The Cult of The Expert
Hat tip to Ron Dart for bringing this revelatory piece to my attention. The article by Jonathan Rosenblum describes the logic (arrogantly twisted that it is) behind the elitism of the over educated left. It explains a lot!
This is an important piece. It starts out drudgingly but becomes more readable. It's titled, Repentance for a misspent youth and here are a couple of the money paragraphs:
This is an important piece. It starts out drudgingly but becomes more readable. It's titled, Repentance for a misspent youth and here are a couple of the money paragraphs:
That the cult of the expert — itself an outgrowth of the Enlightenment's enthroning of human reason above all — should appeal to intellectual elites is unsurprising: It is a form of the revenge of the nerds whose superior qualities were unnoted by the pretty girls in high school. The assumption that "rationality" is a matter easily ascertained, at least by the brainy folks, underlies the preference for centrally planned economies by many intellectuals. Free markets are deemed too unruly, too irrational, as they give equal weight to the decisions of millions of consumers, those with high IQs and low IQs alike.Be sure to read the entire piece. These are the people who are now running the show and they're a dangerous lot.
Belief in a single rational solution to every problem leads as well to nasty politics. Marxists have a term for those who fail to acknowledge the rational solution: "false consciousness." False consciousness can infect entire social classes, and when it does they must either be re-educated or eliminated. In non-totalitarian regimes, ridicule replaces re-education for all those too stupid to accept the consensus. Perhaps that explains why so many writers to the Yale Law Magazine find calling George W. Bush an idiot the height of sophisticated wit. Even "jokes" about Sarah Palin's Down Syndrome son and "retarded" family are not beyond the pale.
Not since the heady days of Camelot has the easy assumption that the "brightest" are the "best" held such sway in Washington D.C., or the cachet of prestigious Ivy League degrees been so high. The cult of the "expert" is reflected in the 30 or so "czars" designated to date. President Obama's choice for science czar, John Holdren, suffers from a particularly hardy case.
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