Trust the Experts?

One of the most interesting scenes in the Matrix is when one character decides that he likes the bliss of believing that the Matrix is reality, as true reality did not bring him the peace of mind that he wanted. He becomes a traitor to all reality in the process, the Judas of the story, who turns on those who have been unplugged.

I read a post the other day that was attempting to argue that the consensus of scholarship on any given issue is due to expertise and not some liberal worldview and whatnot. Let me just say how utterly ridiculous this claim is. This is pure Enlightenment brainwashing at work telling us all that scholars who are immersed in the presuppositions of the Enlightenment, and are never taught to be critical of the methodologies of inquiry that stem from it, are not brainwashed but just concluding from their studies and expertise what's what.

Now, let me say, I don't appreciate laymen contradicting me from their ignorance, and that is half of the thrust of the article with which I actually agree. Overconfident laymen usually replace study with unfounded confidence in their own extremely limited education and unsharpened reasoning skills, which only serve to further entrench them in whatever they want to believe. Yes, I am an elitist in terms of believing that only trained pilots should fly the airplane. I am an "anti-Enlightenment, anti-everybody gets to be included, and anti-everyone should have their opinion heard" sort of guy. That doesn't mean there aren't brilliant laymen who study even harder than those who have a formal education (Nick Norelli in the field of Trinitarian studies comes to mind), but I wouldn't consider them laymen, so my definitions are not "people who went to school versus people who didn't." I know plenty of people who jumped through their hoops and got degrees and are clearly incompetent in their fields, even though they write book after book and hold prestigious positions at various schools. The Wizard gave them a diploma, they write books, and so now they're somehow qualified even though their knowledge and ability to assess it is severely limited. So this is not an all-or-nothing statement.

However, the idea that one should accept the scholarly consensus, let's say on something like the origins of Israel, simply because it stems from their expertise is absolute nonsense. This is the type of rhetoric one expects from someone who has drunk all the Matrix Kool-Aid, and just wants to sit in peace in his pod as the machines tell him he's eating a steak. It is historically and philosophically ignorant of the fact that modern scholarship has been in a polemic against the Bible and orthodox Christianity since the dawn of the Enlightenment, precisely, because it needs to replace the Bible with a more inclusive spirituality rooted in the individual self or community. The Bible was and always will be in the way, and therefore, even when new information comes about, that new information has been/is used to undermine the orthodox teaching of the Bible in some way (even though it did/does not usually do so).

Saying that these scholars are just doing scholarship is philosophically naive. And appealing to their intentions, or whether or not they know they are merely arguing in circles as apologists for their cult, absolutely muddies the issue. This has nothing to do with whether or not they know what they are doing. We are in the cult of the Enlightenment. I would expect almost no one to know, or they would become aware of their brainwashing.

It's like trying to argue to someone who lives among the Mormons that all of those scholars at BYU aren't concluding what they do because they're either intentionally or unintentionally committed philosophically to the truths of Mormonism and the presuppositions at the foundations of their methodologies of inquiry. It's just because they're educated and experts in their fields.

And all of those great German scholars who had a consensus among them that Jews weren't really humans weren't racists. They were just experts in their fields.

What is truly scary is that anyone would be so blinded by his philosophical cult that he thinks it is just the reality that these scholars discover. That means that everyone else is trading in fantasy, and they need to be silenced because reality should be honored over fantasy. And that is exactly why there is a liberal/Enlightenment-oriented worldview that dictates the consensus among scholars in universities. Because you have to sign on to the Enlightenment project to be accepted into one, and certainly, to teach in one. The consensus is due to their having the same worldview, not to their expertise. That's why many uneducated people hold those same views without having set one foot in an academic institution. It isn't because they're educated. It's because they have the same worldview. If it were due to academic training, these people, who are just as arrogant, wouldn't hold the view.

That doesn't leave us with a solution that includes uneducated laymen espousing whatever theory they wish regardless of its probability of being true given the research. It leaves us with the need to be epistemologically wary of our culture's philosophical and theological commitments so that we become self-aware of our own methodologies of inquiry from which we draw conclusions and make claims of any sort.

And that was probably the biggest irony of the post. The idea that going to school makes you more self-aware. I find this a rather laughable idea, having been to numerous schools, both secular and Christian alike. The goal of any cult is conformity, not of various ideas you may hold on the surface (you're allowed to espouse all sorts of views, just not orthodox ones in your papers), but to presuppositions that will make the student more acceptable to the modern scholarly guild. A student with epistemic commitments that are linked to the Bible's absolute reliability in what it teaches, for instance, will be a priori rejected in favor of students who have epistemic commitments to the absolute reliability of the self and academic community. One must presuppose all sorts of things in both of these, primarily to Augustinianism or Pelagianism, that cannot be judged by the amount of one's education, but solely by one's faith commitment. Yet, the latter are accepted in droves and the former rejected in the same numbers. That the cult has a consensus as to what is true, therefore, is of no weight to those of us who have been deprogrammed. It is only weighty to some who are still plugged in to the Matrix and want to believe that what they're eating really is a steak.