The Barbarism of Experts
or, You never learned what the Dreyfus Affair was really about…
It seems we’ve reached escape velocity now that the internet has surfaced a previously untapped vast supply of experts — RNA virus experts, experts on the U.S. Constitution, those deeply knowledgeable in what may have occurred in a Senate office decades ago or what may occur next week.
This ready supply of shamans who are vested with unique insight into the what/where/why of today in the hopes of predicting the what/where/why of tomorrow are actually quite a new phenomenon.
The impulse to create a universe of experts began to surge in the late Victorian era in order to ordain new priests for the new churches. The dogma of this new church is weaponized taxonomies; the seat of this new church was a realignment of state, media and the academy.
Weaponizing taxonomies is the process of (re)defining the world and its contents by their taxonomic relationships (which include a hierarchy of values), thus producing precise labels. These labels, once affixed, create the illusions of control, the ability to manipulate, and to predict. Such illusions — if you can convince others to believe them— are wildly profitable and powerful. So now we’ve got a raging pandemic of experts fluent in affixing labels, citing statistics, providing examples, and patting themselves on the back. In all this, marxism and its mutations are particularly fertile ground because they produce ready-made labels/taxonomies.
And now, for poor, dear Al Dreyfus, an early sacrifice on the altar of experts. In the late 19th c., Dreyfus worked for the French military intelligence service. He was railroaded at trial (twice) for transmitting state secrets to the Germans.[1] He spent five years in a swampy French penal colony off the coast of South America. Everyone is taught that Dreyfus was railroaded because he was a Jew.
Perhaps. Or perhaps he was an uppity ladder-climber who annoyed everyone. I don’t know. What we do know is that Dreyfus wasn’t convicted because he was a Jew. He was convicted based on the evidence.
What was the evidence? A handwritten communication with detailed French military information was discovered in the German Embassy in Paris. Of course, it was unsigned. The French, however, had a sure-fire means of ascertaining the author.
A step back. Many of the French took to the Enlightenment like man lost in the desert to a Slurpee machine. Diderot — a late 18th c. jerk/Encyclopedia-writer — organized the new world around French ideas (like indexing ‘Christianity’ next to the entry for ‘witchcraft’ — and yes, the King asked Diderot to stop being a jerk). Napoleon only accelerated this headlong rush into tomorrow, and, by the mid-19th c., French construction workers were tearing down medieval Paris to replace it with wide boulevards and its monotony of adorable houses.
The French were in the thralls of the new goddess Progress. They were empiricists, scientific methodists, high-precision scholars who’d thoroughly jettisoned the Ancien Régime. They had experts for everything.
And so, who convicted Dreyfus (twice)? It was handwriting experts, and they would have gotten nowhere had France not been so taken by the idea of experts. These handwriting experts assured the courts and the people that Dreyfus had most certainly been the writer of the purloined letter. And thus we have an early example of the vicious cycle of experts being used to promote a narrative (Jews are traitors). Had no expert been available to seal Dreyfus’s fate, France wouldn’t have been torn asunder. The Dreyfus verdict rent France at the seams, exacerbating frictions between socialists, nationalists, globalists, nativists and everyone else.
History has exonerated Dreyfus and yet the story of anti-Semitism is the convenient narrative deployed to avoid the even harder truth. The issue isn’t anti-Semitism or experts deployed to push an agenda; rather, it’s understanding that experts are often elevated (typically by the academy) to frame and gate narratives. This is the bulk of modern cable news.
Conspiracy theories around agendas and narrative-gating abound; the left has their evil corporations (fun fact: it was the government that caused this nation’s most infamous toxic dump to leak into the water supply), and the right has their cultural-marxism.
One of the most outrageous conspiracy theories (coming from the right) is that leftists just want to control the narrative to have sex with children. This sounds like some truly Alex Jones level tin-foil hat projection, except the funny thing about conspiracies theories is that sometimes they’re true.
In the 1960s and 1970s, many leading experts — concentrated in France — argued for the abolition of all consent laws. They marshaled a heady phalanx of experts: Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Simone de Beauvoir, Françoise Dolto and about sixty more wrote articles, issued public statements, and petitioned the French parliament. This list included philosophers, pediatricians, psychoanalysts — all experts in something. Two of France’s biggest newspapers — Libération and Le Monde — promoted the cause. Libération was founded by Sartre and Le Monde was founded at the request of de Gaulle, so both preached from pulpits of authority.
These people were serious. And to be clear: the expert-battalion weren’t arguing in favor of sex with fifteen-year-olds (which was actually the age of consent in France). They were arguing for the abolition of all consent laws and over five dozen of these experts explicitly defended sex with six-year-olds.[2]
One would like to think that a modicum of common sense would have solved the problem of convicting an innocent man of treason or promoting sex with children, and sometimes it does. But often, common sense arrives only after civil society has been reduced to char by the barbarism of experts.
And so, when a 17-year-old expert (who dresses like she’s ten) is promoted by the narrative gatekeepers, remember Dreyfus, lock up your children, and hope that common sense survives the taxonomic war.
Note. The connection between “expert” academics and pedophilia is one of the more gruesome untold stories of the 20th century. It’s astonishing that such an unsavory conspiracy theory actually has so much supporting evidence.
Here’s just one example that’s been recently unfolding in Germany:
Starting in the 1970s psychology professor Helmut Kentler conducted his “experiment.” Homeless children in West Berlin were intentionally placed with pedophile men. These men would make especially loving foster parents, Kentler argued. … He was convinced that sexual contact between adults and children was harmless. … What they found was a “network across educational institutions,” the state youth welfare office and the Berlin Senate, in which pedophilia was “accepted, supported, defended.” … The researchers found that several of the foster fathers were high-profile academics.
Source: https://www.dw.com/en/berlin-authorities-placed-children-with-pedophiles-for-30-years/a-53814208
Another example. Top UNICEF children’s rights campaigner — who led UK’s anti-smacking campaign — is jailed for rape of boy, 13, in latest charity sex scandal.
Many would argue that the specific issue of modern pedophilia began with Alfred Kinsey, who the New York Times memorialized as: …an important and valuable figure. .. the fact remains that he was first, last, and always a scientist. In the long run it is probable that the values of his contribution to contemporary thought will lie much less in what he found out than in the method he used and his way of applying it. Any sort of scientific approach to the problems of sex is difficult because the field is so deeply overlaid with such things as moral precept, taboo, individual and group training, and long established behavior patterns. Some of these may be good in themselves, but they are no help to the scientific and empirical method of getting at the truth. Dr. Kinsey cut through this overlay with detachment and precision. His work was conscientious and comprehensive. Let us earnestly hope that the scientific spirit that inspired it will not be similarly impaired.
Kinsey was a bisexual sadomasochist pedophile. Or, per the New York Times, “always a scientist.”
For a recent documentary on the current state of Kinsey’s “scientific approach,” see https://www.contralandmovie.com/movie.html
For a modern confluence of pandemic theater and computing, see https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2020/05/16/coding-led-lockdown-totally-unreliable-buggy-mess-say-experts/
The super duper advanced software used to predict pandemics was entirely wrong, obviously wrong, and stupidly wrong. In fact, it’s been used for almost 20 years, and it’s never been right. And yet, I’m sure the media will be quoting these experts and governments will be relying on them again in a few years…
[1] The Germans had recently kicked France’s ass in a war, so France was extra-sensitive about German aspirations. For some flavor on late 19th c. Germany, see https://medium.com/@nathan.a.allen/chinazi-should-be-chiser-39ada47d6a6c
[2] No, I’m not making this up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_petition_against_age_of_consent_laws
