An example of the modern expert

In this earlier post, I wrote about how modern experts serve the same cultural function that priests once did: As the interface to the mysterious powers that dominate our lives.

There is a timely example of this in the latest issue of The Atlantic. The author even explicitly compares the modern therapist to a priest or a shaman:

And yet at the end of the day—literally during a five o’clock counseling appointment, as the golden late-afternoon sunlight spilled over the wall of Balinese masks—when given the final choice by our longtime family therapist, who stands in as our shaman, mother, or priest, I realized … no. Heart-shattering as this moment was—a gravestone sunk down on two decades of history—I would not be able to replace the romantic memory of my fellow transgressor with the more suitable image of my husband, which is what it would take in modern-therapy terms to knit our family’s domestic construct back together.

Sandra Tsing Loh is talking about her decision to divorce her husband of twenty years. What is interesting is the manner in which Loh describes the situation in terms of abstract concepts and forces that have almost dictated her decision. She has committed adultery, apparently, and according to the therapist the "domestic construct" can survive only if Loh can replace the romantic memory of her lover with that of her husband. Can she do it? Well, she seems not to think so, saying that "I would not be able" to replace it. I wonder.. how does she know? Has she tried? And why does she so uncritically accept the therapeutic assertion that replacing romantic memories is the decisive act in restoring a marriage? Well, because the expert says so, and in the modern world, only experts know things, not ordinary people.

It's the fatalism of the passage that strikes me. The marriage cannot work unless Loh can peform the ritual memory replacement prescribed by the therapist. In the old days, evil spirits might roam the world looking for the ruin of souls, but there was nothing inevitable about their effect. Evil spirits ruin man through tempting him to sin, but through prayer, the sacraments, and the practice of ordinary virtue, temptation could be overcome and evil spirits thwarted. Even if man succumbs to sin - by committing adultery, for example - there was nothing inevitable about the result. Sin triumphs only if man allows it to triumph, which, unfortunately, man sometimes grants. But the inevitability of the triumph of sin, that there is a time when sin decisively undermines our freedom to overcome it and its effects, is something the modern therapist apparently accepts but the old priest would have resisted with every fiber of his being.

One difference between the old priest and the modern expert is that the priest never allowed that the mysterious powers were powerful enough to fully undermine the freedom of man. His main function, in fact, was to administer sacraments that restored man's freedom in the face of the powers that would dominate him. This includes every kind of power; the power of demons to tempt us to sin, or the power of political authorities to corrupt our conscience (see St. Thomas More and King Henry VIII). Now you may dismiss the angels and demons the priest believed in as fantasy - fair enough. But the point is that the priest always thought that man had the wherewhithal to side with angels against the demons, no matter his station or education. The wealthiest king was still as subject to the temptation to sin as much as the poorest peasant, and both had access to the sacraments that would save them both in this world and the next; in this they were perfectly equal. Not so much anymore. Now the poor peasant is the powerless victim of social and economic forces beyond his control, forces that are known only by the experts and those with the money to pay them. Only the woman with money is able to pay for the expert advice that would tell her how to knit her domestic construct together, unless she is lucky enough to get on the Dr. Phil show.

It's not just mysterious psychological forces that dominate us in the modern world, but chemical forces as well. Loh refers to a book that reveals the manner in which our romantic destiny is determined by chemistry (literally):

Why Him, Why Her explains the hormonal forces that trigger humans to be romantically attracted to some people and not to others (a phenomenon also documented in the animal world). Fisher posits that each of us gets dosed in the womb with different levels of hormones that impel us toward one of four basic personality types:

The Explorer—the libidinous, creative adventurer who acts “on the spur of the moment.” Operative neurochemical: dopamine.

The Builder—the much calmer person who has “traditional values.” The Builder also “would rather have loyal friends than interesting friends,” enjoys routines, and places a high priority on taking care of his or her possessions. Operative neurotransmitter: serotonin.

The Director—the “analytical and logical” thinker who enjoys a good argument. The Director wants to discover all the features of his or her new camera or computer. Operative hormone: testosterone.

The Negotiator—the touchy-feely communicator who imagines “both wonderful and horrible things happening” to him- or herself. Operative hormone: estrogen, then oxytocin.

Some of the combinations work and others don't. An Explorer marrying and Explorer, for example, isn't likely to work, but a Builder marrying a Builder will be boring but permanent. Loh's friend Ellen discovers through the book the reason that her marriage never did and never could work:

Exclaims Ellen, slapping the book: “This is why my marriage has been dead for 15 years. I’m an Explorer married to a Builder!” (Ron literally is a builder—like Ian, he crafts wonderful shelves and also, of course, cooks.) But what can Ellen do? Explorer-Explorer tends to be one of the most unstable combinations, whereas Fisher suspects “most of the world’s fifty-year marriages are made by Builders who marry other Builders.”

But what can Ellen do? In the modern world, nothing at all but accept the inevitability of the chemical forces that dominate her life. Dopamine and Serotonin are gods who brook no appeal.

P.S. Don't you just love the way Ellen identified herself as an Explorer? Why, I must be an Explorer, because I'm "creative"and an "adventurer." My boring old husband, however, is just a "Builder", attached to his "traditional values", his loyal but boring friends (friends, you see, are either loyal or interesting, but can't be loyal and interesting), and really is just a selfish boob, because he's mostly worried about taking care of his possessions (i.e. polishing his BMW). Fortunately for Ellen, chemistry dictates that she can do nothing but rid herself of this boat anchor of a guy.

The new priests: Experts

"Man has been forced to vegetate in his primitive stupidity; nothing has been offered to his mind, but stories of invisible powers, upon whom his happiness was supposed to depend. Occupied solely by his fears, and unintelligible reveries, he has always been at the mercy of his priests, who have reserved to themselves the right of thinking for him, and directing his actions."

- Baron d'Holbach, 1772

The Baron's words are just as true today as they were in 1772, but the referents have changed. The "invisible powers" offered to man today are not angels and demons, but obscure material forces. These are the forces that make him contented or depressed, form his character, and direct his life without him knowing it. In place of the priests of old, we have "experts" who dispense therapy and pills to relieve his depression, other experts who construct government education and welfare programs, without which obscure social forces will inevitably turn him into a criminal, and yet other experts who inspect his genetic code like tea leaves and tell him that he is doomed to be a loser anyway. Instead of confession, we have therapy; instead of the sacrament of baptism, we have the sacrament of abortion; instead of Calvinism, we have genetic determinism. Man still vegetates in his primitive stupidity... but I cannot help but think that vegetating in front of American Idol is a little more primitive than vegetating before the Te Deum at High Mass.

Man's happiness depends on invisible powers. Unfortunately, that's just the way it is whether you are an atheist or a Calvinist, or something else altogether. The decisive question is not whether you can get rid of the stories altogether, but which stories you will believe.

Philosophy and Experts

Over at the First Things blog, Steven M. Barr has written a post about science, crackpots and experts. The upshot is that every academic discipline attracts crackpots. This presents a problem for the layman, for how is he to distinguish the genuine expert from the merely apparently expert? Barr puts the question this way:

When is one to trust the experts and when is one to trust one’s own instincts? It may be the central problem of our times.

Barr's answer to the question is that he trusts scientific experts, but rejects experts in the humanities. The sciences generally weed out crackpots because the crackpots can't acquire the necessary technical skills before their lack of judgment becomes apparent. Also, the empirical foundation of the sciences weeds out crackpots, for the test of whether anyone has created a perpetual motion machine or performed cold fusion is whether he can offer a repeatable experiment that supports his claim, an experiment that may be performed by other, skeptical scientists. The humanities, however, are not based on such falsifiable experiments and so it is difficult to distinguish experts from crackpots with respect to them. Barr prefers to "rely more on my own judgment as far as human realities go"; that is, on his "instincts."

What we have here is the tacit modern assumption that the only genuine knowledge available to us is knowledge in the form of the empirical sciences. Beyond that, there isn't really a basis from which to determine the true from the false, the truly expert from the merely crackpot. So on all those "human realities" like the nature of the beautiful or the best way to raise children, we must fall back on our "instincts." This is another form of the modern denial of the possibility of philosophy as it is classically understood. For the Socratic origin of philosophy consists precisely in the question asked by Barr: How does one distinguish the true expert from the false?

Before I discuss the manner in which Socrates answered this question, I would like to point out a few difficulties with Barr's solution. These difficulties will help us to see the depth of the Socratic solution. The difficulties are:

1. Scientists are genuinely expert in their own field and are able to distinguish the true from the false with respect to it. But in what, precisely, is a particular scientific field delimited? The limits of science is not itself a scientific question but rather a philosophical one. So when a scientist like Carl Sagan, for example, declaims not only on planetery astronomy, but also on nuclear warfare, history, environmental and theological issues, how do we know when he is acting as a true expert rather than merely an apparent one? It is possible for a man to be a genuine expert on one topic and a crackpot on another. Since this is a human question, we must (in Barr's opinion) rely on our instincts, so our ability to distinguish the scientific expert from the crackpot ends up being a matter of instinct as well.

2. Barr presumes that his instincts provide a superior way of judging human issues than reliance on experts. But what makes him think this is so? If there is little or no way to distinguish the true expert from the crackpot in the humanities, how does he know that his own human instincts are not crackpot? Obviously they will not seem to him crackpot, but then the academic crackpot's instincts don't seem crackpot to him either.

Let us now examine how Socrates addressed the question of experts. In the Apology, Socrates is told that the oracle at Delphi pronounced that there is none wiser than Socrates. Socrates is surprised at this, for he knows that he possesses no wisdom great or small. He resolves to prove the oracle wrong by finding someone wiser than himself. Among the candidates he interviews in his quest are the craftsmen, the resident experts of his day. And Socrates finds that they are genuinely wise in their chosen profession; but he finds something else as well. Because they are wise in their particular specialty, the craftsmen are led to believe that they are wiser in many other areas as well. Their genuine knowledge is "obscured" by the things they think they know but they do not. Socrates concludes that he is in a better state than the craftsmen: He does not have their particular knowledge, but neither does he falsely think that he knows things when he does not.

How is Socrates able to determine that the experts don't know things that they claim they do? He finds out through the famous Socratic cross-examination. Socrates generally proves two things in his cross-examinations. The first is that the expert's views are not consistent with each other. The second is that the expert's views contradict one or more elements of common experience that both Socrates and the expert accept. The key to the Socratic method is that Socrates questions a person. Abstract knowledge is a fiction. Like flute-playing without a flute-player, there is no knowing without a knower. This holds for scientific knowledge as well as any other kind of knowledge. So when a scientist proclaims knowledge, we are perfectly justified in demanding an account of how he knows what he claims to know. "Scientific consensus" is a cop-out; it only means that he knows because other scientists claim to know. By holding a scientific expert's feet to the fire in this respect, it is generally not difficult to find out what he really knows and what he doesn't. This is the answer to the first difficulty I pointed out in Barr's position.

The second key aspect of the Socratic method is its basis in common experience. "Instincts" are purely individual and subjective. My instincts may differ from yours, which is why crackpots are usually lonely and their views eccentric. There is no community of crackpots, or at least not any that lasts very long before they drink the Kool-Aid. "Common experience" consists of individual reality as it is universalized through rational dialog. The likelihood that Socrates and his partner in dialog will be crackpots in just the same way is small, and becomes smaller as the dialog is continued over time and with a variety of partners. Participants in the dialog constitute a check on the crackpottery of everyone else. This is why Descartes missed the point when he said that every opinion, no matter how outlandish, has been held by some philosopher at some time. Descartes thought this reason to dismiss the tradition of philosophy as hopeless and to embark on his individual quest for certainty. But of course crackpot ideas have been held by philosophers; the point is that the philosophical tradition eventually recognizes crackpot ideas as such, dismisses them, and learns from their mistakes. Aristotle is still the model of the true philosopher. He does not start philosophizing from his own crackpot ideas (his "instincts"), but from a review of the philosophical tradition, i.e. the ideas that have survived the rational scrutiny of many intelligent minds before him. Aristotle advances the tradition by criticizing it in its own terms and, at times, adding his own novel contributions. Which of Aristotle's contributions are genuinely sound and which are crackpot is something the philosophical tradition will ultimately determine. But Aristotle's grounding in the philosophical tradition makes it a good bet that his personal contributions will be sound rather than crackpot.

And that is how the second difficulty of Barr's position is resolved. We should not rely on our untutored instincts, because we are likely to be as idiosyncratic as anyone else. We should recognize the transcendent authority of classical philosophy and ground our thinking in the philosophical tradition, where we will learn how to tell the true expert from the false in any field whatever, be it the sciences or the humanities.