old sailor in a Westmeath cottage who served me sausages and stale scones from his filthy frying pan, with fingers stained yellow from a half century of unfiltered cigarettes. Poor in all worldly things, but who could recite poetry with stunning ease:
“What need they, being come to sense,
But fumble in the greasy till,
And add the halfpence to the pence…”
He is dead and gone, with O’Leary in the grave.
Do you have links to these cases? I find it handy to use these when getting into comment discussions with people who deny its taking place. (There has only been a couple of cases in the U.K. which limits the argument, so more evidence is useful.)
Are you sure they will? This strikes me as as one of those assumptions we take comfort in, like all bullies are cowards. In fact, all the bullies I’ve met have been bullies because they were aggressive, confident and fearless. If you stood up to them, you simply got beaten up. The idea that bullies are cowards and you’ll win if you face them down is a comforting lie.
In the same way that rich luvvies who aren’t on PAYE don’t pay many of the taxes that they they think should be raised, I’m not at all sure the identity politics class loses out by what they campaign for at all. They get a feeling of virtue and of sticking it to people they hate, and it is others – women getting raped in women’s prison by men – who face the consequences.
I was speaking in a general sense. These people don’t realise they benefitted from the past functioning society The cracks appearing now, as a result of progressivism, will open like chasms in the coming years in my view anyway.
Matt Hindman
2 years ago
Here is an idea. Maybe the “experts” have to show they are right once in a while. If you are wrong constantly, what right do you have to call yourself an expert and what authority do you have to make people listen to you?
Indeed a good idea, but to defeat them, you have to move the conversation to one based on actual data.
They will never engage on this basis as they know it would be the end for them.
eg – getting SAGE to publish probability %s with their scenarios.
Some realised this and ensured they control the data too.
“I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”
You only get to be recognised as peer-reviewed in climate psyence if you agree with the existing groupthink. You can no more get a dissenting opinion published than you could get a gospel added to the New Testament suggesting that Christ was not resurrected, and for the same reasons.
‘Data’ is now wildly over-stated as a guiding light, as can be seen by the last two years of complete insanity. Normal people suddenly endlessly fretting over graphs, Case Numbers and R.
Ethics, constitution, liberty, economy, and a host of other factors need centring back at the table. Data must again become a single piece of consideration, not the single driving force.
This problem is not a new one. Clem Atlee back in the 1940’s observed ‘A lot of clever people have got everything except judgement’.
Matt M
2 years ago
Good article Malcolm. The “experts” versus the people is definitely the story of the last decade in the UK too. And I think we have demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that fightbacks are possible.
I was thinking yesterday how much of our recent history has been driven by a couple of dozen backbench Tory MPs: Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless defecting to UKIP forced the EU referendum, the Spartans at the ERG blocked May’s sell-out deal and hastened the election, Steve Baker and the Covid Recovery Group cajoled a reluctant cabinet into not locking down and then swiftly dropping all restrictions.
I think the lesson is that it is not enough to have a majority conservative government. You need a tough, committed internal faction within the party – willing to suffer the slings and arrows – to actually combat the Expert Class.
Maybe we need an Immigration Research Group next to stop these dinghies.
Last edited 2 years ago by Matt M
AC Harper
2 years ago
Yep, class war. There are the Elite and Commoners, and the Elite use the tools available to keep the Commoners in their place. This includes a protective moat within the Commoner class previously known as the Bourgeoisie, the Middle Class, or the Professional classes.
The Middle class are keen to maintain their differentials over the Lower Class so do the work of defending the differentials of the Elite. Think of the Butler or the Housekeeper keeping the grooms and maids in line, in service to the aristocratic Family.
…and the latest twist is to recruit members of the Middle Class most likely to create a protective moat for the Elite in today’s technological world – the Experts. The Experts are given the blessing of the Elite for them to carry out their protective role, but this depends, as mentioned in the article, on the Expert opinions not being challenged.
Jonathan Ellman
2 years ago
The author is right to frame the culture war as class conflict. The key is to recognise that all the issues are subordinated to the primary cause of maintaining the status of the expert (formerly middle) class. Whether it’s environmentalism, racism, feminism etc., the cause is first and foremost a proxy for the primary cause. We’ve all been naive, both ‘sides’ for a decade or more about this. Even many on the so-called ‘left’, who support the sub-causes with a degree of genuineness, are realising their delusions and are now accepting this reality. Others are digging more trenches. But the battle lines can only be clearly seen in terms of class conflict.
The conflict has existed for at least a century and a half but now it’s being heated by the growth of a global middle class in developing nations and the reduction in the Western middle class. Competition for space on the ladder’s higher rungs is the cause of wokism and leftist hypocrisy. The other ’causes’ are merely conflagration points, like a married couple that hate each other arguing over the top being left off the toothpaste, when in reality their entire marriage needs an overhaul or a divorce.
Jonathan, why do you use the phrase class conflict? Most of the woke brigade are just one generation from working class, but having been credentialled and found a prosperous niche in the universities/public sector/cultural institutions, they have very little to say about the economic institutions that perpetuate class/wealth differences. They aren’t going to the barricades over the advantages conferred by private schooling, for example.
In a way, I’m not surprised by their ferocity in cancelling views that aren’t theirs. Does anyone remember the conformity of the 1950s and how each social group policed its own norms? You probably still find it within the churches, trades unions etc – power games played fairly ruthlessly.
I remember Camille Paglia regretting that history wasn’t taught in a chronological way anymore. I think that’s something to do with the fact that the woke warriors are dancing on the surface of the achievements of the last 300 years without really understanding the roots of those achievements, and how they need to be nurtured. They really haven’t been taught the history and value of open enquiry or respect for the dignity of others. Wide reading and travel can do wonders here; I was lucky – while at university (young & impressionable) I borrowed some money and went on a ‘grand tour’ from third world cities in Asia to Paris and London. In itself eye-opening, but also a great stimulus to read and read, and travel further. What the young are offered as education these days seems to be a narrowing rather then enlarging experience. It seems to make them very angry about very niche issues. What a waste in such a fabulous, fascinating world.
“What the young are offered as education these days seems to be a narrowing . . .etc”
I think it’s brainwashing in fact. Post-modernism, Marxism and feminism twist history and literature out of shape, leaving the majority of pupils and students with a false and distorted understanding of the past.
I agree with you more or less otherwise.
Yes, it is brainwashing. Our education systems deliberately fail to perform their central mission of transmitting past knowledge thus leaving the new generation with no defences or protection against this degenerate lunacy.
I agree with most of what you say. But I think it’s a question of how we define the classes. Clearly the old model is no longer fit for purpose. Over the last 80 years or so, the Western ‘middle class’ has grown and then, more recently, shrunk. So, while I’m not sure how many generations the woke brigade are from working class, what they are competing for so aggressively is middle class status, the problem of defining middle class notwithstanding.
“the problem of defining middle class notwithstanding”.
Apparently about 7% of our children are Privately educated. Combine that with their parents who have made the supreme sacrifice of funding such a privilege (without any form of tax relief) and we arrive at perhaps 21% of the population.Thus the Middle or Patrician class.
Kat Kazak
2 years ago
Stratification has always been a thing (think aristocracy and Charles Murray’s Coming Apart. Yes, I know, he’s long-cancelled and very un-woke), what has never been a thing though is the internet – and the internet allows people to create media by the people for the people, to connect with each other and speak their mind without censure, pointing out weak spots in our current policies and endangering the status quo. We laugh at flat earthers, don’t we? I’m sure they existed before, but they just didn’t have means to band together into facebook groups. When we see a process that is objectively happening, there must be an objective reason. From the top of my head, if there are flat earthers (indisputable) then we need to address the quality of education and mental health services.
The elites pretend to hold very different views on things depending on their political persuasion but their different views boil down to the same thing – it’s always best PR for least amount of money and effort. The democrats in the US could have (rightly so) pointed out that equality cannot be achieved unless everyone has the same starting ground – so clearly nurseries/daycares/kindergartens and schools have to be federally funded and held to a very high universal standard. And once all the kids (disadvantaged or not) have the same level of care and education and nutrition, only then can we say that we did all we could for equality in all layers of society and in 30-40 years the benefits of this investment will become evident. Instead democrats propose to give a small amount of scholarships to disadvantaged students from certain backgrounds. Now people from these certain backgrounds will be in a contest for who is more disadvantaged and deserves this place more (more stratification and nurturing victim mentality). With very little investment they get immediate return and they get to cherry pick a few token people that would look good in a news article “look how the democrats got this terribly horribly disasterously disadvantaged person into college – for free!”, did they actually fix the underlying issue or is this a very cynical Return on Investment scheme? The elites have been separating people into different strata for ages because it’s easier to navigate and there can be no unity, in the US they’re very happy to have a two party system, where they can be fake enemies for show and in reality just keep cosy incomes and jobs and continue to not address any fundamental issues. The internet changes things, now they need to scream louder and be more and more clickbait-ey to keep their jobs and incomes. I’m guessing what they’re thinking is “If we focus all of our nation’s attention on gender dysmorphia/immigration/racism/harrassment/fatshaming or some other heated subject, we won’t have to address the pricing of insulin and other medications that has soared 3000% in the last 20 years. In 4 years we’re out of the office and doing lucrative consultancy work for the rest of our lives. GOTTA HOLD ON”. They bring in PhDs in newly emerged sciences and cite “expert opinions”, they know their job, they’re good at spin but unfortunately that’s all they’re good at.
Joe Rogan talks to people who wouldn’t be invited to a TV show and goes in depth on their opinions on things and shockingly millions of people from all sides of the political spectrum want to listen. They listen to 3-4 hour long podcasts out of their own free will, the same people won’t listen to their president for a hour, that should tell you why the elites are scared of Joe Rogan.
True that.
In the U.S. it started with talk radio’s challenge to the oligarchy of the established newspapers in the 1980’s. For the first time ever, I heard a different message when I first discovered Rush Limbaugh, and it was startling to hear someone in the media who shared my world view.
From the beginning, the public were thought to be unable to think for themselves. Given the facts, the vulnerable and frail elderly would have protected themselves with isolation and mask wearing.
Lockdown for everyone has blighted the lives of our youngsters, our economy and future prosperity..
We can only hope that it never happens again.
We shouldn’t bow down to it if they try to impose anything like it again. The latest research says that it only saved 0.2% of lives and has damaged millions in denying cancer treatment and ignoring heart attacks and strokes plus many other conditions. Damage to children has been criminal!
J S
2 years ago
The experts may be losing but they retain an iron grip and will for our lifetimes. Soviet Communism was an immediate failure yet it lasted 70 years.
Martin Smith
2 years ago
Joe Rogan interviewed Dr Robert Malone, an expert on vaccines and one of the developers of mRNA technology. That doesn’t make him right but he’s definitely qualified to speak on the technical aspects of the subject, as well as the wider issues, those logical and moral ones that we are all qualified to speak on if we want to.
I wish you would use quotation marks around the word expert. I’ve worked with experts, real ones, and most of the people who gift themselves with that elevated status don’t actually qualify.
It’s a besetting sin of columnists, and the media in general, that they liberally use words like ‘experts’, ‘scientists’, ‘technocrats’ etc, (though without the inverted commas) implying that it’s all of them, and that they know what they mean by the word but the reader doesn’t need to.
Same. My work with EU officials put me off the entire EU project.
hugh bennett
2 years ago
Forgive me for quoting, because I have used this quote before and have been called a fool for using quotes by some on this platform, but sometimes a quote just sums things up in a few lines… “nothing would be more fatal than for the Government of States to get in the hands of experts. Expert knowledge is limited knowledge, and the unlimited ignorance of the plain man who knows where it hurts is a safer guide than any rigorous direction of a specialized character.” ― Winston Churchill
WSC, but ‘borrowed’ from George William Russell, Dublin circa 1910.)
Chris Wheatley
2 years ago
I am proud to say that I am a scientist. My biggest achievement was that I attended a special conference with the US Navy to persuade them to use a newish technique to protect the decks of the aircraft carriers. I failed.
I was distraught because I knew that my system was the best but the admirals chose something else. This feeling of failure stayed with me for about 3 months but then I began to realise that everything was more complicated than I thought. There were just too many variables to take into account. Now, today, I think they made the correct decision.
If you get a team of scientists together they will never agree on an answer. There will spend their time coming up with a compromise which suits no-one. Things are just too complicated today to have an answer unless you have years of observations.
Take smoking. Back in 1970 my father, a great smoker, died of lung cancer. This was the time when years of research was taking us to the conclusion that smoking as bad for you. But today there are still many smokers. Why is that?
I said this on a post a year ago and someone came back with an answer that he would carry on smoking for ever because it was his right to do so as an individual. This is a very selfish answer. But it does ask a good question: what right does the state have to tell people what to do, even if what they do takes up the resources of the state? Nobody will be able to answer this question.
The state is, in theory, the representative of the community. We’re social beings and live to some extent dependent on the state/community. We agree to give up some of our personal wealth, and autonomy, for things that benefit the community. The state is the apparatus to which we delegate the right to decide the priorities. Illnesses caused by smoking use up health resources, yet smoking was promoted (to the tune of billions $$) by companies which profited from selling cigarettes. I think it was legitimate for the state/community to increase taxes on cigarettes, ban their display and advertising etc. in the same way that the state uses public health laws so that we can expect to be served clean, unadulterated food in cafes. That’s telling food producers and cafe owners what they have to do, but isn’t that better than the alternative?
I agree with you in theory. In fact though, the state, through its bureaucracy, is an interest group pursuing its own best interest. The recently released email from Francis Collins to Tony Fauci telling Tony to take down the Great Barrington Declaration authors confirms this in no uncertain terms.
The continuation of lockdown or “lockdown-lite” decrees in much of the US demonstrates that this tendancy is not limited to government “scientists”.
Anna Bramwell
2 years ago
What a good article.
Lloyd Byler
2 years ago
This.
Is.
The.
Best.
Article.
Ever.
Written.
On.
Unherd.
Dominic A
2 years ago
But is it ‘The Elites’ that are The Problem? Seems to me it’s a small cabal of right-on social-engineers at the centre making all the noise, repeated, amplified by legions of gullible, lazy or cowed politicians, media, education, business managers etc.
It is clear to me that this cabal actively ignores expert opinion (even at the settled science level). EG: at first glance, you could be forgiven for thinking that the phenomenon of trigger warnings, cancel culture etc (with its emphasis on trauma, emotions, wellbeing) was generally supported by psychology/ists – but it is nearer the opposite.
The Elites are the ones that shape shift reality to suit their needs. The rest either go along, fight or seek justice. We got to use people like Freddy as models and collectively strategize how we go about building a more democratic platform of reality
Gunner Myrtle
2 years ago
Unfortunately in Canada that is why the Trudeau government tried and is trying again to pass legislation allowing unprecedented powers of regulation over the internet. I am sure the humiliation he is experiencing at the hands of the trucker convoy and its supporters with their ‘fringe views’ (in expert opinion) will make this an even higher priority. Their goal would be to block Joe Rogan outright. The legislation gives them powers to order ISP’s to block websites.
jim peden
2 years ago
Top notch analysis. The Swedish experience was news to me! I’ve long thought that ‘professional’ classes everywhere had been taken over or ‘mind snatched’ by bad memes. They have been “dancing on the surface of the achievements of the last 300 years” as one of your correspondents so elegantly put it. As their stock-in-trade is opinions and reports, brute reality doesn’t carry much weight – and it’s so inconvenient, too.
Ian Stewart
2 years ago
The status quo typically wins here, because ‘what goes around comes around’, the pendulum swings, action and reaction – as the writer describes above.
So we may get annoyed and frustrated on Unherd, desperately trying to find ways of pushing the pendulum back (as I sometimes do), but ultimately it will swing back regardless.
The best example of this is Project Fear and the Brexit vote. Sometimes it will result in extremes – such as Trump at his worst – but it’ll still swing back (though too far with Biden). There will be casualties, such as cancelled feminists, wrongly transitioned gays, etc etc. And maybe that’s where we can help by contributing to defence funds etc. Even puritan England restored the monarchy, then chucked it out again for a Protestant monarch.
The exception to this is when a revolution really hits the spot – like the Russian revolution. That pendulum has taken a frickin’ long time to swing back, with casualties in the tens of millions.
Last edited 2 years ago by Ian Stewart
Michael Coleman
2 years ago
Great piece! In the US “The Experts” are losing as evidenced by the anecdotes described above. As private media companies try to censor information new sources like Duckduckgo, Rumble, Parlor spring up to provide an outlet to the forbidden.
Going forward the epistemological problem will require all of us to determine our own personal truthfulness rating for sources and authors.
Substack is potentially a game changer. Find trustworthy authors there and follow their work. I started my own Pure Science substack a few months and just posted a new article related to Dr. Malone’s Ivermectin claims on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast: https://purescience.substack.com/p/how-many-covid-deaths-would-ivermectin-have-saved
Thank for your great piece. It is interesting that no well designed, adequately powered and well conducted trials were required for the use of the mRNA vaccines or the recent raft of anti-virals to treat “COVID”.
Lena Bloch
2 years ago
I think it is very easy, anyone who is afraid of a debate or public discussion, is a fraud. Simply lying. Hiding incompetence. Intolerance comes from insecurity. It never comes from being really on the right side. It comes from lying, being dishonest, being corrupt and being afraid to get exposed. We should not believe what these frauds call themselves, we should see what they do. They have inflicted colossal disasters on our societies, communities and souls, plus of course, nearly 6 million deaths and more millions of deaths from untreated diseases. This is what they did. Virus did not do it.
Douglas Proudfoot
2 years ago
In the US, the reality is no longer matching what the “experts” say either. The inflation isn’t temporary. Green policies aren’t free. The prices of gasoline and natural gas are rising rapidly. Grocery prices are going up, and shelves are often empty because of the supply chain mess. High unemployment payments and vaccine mandates are causing labor shortages. Trust in mainstream media is at record lows, according to polls.
Biden has allowed about 2 million illegal immigrants into the country without Covid-19 screening. He’s bussed or flown them to all parts of the country. Over 50% of likely voters think Biden should be impeached for not enforcing immigration law, according to a recent poll.
Democrats look like they will be swamped in the mid-term elections. Since Biden is unlikely to reverse any of the policies causing the problems, there’s no way for Democrats to recover.
We know that when Democrats win, elections have consequences. However, when Republicans win, we know Democrats control the bureaucacy and they’re willing to use false information and the courts to harrass Republicans in office. We’ll have to do the experiment to see if Republicans will have the guts to fight back against the entrenched bureacracy. Frankly, Trump wasn’t that successfu at it.
John Tyler
2 years ago
I’m a minor expert, but I most certainly am not a member of the ‘expert class’. The overriding characteristic of this class is belief in their own rightness. (I use the word ‘belief’ deliberately; it is a matter of self-trust, not objective analysis of robust evidence, that confirms their own rightness.) In truth, the experts often ARE right within their own area of expertise and the parameters of good research practices.
The problem lies not in their expertise, but in the attempts to apply it to other fields , such as that of democratic policy making. Even those considered (and fairly so) experts in public policy often fall down because they fail to see or accept that lesser mortals have an equal share in the democratic process.
I have family and close friends who belong to the expert class. They are all good people, with high motives, and fully deserving of the greatest respect. However, the work and social bubbles in which they live, be they academia, professions or politics, are not conducive to engendering either respect or understanding of the less-well-educated. In fact, I think the expert class is every bit as patronising (in the worst sense) toward lower mortals as they often accuse the attitudes of the unwoke towards ‘minorities’.
(A final thought: are those who fail to be ‘woke’ called ‘slept’?)
B B
2 years ago
Experts are individuals who know everything about a specialized subject and progressively they know everything about nothing.
Andrzej Wasniewski
2 years ago
“Rather, calls to increase censorship come not from the state but from below, with the educated, urban middle classes often organising on their own”
Excellent article overall, and good point but requires some further consideration. Let’s look at the Neil Young case threatening to withdraw his music from Spotify if the do not censor Joe Rogan.
Well, Neil Young does not own his music, he sold 50% stake in his to investment company Hipgnosis for an estimated $150 million. Hipgnosis just secured very large investment from Blackstone, which is special purpose company launched by Blackrock. The CEO of Pfizer in on the board of directors of Blackrock. Joe Rogan is interviewing people who make reasonable arguments about pros and cons of massive vaccination program. In short, those credentialed, NOT educated, urban middle classes are really useful idiots serving the most predatory form of capitalism that ever existed. And Neil Young is just a clueless pawn.
Jerry Jay Carroll
2 years ago
Populism is a word the expert class uses to describe the underclass whose being nauseates them worse than face planting in a deep, warm pile of dog shit..
Dermot O'Sullivan
2 years ago
A very good piece – thank you.
Jesse Porter
2 years ago
Your article is somewhat confusing. You start out with the premise that the totalitarianism we face today is not top down, but from far down the food chain. Then, about half way down, you switch gears to, “…for most members of our “expert class”, managing the “discourse” is exactly what they are trained to do.” Totalitarianism has always been from the top down. What you hinted at was actually the truth of the matter, those at the top trying to enforce totalitarian control are at the top by force of arms, employing whatever means necessary to keep their subjects down. In government, they employ punishment, from fines and taxes (robbery) to confinement and other torture, to death. In religion, they employ guilt and shunning to physical or eternal death. In education, they employ shaming and withholding honors to denying entrance to chosen professions or kicking their detractors out of their profession. And on and on.
Underlings have few and pitifully weak ways to resist totalitarianism, short of armed rebellion (which must be directed by commanders.) Gandhi and MLK sought unarmed resistance, but were only successful by stint of their mammoth personalities. Socialist power has great strength but no direction except when employed by a dictator. The ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ has always manifested itself in one person at a time.
The Covid stupidity, as well as gender and other identity politics, are without question totalitarian–with multiple underlings employing themselves willingly, even eagerly, to aiding their own dictators.
David Yetter
2 years ago
“Expert class” is the wrong name — Kyeyune admits as much with his example of the 270 non-experts whom he holds up as an example of what he is complaining about. And the subtitle (admittedly possibly written by someone else — does UnHerd do that as so many publications do? Have headline writers?) suggests as much: the point of expertise is having an uncommonly accurate grasp of some aspect of reality. If it’s fantasy, there’s no expertise involved (unless the domain of expertise a grasp of what unreal narratives human beings find attractive and compelling).
Charles Hedges
2 years ago
Orwell said various relevant comments
Scientists are prone to accepting Totalitarian regimes which control thoughts. Few scientists opposed Nazism or Communism Orwell does not fear the dictatorship of the proletariat but the intelligentsia. The intelligentsia play with fire but do not know it burns. The intelligentsia have shallow self righteousness and worship power.
Two essays which highlight Orwell’s view on Totalitarian Regimes are The Prevention of Literture and Politcs versus Literature- there are others.
Communism, Nazism or any Totalitarian Regime give scientists Power and Prestige. Scientists supported Communism and Nazism even though they used slave labour.
In Britain, at the beginning of the Industrial Regime British aristocrats such as the Duke of Bridgewater supported engineers. Once The State became the main supporter of scientists which took place in 1919, scientists supported the State and the more powful it became in raising taxes , the more they supported it. Scientists would support the Monster Raving Loony Party if it gave them the most power and prestige.
Science may devlop under Totalitarian regimes initially but as B Wallis said the ” The genius of the English is due to individuality”.One may have a billion people but if they are clones and incapable of original thought because they lack imagination and ingenuity, there is little innovation.
Little literature is produced under Totalitarian regimes, for example the Roman Catholic Church from 400 to 1450 AD, Communist and Nazi regimes. Look at the number of plays produced in Tudor /Stuart Britain from say 1550 AD to 1690s AD compared to the whole of Europe from 400 AD to 1600 AD.
The Royal Society promoted publishing scientific and technical developments whereas in France they tried to control science. We produced Newton and Descartes had to flee France .
Scientists under totalitarian regimes quickly atrophy their capacity for original thought, a result of censorhip. All Totalitarian regimes have to control thoughts, feelings, words and deeds.
Engineering developments in USSR and China are largely due to copying and theft.
Unherd Person
2 years ago
Progresivism, like all Big State utopian projects, is anti-reality and therefore doomed to both tyranny and self-destruction.
The holier-than-though Progressive sociopaths who have enacted all of this will of course never take responsibility nor face justice.
The holier-than-thou Progressive useful idiots who have supported all of this, shouting down all dissenters with the usual -ists and -isms, will never engage in self-reflection as to their role in the collapse.
The normie masses will as always bear the full brunt of the failed rush to utopia.
Last edited 2 years ago by Unherd Person
Chris Wheatley
2 years ago
‘They say’ that Covid does not exist and that is part of a government plot to control people.
‘They say’ that Boris Johnson is related to Donald Trump because they both have the same silly hair.
‘They say’ that global warming has never existed and that’s why they renamed it Climate Change.
‘They say’ a spoonful a day of horse dewormer protects you from Covid.
‘They say’ that all elections are fixed.
Experts everywhere deny these things but there must be something in it, mustn’t there? There’s no smoke without fire.
One listens to NPR (supposedly an impartial news program) stating that Trump again makes the false claim the election was stolen. Our brains are flexible enough to disagree with both absolutes, that the election was stolen and that the claim is false. The result of irrational absolutes is that one tends not to credit the people who purvey them. That in turn leads one to question authority. It’s not just Trump, or illegal immigrants, or racial murders, or covid and vaccines; we are learning that truth hides in the interstices of declamatory factoids. The Apple iPhone is the subversive agent that experts cannot vanquish
Julie Kemp
2 years ago
Precisely, sir!
One slim line of Wisdom i keep coming back to through my highs and lows in swimming ‘alone’ through these turgid times, is remembering energy – not only intellectual ‘power’ often manifesting like a “hammer” but intelligence which is toned by something deeply fluent, feeling ‘friendly, elegant in its perspicacity, nuanced and capable of stimulating awareness of a Consciousness of the first order available to those who dare to see.
It is tautological to rely on ‘mankind’ efforts alone for ‘safety’ but Humanity is something else. I am reminded of how big-time religion once mandated things; then reformations birthed kicking and screaming of course but revelation and relief became more widely intuited and apprehended naturally by more and more of us.
An Australian female/lady elder!
Elizabeth Dichter
2 years ago
You misquoted Warren Buffet. The full quote was “Yes there’s class warfare alright, but it’s my class, the rich class that’s making war and we’re winning but we shouldn’t be“. Warren Buffet has always said the US should require the very rich to pay more in taxes.
Michael Friedman
2 years ago
Splendid article. Full of insight.
Will Cummings
2 years ago
People form classes in a manner similar to that in which any evolutionary process continually alters its form in response to a changing world. The mutants are the ones who drive evolutionary change. It is the eccentrics, the mad, the fools, and all the unnoticed ones whom we need. Our social hierarchies wobble and we fear they might collapse. Yet, they must wobble, or they will be shattered. A little wobble in our societal algorithms would help all of us. It’s too stiff and rigid, like a shoe that just doesn’t fit. Order won’t melt away into Chaos if we soften our approach, and lighten our grip. It’s a living thing, this human culture. The individuals within it are nerves and sinew, bone and guts. Our collective psyche is bruised and shaken, but I don’t believe anything’s broken. Let’s have a bit of charity and a prescription for forgiveness, and some new-found understanding for the eccentrics, the mad, the fools, and all the unnoticed ones whom it turns out we need very much.
Erlend Kvitrud
2 years ago
“It’s a bizarre situation: a call to censorship justified by the incapability of non-experts to handle a subject like vaccine research is then inundated with people who by the same metric should themselves be disqualified from having an opinion”.
This is just a blatant straw man. The call to censorship was justified, not by Rogan being a non-expert, but by him spreading misinformation.
LCarey Rowland
2 years ago
Well I am an American, liberal arts major who spent most of his adult life banging nails as a carpenter, in order to feed our family of five. Fortunately, my wife, originally a psychology major, turned to Nursing after our youngest started middle school. She, by the way, points out that most people who are tubed-up in the covid unit are unvaccinated. ‘nuf said there.
In spite of my humble adulthood as a laboring stiff, I did manage to write four historical-fiction novels on the tail end my nail-banging long phase.
I have never spent one minute listening to Joe Rogan, nor do I intend to. Nor do I ever intend to express sympathy for the seditionists who stormed our Capitol in the name of an imposter president.
I would side with WaPo any day of the week over Buffett and yet I would’nt know a Soros-supported entity even if it stared me down in a university lecture venue.
I will do whatever it takes to prevent these latter-day brown-shirts and black-shirts who are crawling out of our deplorable American outback. . . to prevent them from usurping this nation’s .gov for their own might-makes-right fourth reich or whatever the hell their demented leader has in mind.
America’s 2022 will not allow Germany’s 1933 to become our foreshadowing of governance by brute force.
Joe who? Where’s George Will when we need him?
I live among the ‘deplorables’. None that I know of want to take over the government; many merely just want to be left alone to get on with their lives. If they do have concerns, it’s about how the current government seems to be acting like an occupying force by changing language and sneering at their way of life, while at the same time accusing them of undeserved privilege. Most of them are also aware how politicians and the media have divided the working classes up against each other, but don’t possess the ‘clever’ academic language to challenge it. Instead they are smeared with the ‘bigot’ brush by those who should know better.
“latter-day brown-shirts and black-shirts who are crawling out of our deplorable American outback” Sounds terrible! Is that really happening, is that what you’re seeing?.
I rather think, unless I have mistaken your meaning, you will be more likely to find the brown and black shirts are presently being worn by those who have been convinced by government that there is an underclass about to revolt, which I can reassure you from the viewpoint of most in my “class” is exceedingly unlikely. The mantra is generally “get out of my life, and leave me to run it” which is probably a sentiment you would embrace.
The shirts appear to have accepted the story that the vaccine hesitant (justifiably so in view of the statistics which show quite clearly that the level of side effects exceeds that of previous vaccines) are dangerously unhealthy and in many instances should be excluded from society. Sounds rather similar to events which kicked off in Europe around the middle of the 20th century to me.
Your wife may find most of those she is treating in her area are indeed unvaccinated, but the statistics, again, show that the vaccinated occupants of many ICU beds in Britain are as numerous as the unvaccinated. I seem to recall reading that Israel have a similar problem, and so apparently have Australia. To prevent confusion, I am double jabbed, declined a booster as I had an unpleasant side effect which took seven months to resolve, and having survived Covid in 2020 will take whatever comes. I promise to expire quietly at home in the event of emergencies. Wouldn’t want ICU departments in any country overwhelmed. https://dailysceptic.org/2021/12/11/majority-of-covid-icu-patients-in-october-and-november-were-vaccinated/ https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/real-covid-numbers-from-australias/
Great article and I’d love to believe the author’s argument that the expert class are failing at managing the “narrative.”
I’m not quite sure, though. The expert class keeps growing, populated mostly by otherwise unemployable liberal arts graduates who are only good for unproductive activity aimed at controlling productive members of society. They’re like zombies: easily dealt with in ones and twos but potentially overwhelming as a herd.
I sometimes despair of my country, the US, but I also feel it still has enough independent-minded people to resist the dead hand of bureaucracy and the relentlessly smug, self-regarding technocrats. The culture wars might be that very battle.
But what about countries such as Italy that’s featured in another Unherd article today? They appear to be irrevocably under the thumb of the technocrats in Brussels and their proxies such as Draghi. For my entire life Italy’s politics and economy have been a shambles. The Italians would have to endure some very lean years to wean themselves off dependency on Brussels. Do they still have that much fight left in them? Even mighty Germany has allowed technocratic logic regarding climate change to drive them to the point where they no longer have a reliable source of energy.
All of which is the long-winded way of asking are the technocrats really losing?
Do you believe ‘You will own nothing, but be happy’? Because that is what they say is our lot. I think they will fail in the second half of the phrase.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LJTnkzl3K64
Happy … yet at the same time preparing for an angrier world
It would easy to laugh at Schwab as he just seems like such an over-the-top Bond villain type — it’s almost beyond parody.
But he is a scary man, and his worldview (and the fact that he’s now openly sharing it) are truly terrifying. In his book he calls people “useless eaters”, which really sums up his view of those outside his technocratic class.
No fan of Schwab but no fan of misattribution either… https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-schwab-population-idUSL2N2OB1JW
Interesting comment and link. I would need plenty of evidence before believing a Reuters fact check is anything more than woke drivel (like the BBC fact-check operation which is childishly risible) but I wonder if there is actually any evidence of Mr Schwab expressing the views I have frequently seen attributed to him. I’m keen to look at both sides of this.
Reuters are ‘partnered’ with the World Economic Forum, as are the Associated Press.
The idea that the current crop of Billionaires will own nothing, indeed makes me happy.
I think the billionaires are talking to us when they say you will own nothing.
J Bryant, good points.
Barnes Wallis ” Everything I have achieved is in depsite of the experts, not because of them “. Experts aquire power and prestige due to some knowledge. If further knowledge comes along which diminishes their power and prestige, they try stop it spreading. B Wallis in his eighties was working on designing planes which could fly at 275,000 ft and 14,000mph; he started his life working on destroyers. Truly great minds do not rest on their laurels and continue innovating until they die. Experts are like misers hoarding what little knowledge they have aquired.
A truly great mind such as Einstein said ” Never stop asking the question Why?” Maynard Keynes said ” When the facts change , I change my mind, what do you do sir?”. A German mathematician was in dispute with B Russell. The German admitted he was wrong and this meant years of work was void. B Russell said this was the greatest act of intellectual honesty of the modern era.
Lord Rutherford said to a conference of physicists said ” If you cannot explain to your cleaner what you are doing, you do not understand what you are attempting to do “.
Since 1945, with the expansion of tertiary education we have created a vast plebian clerisy who are desperate to justify their salaries which invariably come from the state and hence from taxes. Wallis, Einstein, Keynes, Rutherford and Russell are the product of free societies where a plebian clerisy ( a modern version of The Inquisition) does not try to impose a Totalitarian Regime. The modern expert is like the vast horde of people who claimed benefit of clergy, such as Pardoners, in the late Middle Ages, which led to the Reformation.
Nicely summed up.
We (the West) have outsourced our productivity to China and elsewhere.
Now we have fewer and fewer productive enterprises but ever more educated people looking for a role.
Almost right, but I’m not sure about ‘educated’.
“qualified” (in something) then?
credentialed, they have a piece of paper claiming that they are educated and qualified
Certified…? Or possibly better ‘certifiable’.
Certified idiots
excellent description…
Credentialed, that’s the word. In compliance regimes that often they devised. I guess it’s a testament to the value of functioning enterprises that they can stagger on while supporting all these parasites.
That’s the one.
The historian G M Trevelyan in the 1940s described them as intellectual proletariat. Perhaps plebian cleresy could be used.
The situation is similar to the late Middle Ages, say 1340s to 1540s where up to 20% of men claimed benefit of clergy, this included priests, monks, friars, pardoners, clerks in holy order plus other professions.
It seems this trend might be turning around. There is positive industrial production activity in a number of (red) US States now.
On the wider point, I think there is a big difference between the US and Sweden that deserves mention. The US is a much looser federation of States, with effective power further devolved to the local level.
This impedes the ability of the professional expert class to control events ‘on the ground’, outside of those local jurisdictions where they are a powerful plurality / majority (NYC, LA, DC).
For example, I spent some time around New Years in New Hampshire, where this divide is very much in evidence. If you pass from (liberal enclave) Exeter NH to (traditional NH conservative) Milford NH, the facemasks disappear, the hand sanitizer is forgotten and nobody much cares, despite what lies the liberal covid fear machine continues to propagate.
This will ultimately give rise to a natural experiment, and people will vote with their feet. Smart people are already leaving New York City and heading to Nashville and Austin, because they want to be able to have a beer and watch a movie without a face diaper or a QR code.
In a place like Sweden (or for that matter France) the high degree of centralised control makes such an experiment impossible.
Interesting reply Graham. In England we have a government of “experts” who would dearly love to keep the population compliant. Fortunately we have a group of 10 or so backbench Members of Parliament who currently have huge power over the Prime Minister (they can force a leadership contest) and these wonderful people, such as Steve Baker, have effectively ended all covid restrictions in the country. No mask or vaccine mandates. Without these “anti-experts” we would be in the same sorry state as the rest of Europe (except Denmark Happy Freedom day guys!).
Yes, I must say Mr Baker and company are a beacon of light for all of us now.
Sadly, the relationship with the UK and the continent has been so soured over Brexit, that even the clear evidence that such a strategy is superior will be cast aside.
I am considering moving to England to escape my current circumstances.
You will be very welcome.
“The US is a much looser federation of States, with effective power further devolved to the local level.”
Precisely the reason why the Dems want to nationalize elections with all the robust rules, regulations and integrity of a Chicago voting machine.
I thought they were moving to Nashville and Austin so they could afford a house?
I take it that you’re not actually very familiar with the way Swedish governance operates: on a very decentralized basis.
Sweden’s public health authority (and central government, in general), for example, doesn’t have the same authority as their equivalent in the UK. Which is one reason why the best it has offered in response to COVID are recommendations, not actual legal prohibitions (and why you’ll not see many face masks at all throughout Sweden, in marked contrast to the rest of Europe). Also, the rollout of vaccines is entirely handled at the regional/provincial/county level. This process is controlled and budgeted by the regional/provincial/county government, which is controlled by the local political party with a majority electoral mandate.
Stockholm, for example, is long a bastion of the Conservative Moderates. Some northern industrial regions are controlled by the (formerly-Communist) Left Party. In the south, near Denmark, there is control by the far-right ethno-nationalist party, the Swedish Democrats. There are *extremely* different local regulatory and political conditions throughout the country. Just as in the United States.
It’s tiresome (but very career-enhancing for a pundit) to make Sweden this foil for the simplistic political binaries of the Anglo-American world, as the unfortunate author has made a career of. Sweden is a country that most Americans (like myself) don’t know much about, even though it hangs heavily in our consciousness, because very little Scandinavian history, sociology, political, or (until the last decade) literary or filmic works make it into English translation. Until we actually move there (as I have) with an open eyes and realize that the historical, cultural, and political conditions of other countries are not best viewed through the prisms of our own national psycho-dramas! Don’t trust everything you hear about Sweden on Fox News or the Daily Mail or CNN or the Guardian, for that matter.
I don’t think this is right Geoffrey.
The key distinction is between a unitary state and a federated state, wherein the former may have administrative subdivisions – but the point is that the authority is ultimately vested in a single central state apparatus. Central government is supreme.
Sweden is a unitary state, and the powers of the municipalities are granted under the Local Government Act; they tend to be quite far-reaching, it’s true, but they can be taken away or changed with an amendment to this act by the Riksdag.
Contrast with the United States, where (the constitution sets out that) supremacy depends on the policy area under consideration, but unless explicitly set out in the constitution, the powers are assumed to be with the States or the people. (See the 10th amendment of the United States Constitution, or for that matter Article 107 of the Australian constitution)
I’ve been saying exactly the same thing. We’re producing too many ‘do-gooders’ looking for a cause.
Or the professionally outraged.
… and educated in predominantly theoretical, rhetorical things to boot…
Educated?
Yes, a loose term in this case.
“They’re like zombies…” Excellent! In fact, based on current neuropsychiatric models of the human mind and of consciousness, these experts (see McGilchrist’s new book), with their inability to see beyond conflict, anger and identity, their inability to see that shades of grey DO exist and that over-arching narratives are almost certain to be wrong, ARE a kind of zombie. They walk amongst us.
To be fair, I was kind of conflating experts with wokeists – sorry about that.
Agreed lots of the ‘experts’ are highly qualified academically who feel they are undervalued economically and need to be highly valued in some other way,word power.
You are not thinking of a Mr Kit Yates who seems to tied himself to the Covid bandwagon?
In the longer term the “experts” will lose. They will likely succeed in creating the next big mess – which may well resemble a hybrid movie with zombies, bio weapons and a few modern “experts” in their armbands and jackboots. Once they have done so history suggests the grown-ups will re-assert themselves for a generation or two. There may be trials, there may be a bit of old fashioned venganza but “lessons” will not be learned and there will be no “truth and reconcilliation”, no “never again”. Perhaps the only true words Obama ever spoke were “progress isn’t linear”. It would have been more accurate if he’s said “humanity isn’t linear, it’s too human for that”
We are all losing. Technocracy will be ousted post-collapse.
What will cause this collapse, in your opinion? My biggest worry along those lines is a lack of energy, whether from Peak Oil, Peak Coal, etc., or from restrictions to combat Climate Change, but there are other possibilities for societal implosion. I’m curious to see what you think.
“The expert class keeps growing, populated mostly be otherwise unemployable liberal arts graduates who are only good for unproductive activity aimed at controlling productive members of society.” This is a very helpful summation, and should appear as the definition of “the Blob” in dictionaries henceforth – with a nod to Blair for helpfully injecting it with steroids. Thank you.
“This campaign was bolstered by an open letter signed by 270 “experts” …. ….. Interestingly, the list of signatories was not populated by people actually working in virology or vaccine research. “
And this is where we need a media class to do their job, to see past the obvious agenda at play and filter these bad faith actors out.
But few, if any, media outlets actually do this now. If an “open letter”, or the findings of some dubious research, or even just the maunderings of a self-styled “expert”, fit with the narrative stance of that media organisation then they will reproduce it and use it as the basis of several op-ed pieces to push their worldview. It is not simply poor journalistic practice, it is often done completely cynically in a way that is knowingly dishonest.
People who read and write comments on sites like Unherd are likely to be more critical consumers of news and are therefore less likely to take all “expert” opinion at face value. But most people, if told that something is the current medical view, will not stop to question if there is an agenda at play, and will accept it as objectively true.
A few years ago there was an open letter, much touted in the media, and signed by 70 “Doctors” calling for a ban on contact Rugby for all children. A mere 5 minutes on Google would have demonstrated to any journalist that this was an agenda-driven piece of activism rather than medical advice, yet none seemed to spend those 5 minutes and instead there were articles referencing this “medical report” in most papers. I wrote the following to various media outlets at the time, but it took more than a week for any journalist (actually Piers Morgan was the first that I saw) to begin to question the veracity of their claims……
Thank you for this, you’ve done a useful bit of investigative journalism there which ought to be more widely available.
Very well put. This follows on from boxing, which the BMA campaigned for years to be banned. Even when these experts have qualifications and experience, they tend to view things from their own narrow outlook. While undoubtedly children and adults are injured by boxing, this must be weighed against the merits of the sport. Kids, who would otherwise have probably entered a life of crime and violence, finding an outlet for and a way of controlling their aggression is surely a major good.
All effective medications have untoward and sometimes serious side effects in some people and the same is surely also true of sports. When will we start to see calls for cycling to be banned? Lots of people are killed and injured while cycling and by cyclists every year. Let’s not go into why cyclists are a protected species!
Medicine used to attract tough boys; J P R Williams comes to mind. St Mary’s Medical School at one time boasted four British Lions under the age of fourty years, J P R Williams amongst them.
Two brilliant JPR Williams tries against England in 1976 | Guinness Six Nations – YouTube
Boxing taught smaller and weaker boys the ability to defend themselves against larger stronger boys, hence it was called the noble art of self defence. It also gave them the physique which made them attractive to women.
copying and pasting (including your comment) for future reference! Thank you.
I must acknowledge that I usually don’t read responses that are longer than the original essay, but I’m glad I stuck it out with this one.
We live in a narrative driven, electronic screen world with hardly a tad of critical thinking. If people would just stop staring into the tiny electric screen and focus on what is actually happening in front of their eyes, for one moment, they might see reality.
The best example I’ve seen recently is of a man sitting in the prime seats at a football game watching it on his phone. If the announcers were telling him that his team was winning, he would have believed it, as his team was actually losing right in front of his face in real time.
Thanks for this post…. I had a chuckle or two as well as feeling a bit enraged. Dr Anderson’s publications look like the spoofs put out by Pluckrose et al!
I find him a bit sinister, his wikipedia entry wiped the smile off my face.
I’ve tried to provide a link but I can’t make it work.
More than a bit sinister, Claire – have a read of this and shudder at the thought that this man holds a tax-payer funded position – teaching the very same people he admits to preying upon!
Lecturer or lecherer at LGBT talk? | VirtueOnline – The Voice for Global Orthodox Anglicanism
This is a good post, well-presented and full to the brim of knowledge. I decided to test a few people (I live in Wales where rugby is the sport of the working man, not true of England unless you include the 13 man variety).
I asked my daughter and her view was that she would not encourage her son to play any sport but would not stop him either; my son-in-law was all for rugby. I asked four other parents and they had a negative-ish view about all sports. I also have my own view.
When I was young I played cricket at every opportunity. One Saturday afternoon a member of our team was fielding at square leg and got hit in the temple by a slog. He just stood up and we carried on playing. The next day he died. I told my parents and they were concerned but the next week I just carried on playing as normal. Today, all parents would have stopped their children playing.
Why the difference? My theory is that in the past children came along as an afterthought, part of the baggage of being married. Today, people decide to have children; they are a prize to be sheltered and protected from every risk. When you listed the names and occupations of the people who had signed the letter, the correct question to ask was, “Are they parents?”
Also, and you will disagree, in England rugby is a middle-class sport and middle-class parents would get involved. These parents would have checked on Google but, like most people, would not have gone past the first page. Research on Google is not good research. In Wales they wouldn’t have bothered to open the computer because all children are encouraged to play rugby.
Is it correct to capitalise rugby (Rugby)?
Not Rugby League. In in South Wales, Union was played by miners and steel workers; In Gloucestershire and Devon by farm hands and in Cornwall by miners.
Absolutely brilliant comment. The fact that this position: “Professor of Sport, Masculinities & Sexualities at the University of Winchester” exists in the first place tells us so much about the modern University
I can’t help but feel pity for these people. Imagine this was your job, and you had to pretend you were doing something worthy and important that pressed forward the human genius. It must be exhausting
Really excellent comment/article, thank you. The standard of comment and research we get from the national media (well, I can only judge from the BBC) is atrocious, every day something reminiscent of what you describe here.
Academic truth comes in two forms: artistic and scientific. In the artistic world, which includes politics and philosophy and bleeds into the social sciences, truth is about the collective view of experts. You can’t just have an opinion (I like this), you have to have an opinion founded on pre-existing expertise and elite expert opinion. And to become an expert yourself you have to know the canon, before you might be allowed to engage and critique the leading expert class.
In science, truth is based on data and the emphasis is on continually testing and checking that data for new insights because it might be wrong (even stuff as basic as gravity). And if you’re wrong, you’re wrong – it doesn’t matter how expert you are, so an expert in science will always show the data to explain the mechanics of their ‘truth’, not just rely on their opinion. Data first. Everything up for challenge. Science can be done by brewers, school-kids and patent clerks.
But experts in the arts are effectively a clerical class, preaching a mutually agreed interpretation of ‘the story’ with minor variations as schools of thought. Heretics must be overcome as they threaten the status quo, and established hierarchies and career paths. If you fall to the temptation of counter-interpretations or alternate viewpoints without higher expert guidance, you will be shunned and expelled. Preach and support the liturgy as you have been shown and glory will be yours. The interpretation must be mastered, and other forms must be rejected. Data is not relevant until the experts have told you how to interpret it.
Excellent comment.
By your description Saul, the current medical establishment worldwide is of the the artistic class.
Your point is correct in theory, but as we have seen over the past two years regarding the pandemic (and earlier on other politicized science issues) there has been a conflation of this “accept the collective orthodoxy of designated experts” you ascribe to artistic opinion and the “scientific” opinion. Now, we see that Science (as opposed to lowercase science) is defended without data as if it is an institution and not a process of enquiry. And data is not permitted to be presented that contradicts the collective orthodoxy of designated experts (sometimes designated as misinformation or simply expunged from journals, etc.)
Totally agree. But part of this is because we have people educated in the artistic mode, where expertise sits in a citadel, in charge of policy that relies on a scientific basis, but who are unskilled in how to address legitimate data-based criticism other than in the artistic mode of “Who are you to criticise an expert?”
That’s how things ought to be, yes, but it’s not how they actually are. Climate science, COVID responses, social psychology, much medical research, and anthropology are are so riddled with leftism that they have ceased to function as sciences, and are simply savage and repressive religions obsessed with gaslighting, spreading lies and denying obvious truths.
Broadly I agree with your observation but in fact much that should fall within the scientific category in fact is dominated by artistic thinkers in the sense that there is a canon of scientific truth that goes unquestioned among them. When the true scientific researchers (who are normally a minority among the profession in question) raise doubts about the conventional canon of knowledge they are often fiercely resisted by those clinging to the orthodox explanations.
Semmelweis’s work took years to be accepted and, for example, Freedburg was discouraged from researching bacteria as a cause of ulcers in 1940 and Barry Marshal and Robin Warren first successful treated a peptic ulcer patent with antibiotics in 1981 but their work was fiercely resisted by those espousing conventionally accepted stress/ acid explanation for ulcers and it was not until 1994 when patents for acid reducing drugs expired, removing financial incentive to resist antibiotics as treatment of stomach ulcers, that a conference held by the National Institute of Health (USA) demonstrated the general acceptance of H. pylori as a cause of stomach ulcers. Fleming’s observations regarding penicillin did not produce practical results until war accelerated the need for antibacterial solutions to reduce deaths of servicemen through infection following war wounds.
Men of science do not automatically proceed scientifically but tend to stick to conventional scientific explanations as long as possible. However, they are, of course, less resistant to the discovery of inconvenient truths than popular social “sciences” where the truth is often less important than the ideological narrative.
One of the things Joe Rogan is attacked on is interviewing Dr. Robert Malone, an mRNA vaccine pioneer researcher, who is not sold on the efficacy and safety of the current vaccines. This is a scientific dispute, but The Science (TM) has already been decided. The Science (TM) says Dr. Malone is wrong, and must be censored.
On man-made global warming, The Science (TM) is also settled, even though the original data is famously missing. The original data for Mann’s Hockey Stick graph was “lost,” and never produced. Only the “adjusted” data is available. That sounds like what we used to do as high school student when our experiments turned out wrong.
Hmm….as a scientist and one-time expert, I would say things are not so simple – science has become heavily politicised. It was scientists who asserted from minimal genomic evidence that the Wuhan virus could not have come from a virology lab. That was published in the top science journal Nature. Much later, more data, and the narrative has shifted to ‘maybe it did’ (i think the evidence is more conclusive that it did). In my current field of ‘climate’, the UN special panel holds the authority worldwide, and all science academies kowtow. Go back to 2001 and a former president of the US National Academy of Sciences opined publicly that the UN system of peer review on climate was the worst he had seen – but when the US eventually signed the UN protocols, the academies toed the line; likewise in the Russian Academy, where the vice-chair of the UN’s panel, in that same year. could said openly: ‘ In Russia we all think climate change is over-hyped and that natural cycles dominate’. Then Putin signed up for carbon credits and that professor got a fat contract to chem-trail barium sulphate to see if it could cool the planet. At the Chinese Academy, as late as 2013, papers abounded on the long-term cycles that can account for the current warm peak – not anymore.
Covid, climate, 5G….all new issues with vast investment funds at stake. Way back when I was more active, there was one lone expert epidemiologist who could see from the data that children of x-rayed mothers had a higher incidence of leaukaemia – it took 15 years to shift that paradigm. Science does not publicise its errors and particularly not at the UN, which has an appalling record – having licensed CFCs years before banning them, likewise PCBs, X-raying the pregnant women, acid rain and dumping nuclear waste in the ocean. The problem lies not just with interpretation of data, but with lines of authority, group think and vested interest.
The internet is creating a change that is equivalent to the Lutherian or Tyndale revolution. Mass printing of the Bible in the common language enabled lay people to challenge the interpretation of the expert clerics.
The equivalent here is that the internet has given lay people widespread accessibility to data that previously was only available in libraries and privileged places, or simply not available, and the ability to cross-check that data, and publish counter-results quickly.
So instead of accepting an expert view on according to who said it, people ask to see the data and the logic – to cross-check and validate. We’re at a chaotic stage at the moment, full of false theories, deadends and mis-understandings, but as it settles and data-literacy becomes more widespread, the effect will be a massive change in how we deal with expertise, just as profound as the change that eventually lead to the Enlightenment.
I just hope this time that it comes without the wars of religion that saw the establishment fighting the protesting anti-establishment, or the flights to sanctuary required for disbelievers to escape persecution by the believers.
Very interesting to read the Swedish experience.
In Ireland we are here:
“From 2015 to 2018, the entire Swedish expert class closed ranks, mobilised every single institution they controlled, and joined with the state in an attempt to combat “misinformation” and prevent wrongthink on the topic of immigration.”
We celebrate the “diverse” names of men who attack, abuse and rape Irish women while Irish middle class muddle headed low T liberals write newspaper columns confessing their “toxic masculinity”. It’s all going to be interesting in a few years. All the dull witted middle aged fools holding signs like ” no human is illegal” at pro government protests are going to get quite a rude awakening.
Interesting Annmarie. Ireland of course, rushed headlong & brought in poorly thought out legislation of gender identity, only to find that predatory men, convicted of crimes, identified as women so they were sent to a female prison. Several attacks on women in prisons followed & there was little they could do about. Nowhere is the narrative more contested now, than the issue of gender identity.
Yes. And our professional feminist class with PHDs in gender studies or some other nonsense boast about how we have the most progressive gender identity legislation in the world, while throwing female prisoners to the mercy of convicted male sex offenders. These people disgust me. They will reap what they sow.
My heart bleeds for what is left of Ireland; a country I once loved (and really still do), and whose past history inspired such pure and wonderful poetry. When I see these woke-sters sell out to Big Tech and Big Pharma and the illiberal narratives that underpin the whole system of corporate capitalism, I shed a tear for that forgotten place of my romantic youth. Those dingy inner city pubs where sessions came alive and fights broke out. That old sailor in a Westmeath cottage who served me sausages and stale scones from his filthy frying pan, with fingers stained yellow from a half century of unfiltered cigarettes. Poor in all worldly things, but who could recite poetry with stunning ease:
“What need they, being come to sense,
But fumble in the greasy till,
And add the halfpence to the pence…”
He is dead and gone, with O’Leary in the grave.
I cry for my country every day.
Do you have links to these cases? I find it handy to use these when getting into comment discussions with people who deny its taking place. (There has only been a couple of cases in the U.K. which limits the argument, so more evidence is useful.)
Barbie Kardashian. Actually this case is very sad as she/he was subjected to the most disgusting abuse by her/his father
https://gript.ie/photo-barbie-kardashian-irelands-homicidal-girl/
Still though, s/he shouldn’t be anywhere near a women’s prison.
Are you sure they will? This strikes me as as one of those assumptions we take comfort in, like all bullies are cowards. In fact, all the bullies I’ve met have been bullies because they were aggressive, confident and fearless. If you stood up to them, you simply got beaten up. The idea that bullies are cowards and you’ll win if you face them down is a comforting lie.
In the same way that rich luvvies who aren’t on PAYE don’t pay many of the taxes that they they think should be raised, I’m not at all sure the identity politics class loses out by what they campaign for at all. They get a feeling of virtue and of sticking it to people they hate, and it is others – women getting raped in women’s prison by men – who face the consequences.
Unfortunately they are unlikely to reap what they sow as they are unlikely to be imprisoned as beneficiaries of middle class female privilege
I was speaking in a general sense. These people don’t realise they benefitted from the past functioning society The cracks appearing now, as a result of progressivism, will open like chasms in the coming years in my view anyway.
Here is an idea. Maybe the “experts” have to show they are right once in a while. If you are wrong constantly, what right do you have to call yourself an expert and what authority do you have to make people listen to you?
Indeed a good idea, but to defeat them, you have to move the conversation to one based on actual data.
They will never engage on this basis as they know it would be the end for them.
eg – getting SAGE to publish probability %s with their scenarios.
.
Some realised this and ensured they control the data too.
“I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”
You only get to be recognised as peer-reviewed in climate psyence if you agree with the existing groupthink. You can no more get a dissenting opinion published than you could get a gospel added to the New Testament suggesting that Christ was not resurrected, and for the same reasons.
‘Data’ is now wildly over-stated as a guiding light, as can be seen by the last two years of complete insanity. Normal people suddenly endlessly fretting over graphs, Case Numbers and R.
Ethics, constitution, liberty, economy, and a host of other factors need centring back at the table. Data must again become a single piece of consideration, not the single driving force.
In public sector roles, the answer is that (of course) you start by taking control of the definitions, starting with ‘right’.
Prof Pantsdown Lockdown Ferguson come to mind.
This problem is not a new one. Clem Atlee back in the 1940’s observed ‘A lot of clever people have got everything except judgement’.
Good article Malcolm. The “experts” versus the people is definitely the story of the last decade in the UK too. And I think we have demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that fightbacks are possible.
I was thinking yesterday how much of our recent history has been driven by a couple of dozen backbench Tory MPs: Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless defecting to UKIP forced the EU referendum, the Spartans at the ERG blocked May’s sell-out deal and hastened the election, Steve Baker and the Covid Recovery Group cajoled a reluctant cabinet into not locking down and then swiftly dropping all restrictions.
I think the lesson is that it is not enough to have a majority conservative government. You need a tough, committed internal faction within the party – willing to suffer the slings and arrows – to actually combat the Expert Class.
Maybe we need an Immigration Research Group next to stop these dinghies.
Yep, class war. There are the Elite and Commoners, and the Elite use the tools available to keep the Commoners in their place. This includes a protective moat within the Commoner class previously known as the Bourgeoisie, the Middle Class, or the Professional classes.
The Middle class are keen to maintain their differentials over the Lower Class so do the work of defending the differentials of the Elite. Think of the Butler or the Housekeeper keeping the grooms and maids in line, in service to the aristocratic Family.
…and the latest twist is to recruit members of the Middle Class most likely to create a protective moat for the Elite in today’s technological world – the Experts. The Experts are given the blessing of the Elite for them to carry out their protective role, but this depends, as mentioned in the article, on the Expert opinions not being challenged.
The author is right to frame the culture war as class conflict. The key is to recognise that all the issues are subordinated to the primary cause of maintaining the status of the expert (formerly middle) class. Whether it’s environmentalism, racism, feminism etc., the cause is first and foremost a proxy for the primary cause. We’ve all been naive, both ‘sides’ for a decade or more about this. Even many on the so-called ‘left’, who support the sub-causes with a degree of genuineness, are realising their delusions and are now accepting this reality. Others are digging more trenches. But the battle lines can only be clearly seen in terms of class conflict.
The conflict has existed for at least a century and a half but now it’s being heated by the growth of a global middle class in developing nations and the reduction in the Western middle class. Competition for space on the ladder’s higher rungs is the cause of wokism and leftist hypocrisy. The other ’causes’ are merely conflagration points, like a married couple that hate each other arguing over the top being left off the toothpaste, when in reality their entire marriage needs an overhaul or a divorce.
MeAgain Markle complained about racism with Heragain’s Royal family but that would seem to be a class conflict…?
Jonathan, why do you use the phrase class conflict? Most of the woke brigade are just one generation from working class, but having been credentialled and found a prosperous niche in the universities/public sector/cultural institutions, they have very little to say about the economic institutions that perpetuate class/wealth differences. They aren’t going to the barricades over the advantages conferred by private schooling, for example.
In a way, I’m not surprised by their ferocity in cancelling views that aren’t theirs. Does anyone remember the conformity of the 1950s and how each social group policed its own norms? You probably still find it within the churches, trades unions etc – power games played fairly ruthlessly.
I remember Camille Paglia regretting that history wasn’t taught in a chronological way anymore. I think that’s something to do with the fact that the woke warriors are dancing on the surface of the achievements of the last 300 years without really understanding the roots of those achievements, and how they need to be nurtured. They really haven’t been taught the history and value of open enquiry or respect for the dignity of others. Wide reading and travel can do wonders here; I was lucky – while at university (young & impressionable) I borrowed some money and went on a ‘grand tour’ from third world cities in Asia to Paris and London. In itself eye-opening, but also a great stimulus to read and read, and travel further. What the young are offered as education these days seems to be a narrowing rather then enlarging experience. It seems to make them very angry about very niche issues. What a waste in such a fabulous, fascinating world.
“What the young are offered as education these days seems to be a narrowing . . .etc”
I think it’s brainwashing in fact. Post-modernism, Marxism and feminism twist history and literature out of shape, leaving the majority of pupils and students with a false and distorted understanding of the past.
I agree with you more or less otherwise.
Yes, it is brainwashing. Our education systems deliberately fail to perform their central mission of transmitting past knowledge thus leaving the new generation with no defences or protection against this degenerate lunacy.
I agree with most of what you say. But I think it’s a question of how we define the classes. Clearly the old model is no longer fit for purpose. Over the last 80 years or so, the Western ‘middle class’ has grown and then, more recently, shrunk. So, while I’m not sure how many generations the woke brigade are from working class, what they are competing for so aggressively is middle class status, the problem of defining middle class notwithstanding.
“the problem of defining middle class notwithstanding”.
Apparently about 7% of our children are Privately educated. Combine that with their parents who have made the supreme sacrifice of funding such a privilege (without any form of tax relief) and we arrive at perhaps 21% of the population.Thus the Middle or Patrician class.
Stratification has always been a thing (think aristocracy and Charles Murray’s Coming Apart. Yes, I know, he’s long-cancelled and very un-woke), what has never been a thing though is the internet – and the internet allows people to create media by the people for the people, to connect with each other and speak their mind without censure, pointing out weak spots in our current policies and endangering the status quo. We laugh at flat earthers, don’t we? I’m sure they existed before, but they just didn’t have means to band together into facebook groups. When we see a process that is objectively happening, there must be an objective reason. From the top of my head, if there are flat earthers (indisputable) then we need to address the quality of education and mental health services.
The elites pretend to hold very different views on things depending on their political persuasion but their different views boil down to the same thing – it’s always best PR for least amount of money and effort. The democrats in the US could have (rightly so) pointed out that equality cannot be achieved unless everyone has the same starting ground – so clearly nurseries/daycares/kindergartens and schools have to be federally funded and held to a very high universal standard. And once all the kids (disadvantaged or not) have the same level of care and education and nutrition, only then can we say that we did all we could for equality in all layers of society and in 30-40 years the benefits of this investment will become evident. Instead democrats propose to give a small amount of scholarships to disadvantaged students from certain backgrounds. Now people from these certain backgrounds will be in a contest for who is more disadvantaged and deserves this place more (more stratification and nurturing victim mentality). With very little investment they get immediate return and they get to cherry pick a few token people that would look good in a news article “look how the democrats got this terribly horribly disasterously disadvantaged person into college – for free!”, did they actually fix the underlying issue or is this a very cynical Return on Investment scheme? The elites have been separating people into different strata for ages because it’s easier to navigate and there can be no unity, in the US they’re very happy to have a two party system, where they can be fake enemies for show and in reality just keep cosy incomes and jobs and continue to not address any fundamental issues. The internet changes things, now they need to scream louder and be more and more clickbait-ey to keep their jobs and incomes. I’m guessing what they’re thinking is “If we focus all of our nation’s attention on gender dysmorphia/immigration/racism/harrassment/fatshaming or some other heated subject, we won’t have to address the pricing of insulin and other medications that has soared 3000% in the last 20 years. In 4 years we’re out of the office and doing lucrative consultancy work for the rest of our lives. GOTTA HOLD ON”. They bring in PhDs in newly emerged sciences and cite “expert opinions”, they know their job, they’re good at spin but unfortunately that’s all they’re good at.
Joe Rogan talks to people who wouldn’t be invited to a TV show and goes in depth on their opinions on things and shockingly millions of people from all sides of the political spectrum want to listen. They listen to 3-4 hour long podcasts out of their own free will, the same people won’t listen to their president for a hour, that should tell you why the elites are scared of Joe Rogan.
True that.
In the U.S. it started with talk radio’s challenge to the oligarchy of the established newspapers in the 1980’s. For the first time ever, I heard a different message when I first discovered Rush Limbaugh, and it was startling to hear someone in the media who shared my world view.
Brilliant last paragraph !
From the beginning, the public were thought to be unable to think for themselves. Given the facts, the vulnerable and frail elderly would have protected themselves with isolation and mask wearing.
Lockdown for everyone has blighted the lives of our youngsters, our economy and future prosperity..
We can only hope that it never happens again.
We shouldn’t bow down to it if they try to impose anything like it again. The latest research says that it only saved 0.2% of lives and has damaged millions in denying cancer treatment and ignoring heart attacks and strokes plus many other conditions. Damage to children has been criminal!
The experts may be losing but they retain an iron grip and will for our lifetimes. Soviet Communism was an immediate failure yet it lasted 70 years.
Joe Rogan interviewed Dr Robert Malone, an expert on vaccines and one of the developers of mRNA technology. That doesn’t make him right but he’s definitely qualified to speak on the technical aspects of the subject, as well as the wider issues, those logical and moral ones that we are all qualified to speak on if we want to.
See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FU5oNx4ZzoM&t=2s for an unedited and not yet censored view on the Pfizer vaccine controversy.
I wish you would use quotation marks around the word expert. I’ve worked with experts, real ones, and most of the people who gift themselves with that elevated status don’t actually qualify.
It’s a besetting sin of columnists, and the media in general, that they liberally use words like ‘experts’, ‘scientists’, ‘technocrats’ etc, (though without the inverted commas) implying that it’s all of them, and that they know what they mean by the word but the reader doesn’t need to.
Same. My work with EU officials put me off the entire EU project.
Forgive me for quoting, because I have used this quote before and have been called a fool for using quotes by some on this platform, but sometimes a quote just sums things up in a few lines…
“nothing would be more fatal than for the Government of States to get in the hands of experts. Expert knowledge is limited knowledge, and the unlimited ignorance of the plain man who knows where it hurts is a safer guide than any rigorous direction of a specialized character.”
― Winston Churchill
“Experts should be on tap but never on top.”*
WSC, but ‘borrowed’ from George William Russell, Dublin circa 1910.)
I am proud to say that I am a scientist. My biggest achievement was that I attended a special conference with the US Navy to persuade them to use a newish technique to protect the decks of the aircraft carriers. I failed.
I was distraught because I knew that my system was the best but the admirals chose something else. This feeling of failure stayed with me for about 3 months but then I began to realise that everything was more complicated than I thought. There were just too many variables to take into account. Now, today, I think they made the correct decision.
If you get a team of scientists together they will never agree on an answer. There will spend their time coming up with a compromise which suits no-one. Things are just too complicated today to have an answer unless you have years of observations.
Take smoking. Back in 1970 my father, a great smoker, died of lung cancer. This was the time when years of research was taking us to the conclusion that smoking as bad for you. But today there are still many smokers. Why is that?
I said this on a post a year ago and someone came back with an answer that he would carry on smoking for ever because it was his right to do so as an individual. This is a very selfish answer. But it does ask a good question: what right does the state have to tell people what to do, even if what they do takes up the resources of the state? Nobody will be able to answer this question.
Darwinian self selection should be encouraged at every available opportunity. Only idiots think or wish to live for 10,000 years.
Has everyone forgotten those fabulous words “The Gods conceal from men the happiness of death, that they may endure life”?
The state is, in theory, the representative of the community. We’re social beings and live to some extent dependent on the state/community. We agree to give up some of our personal wealth, and autonomy, for things that benefit the community. The state is the apparatus to which we delegate the right to decide the priorities. Illnesses caused by smoking use up health resources, yet smoking was promoted (to the tune of billions $$) by companies which profited from selling cigarettes. I think it was legitimate for the state/community to increase taxes on cigarettes, ban their display and advertising etc. in the same way that the state uses public health laws so that we can expect to be served clean, unadulterated food in cafes. That’s telling food producers and cafe owners what they have to do, but isn’t that better than the alternative?
I agree with you in theory. In fact though, the state, through its bureaucracy, is an interest group pursuing its own best interest. The recently released email from Francis Collins to Tony Fauci telling Tony to take down the Great Barrington Declaration authors confirms this in no uncertain terms.
The continuation of lockdown or “lockdown-lite” decrees in much of the US demonstrates that this tendancy is not limited to government “scientists”.
What a good article.
This.
Is.
The.
Best.
Article.
Ever.
Written.
On.
Unherd.
But is it ‘The Elites’ that are The Problem? Seems to me it’s a small cabal of right-on social-engineers at the centre making all the noise, repeated, amplified by legions of gullible, lazy or cowed politicians, media, education, business managers etc.
It is clear to me that this cabal actively ignores expert opinion (even at the settled science level). EG: at first glance, you could be forgiven for thinking that the phenomenon of trigger warnings, cancel culture etc (with its emphasis on trauma, emotions, wellbeing) was generally supported by psychology/ists – but it is nearer the opposite.
The Elites are the ones that shape shift reality to suit their needs. The rest either go along, fight or seek justice. We got to use people like Freddy as models and collectively strategize how we go about building a more democratic platform of reality
Unfortunately in Canada that is why the Trudeau government tried and is trying again to pass legislation allowing unprecedented powers of regulation over the internet. I am sure the humiliation he is experiencing at the hands of the trucker convoy and its supporters with their ‘fringe views’ (in expert opinion) will make this an even higher priority. Their goal would be to block Joe Rogan outright. The legislation gives them powers to order ISP’s to block websites.
Top notch analysis. The Swedish experience was news to me! I’ve long thought that ‘professional’ classes everywhere had been taken over or ‘mind snatched’ by bad memes. They have been “dancing on the surface of the achievements of the last 300 years” as one of your correspondents so elegantly put it. As their stock-in-trade is opinions and reports, brute reality doesn’t carry much weight – and it’s so inconvenient, too.
The status quo typically wins here, because ‘what goes around comes around’, the pendulum swings, action and reaction – as the writer describes above.
So we may get annoyed and frustrated on Unherd, desperately trying to find ways of pushing the pendulum back (as I sometimes do), but ultimately it will swing back regardless.
The best example of this is Project Fear and the Brexit vote. Sometimes it will result in extremes – such as Trump at his worst – but it’ll still swing back (though too far with Biden). There will be casualties, such as cancelled feminists, wrongly transitioned gays, etc etc. And maybe that’s where we can help by contributing to defence funds etc. Even puritan England restored the monarchy, then chucked it out again for a Protestant monarch.
The exception to this is when a revolution really hits the spot – like the Russian revolution. That pendulum has taken a frickin’ long time to swing back, with casualties in the tens of millions.
Great piece! In the US “The Experts” are losing as evidenced by the anecdotes described above. As private media companies try to censor information new sources like Duckduckgo, Rumble, Parlor spring up to provide an outlet to the forbidden.
Going forward the epistemological problem will require all of us to determine our own personal truthfulness rating for sources and authors.
Substack is potentially a game changer. Find trustworthy authors there and follow their work. I started my own Pure Science substack a few months and just posted a new article related to Dr. Malone’s Ivermectin claims on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast:
https://purescience.substack.com/p/how-many-covid-deaths-would-ivermectin-have-saved
Thank for your great piece. It is interesting that no well designed, adequately powered and well conducted trials were required for the use of the mRNA vaccines or the recent raft of anti-virals to treat “COVID”.
I think it is very easy, anyone who is afraid of a debate or public discussion, is a fraud. Simply lying. Hiding incompetence. Intolerance comes from insecurity. It never comes from being really on the right side. It comes from lying, being dishonest, being corrupt and being afraid to get exposed. We should not believe what these frauds call themselves, we should see what they do. They have inflicted colossal disasters on our societies, communities and souls, plus of course, nearly 6 million deaths and more millions of deaths from untreated diseases. This is what they did. Virus did not do it.
In the US, the reality is no longer matching what the “experts” say either. The inflation isn’t temporary. Green policies aren’t free. The prices of gasoline and natural gas are rising rapidly. Grocery prices are going up, and shelves are often empty because of the supply chain mess. High unemployment payments and vaccine mandates are causing labor shortages. Trust in mainstream media is at record lows, according to polls.
Biden has allowed about 2 million illegal immigrants into the country without Covid-19 screening. He’s bussed or flown them to all parts of the country. Over 50% of likely voters think Biden should be impeached for not enforcing immigration law, according to a recent poll.
Democrats look like they will be swamped in the mid-term elections. Since Biden is unlikely to reverse any of the policies causing the problems, there’s no way for Democrats to recover.
We know that when Democrats win, elections have consequences. However, when Republicans win, we know Democrats control the bureaucacy and they’re willing to use false information and the courts to harrass Republicans in office. We’ll have to do the experiment to see if Republicans will have the guts to fight back against the entrenched bureacracy. Frankly, Trump wasn’t that successfu at it.
I’m a minor expert, but I most certainly am not a member of the ‘expert class’. The overriding characteristic of this class is belief in their own rightness. (I use the word ‘belief’ deliberately; it is a matter of self-trust, not objective analysis of robust evidence, that confirms their own rightness.) In truth, the experts often ARE right within their own area of expertise and the parameters of good research practices.
The problem lies not in their expertise, but in the attempts to apply it to other fields , such as that of democratic policy making. Even those considered (and fairly so) experts in public policy often fall down because they fail to see or accept that lesser mortals have an equal share in the democratic process.
I have family and close friends who belong to the expert class. They are all good people, with high motives, and fully deserving of the greatest respect. However, the work and social bubbles in which they live, be they academia, professions or politics, are not conducive to engendering either respect or understanding of the less-well-educated. In fact, I think the expert class is every bit as patronising (in the worst sense) toward lower mortals as they often accuse the attitudes of the unwoke towards ‘minorities’.
(A final thought: are those who fail to be ‘woke’ called ‘slept’?)
Experts are individuals who know everything about a specialized subject and progressively they know everything about nothing.
“Rather, calls to increase censorship come not from the state but from below, with the educated, urban middle classes often organising on their own”
Excellent article overall, and good point but requires some further consideration. Let’s look at the Neil Young case threatening to withdraw his music from Spotify if the do not censor Joe Rogan.
Well, Neil Young does not own his music, he sold 50% stake in his to investment company Hipgnosis for an estimated $150 million.
Hipgnosis just secured very large investment from Blackstone, which is special purpose company launched by Blackrock. The CEO of Pfizer in on the board of directors of Blackrock. Joe Rogan is interviewing people who make reasonable arguments about pros and cons of massive vaccination program.
In short, those credentialed, NOT educated, urban middle classes are really useful idiots serving the most predatory form of capitalism that ever existed. And Neil Young is just a clueless pawn.
Populism is a word the expert class uses to describe the underclass whose being nauseates them worse than face planting in a deep, warm pile of dog shit..
A very good piece – thank you.
Your article is somewhat confusing. You start out with the premise that the totalitarianism we face today is not top down, but from far down the food chain. Then, about half way down, you switch gears to, “…for most members of our “expert class”, managing the “discourse” is exactly what they are trained to do.”
Totalitarianism has always been from the top down. What you hinted at was actually the truth of the matter, those at the top trying to enforce totalitarian control are at the top by force of arms, employing whatever means necessary to keep their subjects down. In government, they employ punishment, from fines and taxes (robbery) to confinement and other torture, to death. In religion, they employ guilt and shunning to physical or eternal death. In education, they employ shaming and withholding honors to denying entrance to chosen professions or kicking their detractors out of their profession. And on and on.
Underlings have few and pitifully weak ways to resist totalitarianism, short of armed rebellion (which must be directed by commanders.) Gandhi and MLK sought unarmed resistance, but were only successful by stint of their mammoth personalities. Socialist power has great strength but no direction except when employed by a dictator. The ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ has always manifested itself in one person at a time.
The Covid stupidity, as well as gender and other identity politics, are without question totalitarian–with multiple underlings employing themselves willingly, even eagerly, to aiding their own dictators.
“Expert class” is the wrong name — Kyeyune admits as much with his example of the 270 non-experts whom he holds up as an example of what he is complaining about. And the subtitle (admittedly possibly written by someone else — does UnHerd do that as so many publications do? Have headline writers?) suggests as much: the point of expertise is having an uncommonly accurate grasp of some aspect of reality. If it’s fantasy, there’s no expertise involved (unless the domain of expertise a grasp of what unreal narratives human beings find attractive and compelling).
Orwell said various relevant comments
Progresivism, like all Big State utopian projects, is anti-reality and therefore doomed to both tyranny and self-destruction.
The holier-than-though Progressive sociopaths who have enacted all of this will of course never take responsibility nor face justice.
The holier-than-thou Progressive useful idiots who have supported all of this, shouting down all dissenters with the usual -ists and -isms, will never engage in self-reflection as to their role in the collapse.
The normie masses will as always bear the full brunt of the failed rush to utopia.
‘They say’ that Covid does not exist and that is part of a government plot to control people.
‘They say’ that Boris Johnson is related to Donald Trump because they both have the same silly hair.
‘They say’ that global warming has never existed and that’s why they renamed it Climate Change.
‘They say’ a spoonful a day of horse dewormer protects you from Covid.
‘They say’ that all elections are fixed.
Experts everywhere deny these things but there must be something in it, mustn’t there? There’s no smoke without fire.
I am not sure that the Unherd instinct can handle sarcasm
Thank you for your comment.
.
One listens to NPR (supposedly an impartial news program) stating that Trump again makes the false claim the election was stolen. Our brains are flexible enough to disagree with both absolutes, that the election was stolen and that the claim is false. The result of irrational absolutes is that one tends not to credit the people who purvey them. That in turn leads one to question authority. It’s not just Trump, or illegal immigrants, or racial murders, or covid and vaccines; we are learning that truth hides in the interstices of declamatory factoids. The Apple iPhone is the subversive agent that experts cannot vanquish
Precisely, sir!
One slim line of Wisdom i keep coming back to through my highs and lows in swimming ‘alone’ through these turgid times, is remembering energy – not only intellectual ‘power’ often manifesting like a “hammer” but intelligence which is toned by something deeply fluent, feeling ‘friendly, elegant in its perspicacity, nuanced and capable of stimulating awareness of a Consciousness of the first order available to those who dare to see.
It is tautological to rely on ‘mankind’ efforts alone for ‘safety’ but Humanity is something else. I am reminded of how big-time religion once mandated things; then reformations birthed kicking and screaming of course but revelation and relief became more widely intuited and apprehended naturally by more and more of us.
An Australian female/lady elder!
You misquoted Warren Buffet. The full quote was “Yes there’s class warfare alright, but it’s my class, the rich class that’s making war and we’re winning but we shouldn’t be“. Warren Buffet has always said the US should require the very rich to pay more in taxes.
Splendid article. Full of insight.
People form classes in a manner similar to that in which any evolutionary process continually alters its form in response to a changing world. The mutants are the ones who drive evolutionary change. It is the eccentrics, the mad, the fools, and all the unnoticed ones whom we need. Our social hierarchies wobble and we fear they might collapse. Yet, they must wobble, or they will be shattered. A little wobble in our societal algorithms would help all of us. It’s too stiff and rigid, like a shoe that just doesn’t fit. Order won’t melt away into Chaos if we soften our approach, and lighten our grip. It’s a living thing, this human culture. The individuals within it are nerves and sinew, bone and guts. Our collective psyche is bruised and shaken, but I don’t believe anything’s broken. Let’s have a bit of charity and a prescription for forgiveness, and some new-found understanding for the eccentrics, the mad, the fools, and all the unnoticed ones whom it turns out we need very much.
“It’s a bizarre situation: a call to censorship justified by the incapability of non-experts to handle a subject like vaccine research is then inundated with people who by the same metric should themselves be disqualified from having an opinion”.
This is just a blatant straw man. The call to censorship was justified, not by Rogan being a non-expert, but by him spreading misinformation.
Well I am an American, liberal arts major who spent most of his adult life banging nails as a carpenter, in order to feed our family of five. Fortunately, my wife, originally a psychology major, turned to Nursing after our youngest started middle school. She, by the way, points out that most people who are tubed-up in the covid unit are unvaccinated. ‘nuf said there.
In spite of my humble adulthood as a laboring stiff, I did manage to write four historical-fiction novels on the tail end my nail-banging long phase.
I have never spent one minute listening to Joe Rogan, nor do I intend to. Nor do I ever intend to express sympathy for the seditionists who stormed our Capitol in the name of an imposter president.
I would side with WaPo any day of the week over Buffett and yet I would’nt know a Soros-supported entity even if it stared me down in a university lecture venue.
I will do whatever it takes to prevent these latter-day brown-shirts and black-shirts who are crawling out of our deplorable American outback. . . to prevent them from usurping this nation’s .gov for their own might-makes-right fourth reich or whatever the hell their demented leader has in mind.
America’s 2022 will not allow Germany’s 1933 to become our foreshadowing of governance by brute force.
Joe who? Where’s George Will when we need him?
I live among the ‘deplorables’. None that I know of want to take over the government; many merely just want to be left alone to get on with their lives. If they do have concerns, it’s about how the current government seems to be acting like an occupying force by changing language and sneering at their way of life, while at the same time accusing them of undeserved privilege. Most of them are also aware how politicians and the media have divided the working classes up against each other, but don’t possess the ‘clever’ academic language to challenge it. Instead they are smeared with the ‘bigot’ brush by those who should know better.
“latter-day brown-shirts and black-shirts who are crawling out of our deplorable American outback”
Sounds terrible! Is that really happening, is that what you’re seeing?.
I rather think, unless I have mistaken your meaning, you will be more likely to find the brown and black shirts are presently being worn by those who have been convinced by government that there is an underclass about to revolt, which I can reassure you from the viewpoint of most in my “class” is exceedingly unlikely. The mantra is generally “get out of my life, and leave me to run it” which is probably a sentiment you would embrace.
The shirts appear to have accepted the story that the vaccine hesitant (justifiably so in view of the statistics which show quite clearly that the level of side effects exceeds that of previous vaccines) are dangerously unhealthy and in many instances should be excluded from society. Sounds rather similar to events which kicked off in Europe around the middle of the 20th century to me.
Your wife may find most of those she is treating in her area are indeed unvaccinated, but the statistics, again, show that the vaccinated occupants of many ICU beds in Britain are as numerous as the unvaccinated. I seem to recall reading that Israel have a similar problem, and so apparently have Australia. To prevent confusion, I am double jabbed, declined a booster as I had an unpleasant side effect which took seven months to resolve, and having survived Covid in 2020 will take whatever comes. I promise to expire quietly at home in the event of emergencies. Wouldn’t want ICU departments in any country overwhelmed.
https://dailysceptic.org/2021/12/11/majority-of-covid-icu-patients-in-october-and-november-were-vaccinated/
https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/real-covid-numbers-from-australias/