“He doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” I said to the television.
I’d just watched a History Channel exposé on the life of King David. The “expert” theologian made a few comments that were clearly contradicted by scripture, but no matter, the guy was an expert according to the show’s producers, so his narrative was portrayed as fact. Except it wasn’t.
This happens all the time; no doubt you’ve experienced this phenomenon yourself.
Years of focused study will probably educate a person on a particular subject, but the ability to parrot information is a far cry from the discernment necessary to apply that knowledge. Computers can process information but they can’t really think. They can’t look at your conclusions and say, “Bob, this is a load of bleepety bleep. You’re using the data wrong.”
Dissent is treachery in academia, and running afoul of the popular narrative can very quickly get ugly. God help the opposition voice who tries to post a video on YouTube explaining why the experts are wrong.
Many experts believe they hold the keys to unlocking mysteries laymen are unequipped to understand. They spent years in medical school, seminary, Ivy League schools, French bakeries, and so on…and one dare not question them about a subject learned the old fashioned way — by experience or independent study.
These experts might meet those arguments with a dismissive chuckle.
“You do know I am a ______ with a degree in ______ , and a member of the XYZ Association of Condescending Jerks, don’t you? Peasant.”
A mountain of first hand experience, supporting data from additional sources? It doesn’t matter, they’ll discard it because they have a few letters after their name. For some experts, to admit being wrong is worse than actually being wrong.
So where do we look for answers? What decides which decisions or policy prescriptions are grounded reason and not just educated shots in the dark? The answer: first principles.
We can let our response flow from the wisdom we’ve acquired over a lifetime. We can trust our instincts and not freak out over the headlines of the day, the latest trends, or the pseudoscience birthed from incomplete data.
Here are a few of the first principles that guide my reactions:
Don’t panic.
Do no harm.
Is my response consistent with the nature of God?
Does this make sense with what I know to be true?
Perhaps you have others, but I encourage you think about it so the next time someone tells you it’s dangerous to walk on a beach, it’s necessary to wear a mask, it’s okay to kill an unborn child, it’s proper to force isolation on a person suffering from depression, it’s legal to own a slave…you will have a ready response, even if it’s an unpopular one.
Something is ethical if it’s always right, regardless of the circumstances.
I come from the perspective of historians, who are apt to begin with the presupposition that we will need a good 30 years to fully understand anything that’s happening in the present. That said, I’m inclined to agree with the following:
“I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.”
William F. Buckley Jr.
That is age old wisdom. Modified for a modern, reactive audience who skips past video clips if they are more than three minutes long, I might say, “I’d rather be governed by the first 400 customers at Lowe’s than the management of Google, Facebook, and YouTube combined.”
You might add in the CDC, the U.S. Congress, the World Health Organization, and all of the other experts who’ve been upending your life lately. Not all of them claim to be experts, just policy bureaucrats. But like experts, they don’t like to admit they were wrong — or even worse, that a simpleton like you was right.
It’s much easier for them to just delete the YouTube video…for the good of the community, of course.