Church and Academy [3]
What is expertise for?
My corner of the internet blew up last week. Douglas Murray and Dave Smith went on the Joe Rogan Experience to debate the wars in Gaza and Ukraine. I was excited when I saw the lineup. I’ve been consuming Douglas Murray content for some time. His wit and eloquence have made him a voice of reason that makes reason fun to hear. And I’ve recently found Dave Smith’s brand of well-read, snarky commentary on US American wars to be refreshingly commonsensical. Murray being a hawkishly pro-Israel goy and Smith being an anti-war, libertarian Jew, it was bound to be a fascinating conversation.
Then the episode started. And oh boy. Within three minutes, I thought, this is going to go very badly for Murray. And it just kept getting worse for him—or rather, he just kept digging himself deeper into a hole with seemingly no awareness that he was doing so. Maybe he was aware, but his tactic was so strange that it didn’t seem like it could be consciously chosen. I’ll explain.
Murray came out of the gate attacking not Smith but Rogan. He asked Rogan whether he has hosted enough representatives of the pro-Israel or pro-Ukraine side(s). Apart from the basic foolishness of going after the host, this is a bizarre move since Murray was there specifically to represent the pro-Israel side, and he could’ve just got on with it. Instead, he wanted to chastise Rogan for his implied bias. But it’s more than that. This move sets up the only point he was interested in debating for the entire three-hour podcast:
There’s been a tilt in the conversation—both conversations—in the last couple of years, and it’s largely to do with people who have appointed themselves experts who are not experts. (3:01–3:13)
The implicit claim is simple: experts agree with me; those who disagree with me are not experts. In other words, I don’t have to debate you on the substance of the disagreement because, unless you’re an expert, your disagreement is inconsequential.
If Murray could win on this one point, he’d run the table. But here’s the problem that makes his strategy so difficult to fathom: His argument only works if there is a reason to trust the experts, and he has spent a good deal of the last five years telling people why they shouldn’t trust the experts.
Now, I said “my corner” of the internet blew up last week because many of the people once associated with the Intellectual Dark Web (IDW) populate my algorithm. This label identifies a movement among thinkers, writers, and podcasters who were willing to critique the cultural “orthodoxy” that prevails particularly in academic and scientific realms, where the expertise of “the experts” is precisely what undergirds the orthodoxy. These voices have raised alarms about a variety of issues over the years, including free speech, identity politics, wokeism, transgender ideology, and the governmental and social responses to COVID‑19.
The article that put the Intellectual Dark Web on the mainstream map, Bari Weiss’s New York Times opinion piece (linked above), was evenhanded and identified the movement’s primary weakness:
I get the appeal of the I.D.W. I share the belief that our institutional gatekeepers need to crack the gates open much more. I don’t, however, want to live in a culture where there are no gatekeepers at all. Given how influential this group is becoming, I can’t be alone in hoping the I.D.W. finds a way to eschew the cranks, grifters and bigots and sticks to the truth-seeking.
The conundrum is that free speech is the foundational tenet of the conversations the IDW was leading, and the defense of free speech always attracts cranks, grifters, and bigots whose speech is improperly shut down by appeals to expertise. Yet, it is precisely the exercise of expertise under the protection of free speech that properly shuts down cranks, grifters, and bigots. That is, the strength of the IDW was that legitimate intellectuals were willing to question the orthodoxies of the very institutions that legitimize their intellectual work. But its weakness was that the only possibility for resisting the overwhelming power of those institutions to censor dissent was to inhabit the Wild West of the podcast world, where speech couldn’t be freer, and cranks, grifters, and bigots couldn’t have fewer constraints. Its weakness, in other words, was guilt by association.
It turns out that this guilt was the cutting edge of Murray’s argument. He insisted (despite evidence to the contrary, but no matter) and persists in the assertion that the real problem in need of debate is not the particulars of the wars that Rogan intended his guests to discuss but the fact that non-experts—including Dave Smith—who purport to have expertise have been platformed. Again, never mind that Dave Smith, for one, does not purport to have expertise. The point remains: Douglas Murray doesn’t have to dignify the substance of Dave Smith’s objections to the wars in Gaza and Ukraine because Dave Smith is not an expert. And shame on Joe Rogan for letting such people on the biggest media platform in the world.
The irony of Murray’s approach is head-spinning. He has been a staunch critic of the aforementioned orthodoxies, ready to debunk the appeals to authority and credentialism, for instance, that propped up the COVID-19 regime as lie after lie by the medical establishment was revealed.1 Murray helped create the world in which “trust the experts” is seen to be an ideological shibboleth. His argument on the Joe Rogan Experience is so bizarre, therefore, that one of his IDW compatriots, Bret Weinstein, said this week that Murray is talking like someone being held hostage. And he is. His rhetoric is an expression of ideological captivity.
Now to the point of rehearsing all this drama and what it has to do with church and academy.
The point is that, as far as I can tell, the voices in the orbit of the now largely defunct IDW who are responding to this podcast episode—and certainly Murray himself—are failing to make three key distinctions.
First, there is a difference between the appeal to expertise and the exercise of expertise. Almost everyone I find worthy of attention in the IDW (and whatever now follows it) is an expert in their own right. Expertise, intellectual accomplishment, and raw genius are not suspect. They are necessary. How else can the orthodoxy of the expert class ensconced in the establishment possibly be challenged with any credibility? Podcasts have become the public forum in which the work traditionally done in the academy (peer-reviewed articles and books) reaches the public. Podcasts are not peer reviewed, and that is a weakness. But neither are university lectures. And unlike most university lectures, podcasts are subject to the scrutiny of anyone who cares to respond. Any time someone with expertise, particularly credentialed expertise, bothers to explain himself or herself at length, I’m interested. So, evidently, are many others. And so they should be. Those explanations are vital, and they are exactly what Murray is refusing to offer in response to Dave Smith.
“Trust the experts” is a shibboleth because it is an appeal to authority. As Dave Smith states in the episode, it is a non-argument. It foregoes the work that experts (or their students) are meant to do publicly and convincingly. Anyone who says, “I don’t have to explain myself because I’m an expert” or “I don’t have to explain myself because I agree with the experts” is—guess what?—a crank, a grifter, or a bigot. Or ideologically captive, which is something like the sum of all three.
Two, there is a difference between being an expert and relying on experts. You do not need to be an expert to read them, listen to them, understand them, and agree or disagree with them. I recommend humility, first to experts and then to non-experts. As experts know, when they go to battle with other experts in their field, they can get humbled. Better to start there. As non-experts may know, expertise as a credential is (hopefully) hard-won. If you choose to go toe-to-toe with an expert, hubris is an achilles heal. But everyone is both finite and fallible. What matters, I assert as a certified expert in Christian theology, is substance. Experts can be fools. Show your work. Make your points. Truth will out.
It’s interesting that Douglas Murray has relied on a comparison in his attempt to manage the fallout of the JRE podcast appearance. For example, in his conversation with fellow IDW personality Gad Saad, he compares his point about expertise with Joe Rogan’s expertise in MMA. The problem with the comparison is that anyone with actual expertise in MMA, like Joe, would not only convincingly correct an ignorant commentator but also be able to “ragdoll” someone who is ignorant of the sport. The proof is in the pudding. Expertise is a matter of capacity; credentials merely signal capacity. If Murray could have ragdolled Smith, he would have.
But Murray couldn’t handle Smith because Smith was relying on experts, and Murray refused to do more than insist that he was on the side of the experts. The substance of Smith’s arguments relied on experts (not, of course, Murray’s experts). I make this claim with some hesitancy because I haven’t read those experts and don’t know what I might say if I had. But he clearly has familiarity with sources that can’t be dismissed as anything less than expert, and his commonsense use of them passes the smell test. And this is sufficient to make my point: You needn’t be an expert to use experts in the articulation of inexpert thoughts.
Three, there is a difference between an expert supporting a position and that position being correct. Obviously, not only can experts be mistaken but the premise of expertise is, for example, a field of study in which many experts are necessarily in disagreement. When we’re talking about topics as fraught as geopolitics, war, and, say, Zionism or imperialism, disagreements among experts multiply. Different sets of “facts” and different interpretations of agreed-upon facts abound. Schools of thought and methodologies conflict. Commitments and motives diverge. Obviously!
It may seem like this leaves us lining up behind “our” experts. Tribalism is tempting. But the issue isn’t which experts support our side or even which experts we trust, though trust is important. The issue is why we trust them, and at the end of the day, trust should be based on what their expertise actually does. Can it provide substantive explanations? Can it incisively critique alternative viewpoints? Can it withstand and respond effectively to critique? Can it communicate cogently and clearly?
Notice that neither omniscience nor infallibility are reasons to trust an expert. Even when an expert experts with all expertise, he or she can be flat wrong. What matters is whether they show their work—which is work that non-experts cannot do.
The US American church should take note of these conflicts because they are signposts of the culture we inhabit. How the church engages with expertise is ever shaped by influences beyond the church itself. So what, from a Christian perspective, is expertise for?
Expertise is for serving God’s purpose and, in particular, equipping the church to that end.
That’s a broad statement with a lot of entailments. I'll highlight a few. Granted that there are various kinds of expertise, I should stipulate that I’m referring to the kind that lives in the academy—intellectual expertise, particularly the theological variety. Think of this expertise as well-stewarded, mature gifts of knowledge, wisdom, and teaching. This expertise is for:
Illumination. Expertise should shed light on what the church cannot otherwise see. Experts provide perspective. This does not mean the correct perspective. For the church, experts can neither exercise authority on the basis of expertise nor serve as the object of appeals to authority. Authority in the church is spiritual. Of course, experts can be spiritual leaders, and there is probably something like expertise in Christian spirituality (though that is dangerous conceptual territory), but expertise is not an index of spirituality and is, therefore, not a proxy for authority in the church. Rather than the correct perspective, expertise can provide a wider scope of vision, a higher-definition picture, a deeper insight, a clearer focus, or a more diverse set of viewpoints. It does so by shedding light on ambiguous data, fuzzy concepts, and uncertain assumptions as well as solid foundations, established methods, and historical precedents. In all of these functions, the expertise that the church should find trustworthy demonstrates epistemic humility and fair-minded engagement with a plurality of other experts, all aimed at discerning God’s purpose.
Protection. Expertise should protect the church from foolishness. Let’s be frank. Ignorance leads to foolishness. And foolishness is dangerous, sometimes deadly. At the very least, foolishness is a vulnerability. More importantly, it is a barrier to participation in God’s purpose. Without expertise, the church is prone to fall into all kinds of pits, including insensitivity to God’s purpose. Not that the church lacks other protections. The role of experts is never to be patronizing, much less to be the heroes who ensure the church is attuned to God’s purpose. But they have a role to play. That role is vital because other ideologies are always vying for the church’s loyalty, and resisting them is largely intellectual work. Fools can seldom resist the allure of ideological alternatives. Experts have the unique ability to unmask competing ideologies through explanation and critique that can withstand alternative explanations and critiques. In short, experts can protect the church from others who claim expertise—not by yelling “You’re not an expert” but by doing the work of expertise.
Resourcing. Expertise should produce tools for the church to do its intellectual work. Experts not only model high-level intellectual work but also train the church to do this work and create sources to sustain it. Yes, I mean experts write books—and all kinds of articles, essays, and study guides. And, these days, they podcast. Whatever the medium, these resources are and have always been vital for the life of the church. But they are often misunderstood or misused. The point of expertise is not simply to provide definitive answers. It is not to put an end to the conversation but to enliven, fortify, and guide it. The church is responsible for loving the Lord with her whole mind. This is not work that can be outsourced to a subset of Christian thinkers. Experts who fail to equip the church with whatever wisdom, instruction, understanding, shrewdness, knowledge, discernment, and skill they have to offer because they prefer simply to answer the church’s questions for her promote nothing less than unfaithfulness to God and, by extension, God’s purpose.
The challenge is not merely for experts to do what they should with their expertise but for the church to make use of expertise faithfully. What is expertise for? God’s people must be clear: participation in God’s purpose. In the midst of the cultural influences that pull us in other directions, this theological orientation is essential.
I have no doubt that some readers will balk at that assertion—a fact that demonstrates the power and durability of institutional orthodoxy. I’m not going to rehearse the facts here. If you need details, DM me.