Cranks III

 

In my last piece I alluded to a kind of crankiness that perhaps deserves more comment. This is the crankiness exhibited by scientists who comment on matters outside the domain of the sciences whether these be philosophical, religious or historical. The interventions of scientists in these domains are, almost without exception, cranky and it is useful to investigate why. What makes a scientist comment on these subjects in spite of a manifest unfitness to do so? Why do we need physicists commenting on the historicity of Jesus or chemists lecturing on epistemology or archeology? Why do we need the thoughts of ethologists on ‘poetry’ or of nuclear engineers on the ontological argument? Of course, we do not need such things at all yet specialists in THESE areas are deeply, existentially convinced we do. The first thing we must note is that ALL of these people deeply and correctly resent the intrusion of amateurs in THEIR domains. Yet at the same time they are incapable of exercising the same restraint they expect of others. What drives a Dawkins to lecture ignorantly on Keats or a Sagan to offer ridiculously crude potted histories of science? What makes Neil deGrasse Tyson pronounce on Islamic history with the least confidence of being right? One aspect of this pathology is surely one of psychological perspective. The individuals mentioned are victims of the following cognitive bias: if quantum mechanics is a ‘hard’ subject and history is a ‘soft’ subject then he who masters the first must be more than capable of mastering the second. Indeed, he must be able to do history more readily and more easily than any historian who is, after all, only a failed scientist. If the historian COULD do science he would, but, since he can’t he does the ‘soft subject’ instead. One the scientist could easily master if he thought it worthwhile to do so (which usually he doesn’t). Thus, when the biologist or chemist feels the need to comment on the Greeks or the Middle Ages or the Bible he does so freely and fully knowing that such subjects are not ‘hard’ and that any claim to special ‘expertise’ in them is phony.

Also, the scientist knows much more than the literary critic or the social scientist what knowledge is as he possesses the paradigmatic form of it. If a man truly knows what real knowledge is, then he can apply that capacity to any subject under the sun and make progress far more quickly than the pedants who claim a lifetime’s worth of expertise in the matter. This is why a biologist can tell us who wrote the plays of Shakespeare far more readily than the phonies who claim to understand literature but whose purely subjective, arbitrary reactions to it are an obvious form of bullshit. The ne plus ultra of this kind of hubris was surely attained by the noted physicist who pointed out, in reaction to claims of sexual harassment directed at a colleague, that as a scientist he was far more qualified to assess such claims than the purported victims. As ridiculous as this sounds, it is only a slight extension of the principle underlying crank interventions in all the domains listed above. Who but an ethologist like Dawkins is qualified to judge the value of Kafka’s stories or of War and Peace? After all he is a man of science and hence a man of knowledge. If he knows what knowledge itself is then there is nothing, in principle, he cannot know: the whole contains the part and the general the particular. This is especially the case given that the usual paradigm of ‘real’ knowledge is quantitative. English and history involve no math so how could they present the least barrier to those who can do complex equations? Thus, a delusion bred by a certain form of scientism may underly the ham-fisted interventions of computer engineers and quantum physicists in historical, theological and literary domains they have no business commenting on.              

                This is a fallacious pattern of thinking common enough to have a name: the fallacy of false expertise. If Einstein is an expert on physics, why is he not also an expert on economics, or sociology or even woodworking? The problem here, though, is not identifying the fallacy so much as explaining why so many intelligent people commit it. The answer may well be political. There is a cost to ceding expertise to another and that is the assumed hegemony of one’s own discipline. Knowledge is power and where one renounces knowledge one renounces power and prestige. The greatest offense to any science is the existence of another science to compete with it for resources and fame. This is why scientific experts attempt to colonize not only arts disciplines but other sciences as well. How many climate change deniers or anti-vaxxers are psychologists or physicists rather than climatologists or epidemiologists? The proponent of any science has a strong vested interest in the claim that he has the master science and can therefore comprehend the objects treated in all the others. At bottom, the physicist who wants to tell us all about the bubonic plague or the inquisition or who wrote the Bible is engaged in flexing. Of course, another question remains which concerns the fans of the crank who are so impressed when a psych prof or statistician shows all the historians and literary critics to be full of it. Part of this involves the myth of the outsider and the myth of the underdog. This, though, may require yet another essay!