Aug
18
The Cult of the Expert
“The idea that monetary policy is politically neutral is a convenient fiction rather than a reflection of reality.” — Stephen D. King, British economist and journalist
One of the books I began reading recently is Ruler of Kings: Toward a Christian Vision of Government by Joseph Boot. Dr. Boot is a cultural theologian, leading Christian apologist, and founder of the Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity (EICC), among other things. He is also British-Canadian, so he sometimes spells things funny, but I try not to hold that against him.
As usual when reading a book of this sort, I am constantly looking for excerpts that would make for a good blogpost, and sure enough I found one. Maybe you will appreciate what he has to say, as well.
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One of the besetting sins of professional intellectuals as a class is believing that, because they have a particular depth of knowledge or strong ability in a given area, they can then generalize their narrow knowledge and ability into the notion of their own superior wisdom and judgement for life in general. Frequently disregarding the everyday, non-theoretical and mundane knowledge of ordinary people in the real world, central socio-political planning is taken on by the ‘experts’ — a particular kind of intellectual — as part of a broader intelligentsia who believe they alone are qualified to guide and shape society. As Thomas Sowell has rightly pointed out, “Intellectuals have seen themselves not simply as an elite — in the passive sense in which large landowners, rentiers, or holders of various sinecures might qualify as elites — but as an anointed elite, people with a mission to lead others in one way or another toward better lives.”
We have seen this modern cult at work during the era of the Covid-19 related crisis, with intellectuals in the fields of virology, statistics and computer modelling wheeled out by politicians to proclaim that civil liberties should be suspended for months on end, while prophesying that life can never return to the way it was before if we are to have a safe and healthy future. Because they are the ‘experts’, few pause to ask what qualifies a virologist, computer modeller or statistician to make far-reaching social, political and juridical decisions that profoundly affect millions of people around the world, including those of us in ostensibly free societies. But according to the politicians we must all be guided by the ‘experts’.
Another good example is seen in the field of economics — a bamboozling subject for the uninitiated as literal ‘magic tricks’ are performed by financial experts. For most of us ordinary mortals, we assume that paper money must represent a specific value of something concrete that has a generally agreed worth. Therefore, a certain number of dollars will buy me a certain number of potatoes (the paper being monetized wealth for the purpose of trade). Countries in which trust in their currency evaporates — as was seen in Zimbabwe, the former Soviet Union and is taking place now in Venezuela — soon find that a wheelbarrow full of paper money will not buy them a loaf of bread because their money is suspected of being no longer backed by something real and reliable, inflation having pushed the price of goods that much higher. Yet we are told by experts today that modern economies do not need to be backed by gold and other precious metals but can function safely simply on debt and government promises.
The political answer to financial crises [in this view] is therefore not ‘austerity’ and a balanced budget, but more and more public spending and stimulus to grow the economy. Stimulus means quantitative easing (that is, printing more and more paper money), with governments accumulating more and more debt, supported by the promise of future tax revenues and economic growth (GDP). As money gets cheaper due to its increased availability, keeping interest rates artificially low, many people borrow more, whilst the savings of others are effectively devalued (money now being worth less). However, markets inevitably aware of the problem will be concerned with looming runaway inflation. The sustainability of this model is therefore predicated on the ideas of unending economic growth and trust in government experts manipulating economic reality. Thus, for most Western governments, the idea of a balanced budget has gone the way of the dodo.
Whatever we make of this, the point is that economic and monetary policy is not value-neutral but equally driven by the thinking of expert-intellectuals who are not simply accountants and economists but people shaping life and culture in terms of a worldview, believing they are uniquely qualified to guide society. As Stephen D. King [not the novelist] notes:
“The idea that monetary policy is politically neutral is a convenient fiction rather than a reflection of reality. Yet it is often only during periods of economic and social upheaval that the fiction is exposed. Today, monetary policy works not so much by reinvigorating the economy but, instead, by redistributing wealth and income: it is no more than a stealthy form of redistributive taxation.”
There is nothing truly new here. Whether the area is economic life, law, medicine, education, politics or some other area of cultural import, from the time of the Pharaoh’s magicians and the Persian magi, kings, emperors and political leaders have surrounded themselves with a cadre of ‘experts’ to both give counsel and to act as a convenient means of shifting blame if thing went wrong. Of course the intellectuals of the ancient and classical world did not enjoy the same levels of unaccountability that the modern expert enjoys. If you misinterpreted Pharaoh’s dream or that of the king of Babylon, you might be executed. But whether they were called satraps or soothsayers, advisers or counselors, scholars or magi, they were the public intellectuals of their era and frequently functioned as a priestly class guiding the religious and political life of the people.
These thinkers, however, were invariably fumbling in the darkness, disconnected from the revealed covenants of promise and often oblivious to the clarity of God’s revelation in creation. Unless any expert intellectual is willingly subject to Christ and His Word-revelation, even when they stumble across God’s creational laws and norms in their work, they will consistently fail to properly apply what they have learned in terms of the fullness of the wisdom of God — for as we have seen, intellect, intelligence and wisdom are not the same thing.
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Some very good observations there, I think. I appreciate Boot giving the relatable examples of Covid-19 and economic policy ‘experts’ and how they have been trotted out by politicians to instruct the citizenry about what they “must” do. And history has shown that much of that advice — especially from the political Left — is ineffective, even dangerous.
