As I recall now with an effort my very first attempt at submitting a scholarly article involved an interpretation of a few words in Book 2 of Virgils Aeneid (line 749). The hero is narrating his frantic return to the flaming ruins of Troy in search of his wife Creusa. He uses the phrase cingor fulgentibus armis to describe... what exactly? A scholarly tradition has evolved which holds that the poet simply whiffed on this one. Aeneas so runs the wisdom has already girded myself with bright arms" several verses earlier. My objections to the collective wisdom were multiple. I argued that a) its too late in the narration for Aeneas to arm himselfhe has left the rendezvous of refugees well behind as the verses first half declares in the present-tense words I return to the city"; b) the style of the full verse (ipse urbem repeto et cingor fulgentibus armis) would be perfectly Virgilian if the latter half were reiterating the former (i.e. I myself return to the city and am hemmed about by glistening arms"); c) Aeneas is indeed being figuratively girded" by arms as he creeps among the pillaging Greeksthe scoffers are missing the drama; and d) the verb cingere is used both of girding oneself as when buckling a belt and of encircling a city with defensive walls. Theres a bit of a connotative strain created perhaps by having a human figure girded with the contents of a city. But were talking about poetry right? About a poetic genius in fact... right?
Wrong. Were talking about scholarly consensus". Its more acceptable to condemn Romes Shakespeare of not describing his scenes with pettifogging precision or of not purging his scribbles of daringly figurative language than it is to call into question the collaborative nods of a hundred academic jackdaws on a clothes-line. If the poet (as I was informed by the rejection letter) had employed the verb cingere in this novel fashion it would be the only instance of its being used with such intent in the entire epic (what classicists call a hapax legomenona once read"). Actually thats not true. Gird or surround" remains the verbs meaning here as elsewhere. The collective result is called a figureas in poetry!
But since something done once is a suspicious oddity to the pettifogger (even if a glorious discovery to the poet) any unique instance is likely a mistake. Therefore... therefore nothing unique is ever plausibly said or written and consigning the apparently unique" to the much larger body of things already said and written is the sensible" course. Naturally that bit of high-handedness makes the body things already said and written grow yet larger and... and tendency becomes inflexible rule. Creativity becomes impossible.
That was my professional introduction to expert opinion".
Now it also happened that I came of age in a time when all conventional wisdom was being trashed as irrelevant or hopelessly corrupted by special interest; and theres no question in my mind that literary studies proceeded to collapse during the Seventies and Eighties under the toxic influence of various slovenly self-serving reader response" approaches. My own loyalties then were torn between my almost religious regard for artistic inspiration (a truly religious regard: read my Literary Decline and the Death of the Soul) and a profound disgust with the politicization of art to serve trendy crusades. I say between" yet what Ive just written doesnt support those polarities. The Old Guard was not my ally at the spiritual end of the tug-of-war. The "scholarly consensus" had rigidified our literary heritage to gird in shining armor" its patented theories and its long long baggage train of publications; the New Guard had dumped that heritage (along with the baggage parasitically attached to it) in the nearest bin and was now celebrating Simone de Beauvoir and Rigoberta Menchu as the superiors of Sappho and Marie de Francejust to keep it female. Different politics... same politicized motivation. Careers egos authority: the Tower of Babel.
And so it is alas in the sciencesor so it has become. I and the very few of my colleagues who somehow smuggled an appreciation for the spiritual into closely guarded ivory corridors would occasionally look with longing across the quadrant at Chemistry or Engineering and dream about what it must be like to work in an objective discipline. Pipe-dreams... mere pipe-dreams. For as scientific research became funded more and more by grant money the assumptions of that research acquired more and more of a parti pris. Why would a pharmaceutical company underwrite a study of a new cure for insomnia if a dozen harmful side-effects were to be unearthed and published? Oh but surely government grants wouldnt import such sordid pressures into the lab... surely not! No one in government has an agenda that requires a particular worldview to be validated!
Im trying to tread warily and tastefully into a subject that bears an incalculable amount of significance for our future as a society: the reliability of expert opinion" in the medical field. In all of the sciences as life grows ever more riddled with high-tech strict integrity becomes more important; for we laymen must be able to rely on recognized experts as critical facts drift farther and farther from the reach of our intellectual competency. How do we know drawing purely from our own resources whether a huge solar flare will toast the continental power grid or not? How do we know whether GMOs are safe or whether a light coating of Roundup threatens the health of Third World nations more than an unimpeded swarm of locusts? How do we know whether Extremely Low-Frequency Waves are still being directed into the stratosphere whether their activity might cause the Earths magnetosphere to reverse its polarities or whether the effects of such reversal might settle down harmlessly in an instant or end all terrestrial life over a period of months?
In the particular case of medicine the stakes rise (or appear to). Somehow solar flares and locust swarms and the magnetosphere seem awfully distant to us. Theyre not distant at all and maybe indeed theyre seeming less so every day. The susceptibility of many average Americans to outright panic about the weather should prove that the paranoia stirred in us by our own cluelessness sits very near the surface ready to erupt (like the supervolcano under Yellowstone that may or may not kill us all) at the slightest provocation. Still when you cant even breathe the air with confidence... when you dare not even leave the house without a mask and when youre reluctant even to leave the house... then a face perching on a white coat and stethoscope becomes the Voice of God. Thats understandable.
But its also understandableonly too much sothat those who want minute control over our behavior would enlist (or dragoon) the support of the medical community in their authoritarian project. And as with all other academic disciplines the more government has become involved in medicine the better its been able to enlist (or dragoon) support. Grant money yes; also board reviews and licensures federal mandates control over the means of payment awards of access to resources funded by the inexhaustible" flow of tax revenue... policy-makers can finesse intimate decisions reached between doctor and patient in dozens of ways. You may remember the controversy Obamacare kindled about a medical exams resulting perhaps in the confiscation of the patients personal firearms.
Such concerns have diminished only to the degree that weve now surrendered the principles underlying them. Peter Helmes published a piece at his Die Deutschen Konservativen site a few weeks ago about an interview between Gert Scobel and psychologist Thomas Metzinger. Primarily the exchange concerned the future use of hallucinogens like LSD to treat depression. The medical man" expressed eagerness and optimism about the potential of mind-altering drugs to promote a universal consciousness" highly amenable to the Green Movements radical political objectives. The scenario is more Orwellian than Orwell: a populace fed delusion-inducing substances to sway it toward the vision of a world that doesnt exist and cant exist.
Okay yes: thats Europe this is America. But our supreme medical expert Dr. Anthony Fauci publicly foresees the daywithout the least indication of personal alarmwhen citizens will be required to have a battery of injections and to produce on demand documented proof of compliance. On the bankrolling side of this expertise" Bill Gates proposes further that the document" might take the form of a microchip injected (with or without the citizens knowledge) during the mandatory inoculation. That an astroturf initiative to debunk" Gatess connection to such authoritarian fantasies is raging on Twitter and Facebook should not soothe inquiring minds. (Diana West informed Frank Gaffney on Secure Freedom Radio 4/15/20 that explicitly incriminating comments had been scrubbed from a Gates TED Talk.)
I dont like Anthony Fauci. I dont like Bill Gates either. I dont like either one of them at all at all. I wouldnt break bread with them; and were hand-shaking still permitted by the Faucian hygienic protocol I wouldnt shake his hand or his one-time patrons. Not either hand of either one of them. I intensely dislike them as American citizens and as human beings.
Their level of expertise has nothing to do with my dislike. It is the traitorous American and the corrupt human in them that I loathe. Anyone who would seriously consider even for a moment tagging you and me the way Marlon Perkins used to tag zebra from a Jeep has renounced his membership in the family of decent responsible adults. No one gets to tag me. No one gets to stamp your profile on (or in) your forehead. People who have notions like this are monsters. I dont care how well they understand virusesand Mr. Gates for that matter understands them no better than I do. I personally am not a virus in a vial or a white rat in a cage. Im a man. I am your equal under God Dr. Fauci; and if you were my age (Id even give you ten years) I think I might bust you in the chopsafter which I would carefully sterilize my knuckles.
Let us please clarify the nature of expertise. The expert on Virgil is restrained by a humble veneration for poetic genius and artistic mystery: he isnt a mandarin on a throne who gets to gird up a classic text tightly within verbal statistical analysis and historical minutiae. The expert on human health respects the spiritual mystery of the human being: he isnt a master technician for whom the behavior of viruses in a sack of guts is no different from their behavior in a Petri Dish. To hear such a supposed expert descanting about how future societies should be organized is equivalent to hearing the New Age scholar interpret the Aeneid as a mere work of militaristic propaganda. That is a literary scholar" who can do no better than say The peoples Will was held in check by these creaky old epics that exhorted them to die for the patriarchy"... that person is no better than a medical expert" who says We could avoid pandemics in the future if people would just move in designated zones eat designated foods and touch each other in designated ways at designated times." Damn.
Yes the scholar who knows the history of the Augustan age inside-out is certainly superior in some manner to the quasi-literate Ph.D. who rates every art work ever created by how well women and minorities make out in it. The researcher who has actually logged decades of experience before a microscope is also superior to a Bill Gates who fantasizes about vaccinating all humanity with whatever he deems good for the race. But a genuine expert is neither of these. A genuine expert would say This is odd with respect to available linguistic data... but its also poetry"; or This risk could be reduced if people would do less of thus-and-so... but life is complex and the choice among possible behaviors isnt mine to make except for me personally."
One could say that playing God is above the experts pay grade; but when New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy volunteered this flippant excuse for ignoring the Constitution he was de facto putting himself in the position of God Almighty. Part of being an expert is understanding the limitations of your expertise. To claim authority over the destiny of humanity because you have a rare knowledge of human diseases is like labeling a hundred deaths a calamity without identifying the number of lives that survived the specific threat. Knowledge without context is magnified ignorance.
As I recall now with an effort my very first attempt at submitting a scholarly article involved an interpretation of a few words in Book 2 of Virgils Aeneid (line 749). The hero is narrating his frantic return to the flaming ruins of Troy in search of his wife Creusa. He uses the phrase cingor fulgentibus armis to describe... what exactly? A scholarly tradition has evolved which holds that the poet simply whiffed on this one. Aeneas so runs the wisdom has already girded myself with bright arms" several verses earlier. My objections to the collective wisdom were multiple. I argued that a) its too late in the narration for Aeneas to arm himselfhe has left the rendezvous of refugees well behind as the verses first half declares in the present-tense words I return to the city"; b) the style of the full verse (ipse urbem repeto et cingor fulgentibus armis) would be perfectly Virgilian if the latter half were reiterating the former (i.e. I myself return to the city and am hemmed about by glistening arms"); c) Aeneas is indeed being figuratively girded" by arms as he creeps among the pillaging Greeksthe scoffers are missing the drama; and d) the verb cingere is used both of girding oneself as when buckling a belt and of encircling a city with defensive walls. Theres a bit of a connotative strain created perhaps by having a human figure girded with the contents of a city. But were talking about poetry right? About a poetic genius in fact... right?
Wrong. Were talking about scholarly consensus". Its more acceptable to condemn Romes Shakespeare of not describing his scenes with pettifogging precision or of not purging his scribbles of daringly figurative language than it is to call into question the collaborative nods of a hundred academic jackdaws on a clothes-line. If the poet (as I was informed by the rejection letter) had employed the verb cingere in this novel fashion it would be the only instance of its being used with such intent in the entire epic (what classicists call a hapax legomenona once read"). Actually thats not true. Gird or surround" remains the verbs meaning here as elsewhere. The collective result is called a figureas in poetry!
But since something done once is a suspicious oddity to the pettifogger (even if a glorious discovery to the poet) any unique instance is likely a mistake. Therefore... therefore nothing unique is ever plausibly said or written and consigning the apparently unique" to the much larger body of things already said and written is the sensible" course. Naturally that bit of high-handedness makes the body things already said and written grow yet larger and... and tendency becomes inflexible rule. Creativity becomes impossible.
That was my professional introduction to expert opinion".
Now it also happened that I came of age in a time when all conventional wisdom was being trashed as irrelevant or hopelessly corrupted by special interest; and theres no question in my mind that literary studies proceeded to collapse during the Seventies and Eighties under the toxic influence of various slovenly self-serving reader response" approaches. My own loyalties then were torn between my almost religious regard for artistic inspiration (a truly religious regard: read my Literary Decline and the Death of the Soul) and a profound disgust with the politicization of art to serve trendy crusades. I say between" yet what Ive just written doesnt support those polarities. The Old Guard was not my ally at the spiritual end of the tug-of-war. The "scholarly consensus" had rigidified our literary heritage to gird in shining armor" its patented theories and its long long baggage train of publications; the New Guard had dumped that heritage (along with the baggage parasitically attached to it) in the nearest bin and was now celebrating Simone de Beauvoir and Rigoberta Menchu as the superiors of Sappho and Marie de Francejust to keep it female. Different politics... same politicized motivation. Careers egos authority: the Tower of Babel.
And so it is alas in the sciencesor so it has become. I and the very few of my colleagues who somehow smuggled an appreciation for the spiritual into closely guarded ivory corridors would occasionally look with longing across the quadrant at Chemistry or Engineering and dream about what it must be like to work in an objective discipline. Pipe-dreams... mere pipe-dreams. For as scientific research became funded more and more by grant money the assumptions of that research acquired more and more of a parti pris. Why would a pharmaceutical company underwrite a study of a new cure for insomnia if a dozen harmful side-effects were to be unearthed and published? Oh but surely government grants wouldnt import such sordid pressures into the lab... surely not! No one in government has an agenda that requires a particular worldview to be validated!
Im trying to tread warily and tastefully into a subject that bears an incalculable amount of significance for our future as a society: the reliability of expert opinion" in the medical field. In all of the sciences as life grows ever more riddled with high-tech strict integrity becomes more important; for we laymen must be able to rely on recognized experts as critical facts drift farther and farther from the reach of our intellectual competency. How do we know drawing purely from our own resources whether a huge solar flare will toast the continental power grid or not? How do we know whether GMOs are safe or whether a light coating of Roundup threatens the health of Third World nations more than an unimpeded swarm of locusts? How do we know whether Extremely Low-Frequency Waves are still being directed into the stratosphere whether their activity might cause the Earths magnetosphere to reverse its polarities or whether the effects of such reversal might settle down harmlessly in an instant or end all terrestrial life over a period of months?
In the particular case of medicine the stakes rise (or appear to). Somehow solar flares and locust swarms and the magnetosphere seem awfully distant to us. Theyre not distant at all and maybe indeed theyre seeming less so every day. The susceptibility of many average Americans to outright panic about the weather should prove that the paranoia stirred in us by our own cluelessness sits very near the surface ready to erupt (like the supervolcano under Yellowstone that may or may not kill us all) at the slightest provocation. Still when you cant even breathe the air with confidence... when you dare not even leave the house without a mask and when youre reluctant even to leave the house... then a face perching on a white coat and stethoscope becomes the Voice of God. Thats understandable.
But its also understandableonly too much sothat those who want minute control over our behavior would enlist (or dragoon) the support of the medical community in their authoritarian project. And as with all other academic disciplines the more government has become involved in medicine the better its been able to enlist (or dragoon) support. Grant money yes; also board reviews and licensures federal mandates control over the means of payment awards of access to resources funded by the inexhaustible" flow of tax revenue... policy-makers can finesse intimate decisions reached between doctor and patient in dozens of ways. You may remember the controversy Obamacare kindled about a medical exams resulting perhaps in the confiscation of the patients personal firearms.
Such concerns have diminished only to the degree that weve now surrendered the principles underlying them. Peter Helmes published a piece at his Die Deutschen Konservativen site a few weeks ago about an interview between Gert Scobel and psychologist Thomas Metzinger. Primarily the exchange concerned the future use of hallucinogens like LSD to treat depression. The medical man" expressed eagerness and optimism about the potential of mind-altering drugs to promote a universal consciousness" highly amenable to the Green Movements radical political objectives. The scenario is more Orwellian than Orwell: a populace fed delusion-inducing substances to sway it toward the vision of a world that doesnt exist and cant exist.
Okay yes: thats Europe this is America. But our supreme medical expert Dr. Anthony Fauci publicly foresees the daywithout the least indication of personal alarmwhen citizens will be required to have a battery of injections and to produce on demand documented proof of compliance. On the bankrolling side of this expertise" Bill Gates proposes further that the document" might take the form of a microchip injected (with or without the citizens knowledge) during the mandatory inoculation. That an astroturf initiative to debunk" Gatess connection to such authoritarian fantasies is raging on Twitter and Facebook should not soothe inquiring minds. (Diana West informed Frank Gaffney on Secure Freedom Radio 4/15/20 that explicitly incriminating comments had been scrubbed from a Gates TED Talk.)
I dont like Anthony Fauci. I dont like Bill Gates either. I dont like either one of them at all at all. I wouldnt break bread with them; and were hand-shaking still permitted by the Faucian hygienic protocol I wouldnt shake his hand or his one-time patrons. Not either hand of either one of them. I intensely dislike them as American citizens and as human beings.
Their level of expertise has nothing to do with my dislike. It is the traitorous American and the corrupt human in them that I loathe. Anyone who would seriously consider even for a moment tagging you and me the way Marlon Perkins used to tag zebra from a Jeep has renounced his membership in the family of decent responsible adults. No one gets to tag me. No one gets to stamp your profile on (or in) your forehead. People who have notions like this are monsters. I dont care how well they understand virusesand Mr. Gates for that matter understands them no better than I do. I personally am not a virus in a vial or a white rat in a cage. Im a man. I am your equal under God Dr. Fauci; and if you were my age (Id even give you ten years) I think I might bust you in the chopsafter which I would carefully sterilize my knuckles.
Let us please clarify the nature of expertise. The expert on Virgil is restrained by a humble veneration for poetic genius and artistic mystery: he isnt a mandarin on a throne who gets to gird up a classic text tightly within verbal statistical analysis and historical minutiae. The expert on human health respects the spiritual mystery of the human being: he isnt a master technician for whom the behavior of viruses in a sack of guts is no different from their behavior in a Petri Dish. To hear such a supposed expert descanting about how future societies should be organized is equivalent to hearing the New Age scholar interpret the Aeneid as a mere work of militaristic propaganda. That is a literary scholar" who can do no better than say The peoples Will was held in check by these creaky old epics that exhorted them to die for the patriarchy"... that person is no better than a medical expert" who says We could avoid pandemics in the future if people would just move in designated zones eat designated foods and touch each other in designated ways at designated times." Damn.
Yes the scholar who knows the history of the Augustan age inside-out is certainly superior in some manner to the quasi-literate Ph.D. who rates every art work ever created by how well women and minorities make out in it. The researcher who has actually logged decades of experience before a microscope is also superior to a Bill Gates who fantasizes about vaccinating all humanity with whatever he deems good for the race. But a genuine expert is neither of these. A genuine expert would say This is odd with respect to available linguistic data... but its also poetry"; or This risk could be reduced if people would do less of thus-and-so... but life is complex and the choice among possible behaviors isnt mine to make except for me personally."
One could say that playing God is above the experts pay grade; but when New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy volunteered this flippant excuse for ignoring the Constitution he was de facto putting himself in the position of God Almighty. Part of being an expert is understanding the limitations of your expertise. To claim authority over the destiny of humanity because you have a rare knowledge of human diseases is like labeling a hundred deaths a calamity without identifying the number of lives that survived the specific threat. Knowledge without context is magnified ignorance.