“And for what purpose? Why are we encouraging the spread
of this lunacy? I mean we here, in North America. I don't mean […] the richest
people in the world battening on the poorest. That's just greed, which is a
comparatively clean kind of vice. I'm talking about perversion, horrible,
disgusting, systematic, deliberate perversion of the power of reason to destroy
people without killing them, to strip them of their initiative, their joy in
life, their hope, […], their last ultimate irreducible human resource, hope.
Out of sheer desperation millions of people are abandoning the use of reason,
bankrupting themselves to buy [new age junk], in a last puerile attempt to
outdo the bastards who've made "reason" a dirty word.
“They've done it, you know—it's the dirtiest word in any
human vocabulary right now. And it's been brought about in my own lifetime, almost
entirely. Cold rational decisions, every step leading to them perfectly
logical, underlay the wars in Asia […] and at every step we lost. Not just the
wars, but bits ourselves. Compassion. Empathy. Love. Pity. We systematically
chopped ourselves down to the measure of a machine.
– Fictional psychologist Xavier Conroy, from John
Brunner’s The Jagged Orbit
I decided to go and read Nichols The Death of Expertise, since he is a prominent never-Trump figure whose
public persona I rather like.
Oh. My. God.
This is a book of excuses by, I
think, an enormously guilty man. Somewhere in the back of his mind he probably knows
that it is conservatism that mounted the huge attack on knowledge and expertise
that began in the last quarter of the 20th century. Somewhere in the
back of his mind he probably knows that this was done to defend the policies
which his political faction supported: the relaxation of financial law, widespread
war, ecological destruction as a way to gain wealth. There’s some good material
here on the genuine disrespect for knowledge and the problem of the value of intellectual
authority when the basics of many subjects are widely and quickly available.
(Anyone who has tried a home repair based on YouTube videos has something to
say about this matter.) I read this just after Lanier’s Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now and
the books have something to say to each other.
But this is an arsonist fighting
the fire he helped feed. The vast amount of distortion that has been introduced
into public discourse and is maintained by huge spending on propaganda is
almost entirely from Nichols’s own political faction. It was “conservative”
experts who rationalized the policies that killed millions through pointless
war. It was “conservative” experts who rationalized the lawless financial and
economic policies that destroyed the savings of the American middle class. And
it is “conservative” experts who are still attacking the knowledge of
scientists to defend the continuing destruction of the earth’s planetary environment.
Congratulations, Dr. Nichols.
Your side won. And now you are surprised and angry that your victory has turned
to ashes? This is a start. I am glad that at least you at least are willing to
acknowledge that it is ashes. But it is time to look back at your intellectual
sources, to, as economist Brad Delong says, mark your beliefs to market.
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