expertise in action

Diarmaid MacCulloch:

The particular appeal of Orthodoxy for a certain sort of young man comes from the fragility of so much of young American masculinity: disoriented by assertions of female equality and the new self-confidence of many people in their variations on gender and sexual identity.

I have two questions. First, why ask Diarmaid MacCulloch this question? He’s an English historian of Christianity, primarily of the Reformation, with almost no discernible knowledge of contemporary American religion. (Recent American Christianity gets about two paragraphs — which is approximately the right amount — in MacCullouch’s excellent A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. And even those paragraphs are really about politics.)

Second, why does MacCulloch offer so confident (and sneeringly dismissive) an answer, when he should have said, “I don’t know, you should ask someone who has studied the matter”? Instead, he’s just doing what most people do when faced with the Repugnant Cultural Other: claiming to be able to read their minds and reporting that your telepathic scrutiny has revealed fear and loathing. (This is what the Freudians call “projection.”)

My suggestion is this: if you want to know why groups of people are acting in a particular way, the first step is always to ask them. In this case, that’s what Ruth Graham of the New York Times did. You don’t stop there, but you start there. And then you move on to get the views of people who have indeed studied the matter.

The tag at the bottom of this post will lead you to posts I’ve written over the years about why the very idea of expertise has fallen into such disrepute, and one of the chief reasons is that people who have expertise in one area think themselves thereby qualified to speak authoritatively on many other matters — often unrelated. McCullough is at least remaining in some very broad sense within his own discipline, something that cannot be said about the custodians of the ridiculous Doomsday Clock, i.e., people who think that expertise in physics qualifies them to make predictions about international politics.

Our social order needs to have some trust — not blind trust, never blind trust, but reasonable trust — in expertise, but that will never happen as long as experts’ arrogance leads them to pontificate on matters about which they are ignorant. That makes people doubt their actual expertise.