I recently got my first hate e-mail—something that I was not actively looking forward to but was nonetheless expecting after I expanded some of my blog critiques into this negative Amazon review of Glenn Beck’s The Original Argument. It wasn’t much of a hate-e-mail, to be honest, but I do take some pride in the fact that (since e-mail addresses are not linked to Amazon accounts) the author had to spend a few extra seconds on Google figuring out where to find me. Here is a screen shot of the original text:
Initially, I suppressed my desire to respond and have just tried to let various reactions play out in my mind. My first four thoughts went something like this: 1) “while I would certainly rather have fan mail than un-fan mail, I do realize that being criticized is part of the game (which consists, basically, of criticizing someone else)”; 2) “but couldn’t Mr. Vaughn have taken the time to think of a good insult, rather than just repeat a meaningless cliché?”; 3) “wait a minute, isn’t the whole point of Mr. Beck’s book to “teach” people something about the Founding Fathers”?”; and 4) “at least he thinks I am a teacher and has not guessed that I am really just a useless administrator who used to teach.”
But it is the fifth thought that stuck with me and bounced around in my head for the rest of the day. Here it is: “I can only claim to be an expert in one thing, and this guy is trying to dismiss that expertise on the authority of a 200 year old cliché.”
Let me explain: I am an academic. I am actually quite willing to admit that the 13 years that I spent in college left me ridiculously unprepared to face the real world. I can’t change a tire, I have never actually balanced a checkbook, and I have to use Wikipedia to understand the sports metaphors that the other vice presidents use in our cabinet meetings.
The depth of my uselessness is unusually profound, given that all three of my degrees are in English. I spent 2/3 of my college career studying 18th century political rhetoric—a stunningly unimportant pastime that I have continued in the dozen articles and two books that I have written since completing my doctorate in 1997. Other than the language and rhetorical style of 18th century political discourse, there is not a single thing that I could plausibly be considered an expert about.
Fully aware that my area of expertise is both narrow and shallow, I confined my review of Beck’s Federalist “translation” to two representative passages that, I felt, demonstrated a lack of understanding of 18th century English. Both examples were clear paraphrasing errors that either reversed or seriously altered the intended meaning of the original text. It is perhaps the only thing I have ever written for a non-professional audience that actually has anything to do with the expertise that I have spent more than 20 years developing. And the response? “Those who can – do; Those who can’t – teach.”
Mr. Vaughn’s not-exactly-inspiring e-mail is just a very minor front of what I have started to call “The War against Knowing what the Hell You’re Talking About.” The soldiers in this war come from all over the political spectrum—but mainly from the extremes—and share only the propensity to turn expertise into a sin that disqualifies its possessors from political discourse. As an example, consider the following propositions:
· All claims of global warming are “junk science.” Temperatures increase and decrease all the time, and human beings have nothing to do with it.
· There is no such thing as being “born gay.” Homosexuality is simply a lifestyle choice.
· Our Founding Fathers were committed Christians who believed that America was called by God to be the greatest nation on the earth.
These should not be unfamiliar claims to anybody who reads the papers; each one of them has been made in the past month by at least one serious presidential contender. Each of these three statements also shares at least two important rhetorical properties:
· Each statement requires a certain level of expertise in a scholarly field—respectively, climate science, human psychology, and history. Each statement, that is to say, makes claims that can be supported or refuted by analysis that can reasonably be described as “scholarly.”
· Each statement is the subject of debate among actual experts. While there are very few legitimate researchers who would accept the extreme versions of these propositions that I have quoted above, there are also very few who would accept their diametric opposites (that climate change is entirely the result of human activity; that homosexuality is entirely genetic, with no environmental component; and that all of the Founding Fathers were atheists). In each case the truth—in as far as scholarly activity is able to get at the truth—lies somewhere in between the two extremes.
But there is a third thing that these statements have in common: they are all non-negotiable parts of certain powerful ideologies that can only accept the most absolute versions of each claim. If human activity responsible, in any way, for climate change, for example, then certain extreme political positions become untenable—and those who have aligned their political fortunes with these positions must either moderate their ideology (unlikely) or dismiss the entire class of people we call “climate scientists” (or historians, or psychologists, or even experts in 18th century political rhetoric) as part of an evil, ideologically driven conspiracy to suppress the truth.
The War on Knowing What the Hell You're Talking About is, like all wars, waged out of a perceived ideological necessity. With genuine expertise comes a mistrust of absolute statements, simplistic arguments, and uncompromising positions—which is precisely why those who want to build their political careers on absolute, simplistic, and uncompromising ideologies must first wage war on expertise.
