Expert Worship: Comes The Time, Comes The Idiot

“Some people seem to think that, if life is not fair, then the answer is to turn more of the nation's resources over to politicians.” Thomas Sowell

In 1850, the ablest minds of the British Empire were in a quandary. They’d decided to stage a great exhibition in London, but then they hit a wall in coming up with a signature building. Constrained by budget and (seemingly) by technology the best idea they proposed was a huge iron dome held up by 30 million bricks. 

The project foundered (it would take months just to find and lay the bricks), leaving the people who’d promised Queen Victoria a regal celebration in a very embarrassing predicament. Enter Joseph Paxton, a working class gardener by trade and a marvellous fixer. Paxton’s solution was to scrap the iron and bricks in favour of something he knew well: a hothouse.

Using improvements in glass manufacturing and his own fertile imagination Paxton’s dream became the Crystal Palace, the world’s largest greenhouse. As Bill Bryson notes in At Home nothing like it had ever been tried before. But Paxton— who had no formal training but buckets of ingenuity— made it work. Millions came to see it. 

The Georgian and Victorian ages were like that. People with no “expertise” (many of them humble parsons and vicars working in their spare time) revolutionized the world. Charles Darwin had no biology training; his work on evolution was self-taught, popular simply because it spoke to the non-credentialed. As Bryson notes these “amateurs”  invented power looms, gas lighting, submarines, farming practice, aerial photography and much, much more. They were also extraordinary writers, philosophers and mathematicians. Working in their spare time. 

None more so than Reverend Thomas Bayes, who in 1760 conjured a theory on probability so revolutionary it had to wait for computers two centuries later to prove its brilliance. None of this was considered extraordinary at the time. Inventions by the unlettered were a bragging point in those times.

In today’s Covid-crazy world, however, the marriage of Woke recidivism with Marxist fanaticism is a case of comes the time, comes the idiot. Only the credentialed need apply. A cursory walk through social media reveals progressive scolds whose worldview extends from Lady GaGa to the Goo Goo Dolls. 

Inventive laymen like Bayes, Darwin, Paxton and Jethro Tull (he invented the seed drill) would be shunned, consigned to tinfoil-hat status by a society that worships experts with a religious fervour. The WHO to the CDC to the alphabet soup of health organizations botching the pandemic have told non-credentialed people to sit down, shut up and obey the white coats of science.

Whether it was hydroxychloroquine, Invermectin or Remdesivir, those who proposed anything but a Big Pharma vaccine were muted by Twitter, buried by Facebook and ridiculed by the slick savants of late-night TV shows. In a triumph of perverse constructionism, any criticism of the credentialed geniuses that spawned 3 million deaths world-wide was declared heresy by the Rachel Maddow Choir. 

As mentioned innumerable times here and here and here, the many failures of the expert class since February 2020 only seems to have heightened the devotion of expert worshippers in their priests of technology. The worse it gets the more fanatical the devotion. 

“So you know more than a scientist,” is the witty retort from those cringing in their quarantine huts.

As a result, we have the unholy trinity of settled science, complacent media and gulit-addled progressives behind their masks denying secular criticism of their heroes. This layer cake of disaster is managed by a coercive government bent on radical change. 

The rise of Covid expert syndrome is just a table setter for the worship of climate gurus, whose only rule is the more unintelligible their modelling the better to hoodwink the “educated” class. 

This devotion to lettered dogma has created baffling byproducts of top-down liberal smugness. While native Americans polled said they had no trouble with the NFL team name the Redskins (many said it made them proud), the enlightened technocrats tut-tutted and forced the change of a legendary name.

Ditto the Edmonton Eskimos McGill Redmen and, soon, the Cleveland Indians. White liberals exercise their privilege in eliminating a problem that didn’t exist— except in their own hollow souls.

This elitist oblige extends to municipal bylaws. Cities created zones of impermissible entry without masks or spacing, then blithely looked the other way when favoured political groups by the thousands or tens of thousands rallied together in the streets.

Perhaps the most noxious example of the self satisfaction in the privileged class is the current story where hundreds of former Jeopardy winners ganged up online to allege that a recent three-time champion was signalling white supremacists with a hand gesture on the show.

On a private Facebook site these wonks talked themselves into a baseless conspiracy theory. “Based on the evidence we’ve seen being bandied about elsewhere, there is a real possibility he was giving either a white power or a Three Percenter hand gesture,” wrote one of these loons.

Even The New York Times, the Parnassus of liberal press, debunked the idea, pointing out he was only indicating his third win. But for the MSNBC types this was not enough. They doubled down. A full 595 former contestants signed the final draft of a letter, asking why “Jeopardy!” hadn’t edited out the moment.

“We cannot stand up for hate. We cannot stand next to hate. We cannot stand onstage with something that looks like hate.” Yup. Canadians were among the signatories. Shocked, I know. Expertise has its privileges, apparently. It’s their way or the gulag. 

We’d ask Darwin what he thinks of this evolutionary cycle but he’s probably banned on Twitter. 

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author of Cap In Hand is also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, his new book Personal Account with Tony Comper is now available on http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx