Alan Jacobs

Rush Limbaugh says, “Yeah, I’m dead right on this. The coronavirus is the common cold, folks.” Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, says, “I mean, people always say, well, the flu, you know, the flu does this, the flu does that. The flu has a mortality of 0.1 percent. This is ten times that.” (He could have said “at least ten times that.”) 

Question: Why does Rush Limbaugh think he knows better than Fauci? Potential answers:  

1. He doesn’t. He’s just saying what he thinks his audience wants to hear in order to keep them listening, keep his advertising rates high, and put more money in his pocket. 
2. He’s a narcissist who suffers from the Dunning-Kruger effect. 
3. It’s a classic case of motivated reasoning: Like all of us, he would prefer that COVID-19 be an insignificant threat to public health, so he finds a way to believe it. 
4. He sees a vast conspiracy of elite culture against Donald Trump in particular and conservatism in general, and Fauci, as the director of a federal agency, is ipso facto a member of that elite; therefore it is logical to assume that Fauci is part of that conspiracy. (Perhaps not consciously; perhaps Limbaugh would think that Fauci is the one guilty of motivated reasoning.) 

We need not choose one or two explanations: probably all four factors are at work, though it would be impossible to know in what proportion. Certainly Limbaugh wouldn’t know, in precisely the same way that I don’t understand my own motivations. 

But maybe more significant is this question: Why do many Americans — millions of them, I suppose — believe Limbaugh rather than Fauci? Presumably answers 3 and 4 above play a major role. But the matter bears more reflection. 

I believe the key issue that must be addressed in this situation concerns what Tom Nichols calls the death of expertise — and, more important still, what might be done to restore public trust in genuine expertise. For my money, the really vital chapter in Nichols’s book is the one on the wrongness of experts — why they get things wrong and what happens when they do. Indeed, that should be a book in itself.

I want to call attention to a few passages from Nichols’s book, starting with this one: 

[Our] daily trust in professionals … is a prosaic matter of necessity. It is much the same way we trust everyone else in our daily lives, including the bus driver we assume isn't drunk or the restaurant worker we assume has washed her hands. This is not the same thing as trusting professionals when it comes to matters of public policy: to say that we trust our doctors to write us the correct prescription is not the same thing as saying we trust all medical professionals about whether America should have a system of national health care. To say that we trust a college professor to teach our sons and daughters the history of World War II is not the same thing as saying that we there- fore trust all academic historians to advise the president of the United States on matters of war and peace. […] 

Experts can go wrong, for example, when they try to stretch their expertise from one area to another. This is not only a recipe for error, but is maddening to other experts as well. In some cases, the cross-expertise poaching is obvious, as when entertainers — experts in their own fields, to be sure — confuse art with life and start issuing explanations of complicated matters.

But it’s not just “entertainers” like Limbaugh who are to blame here. A classic example of the abuse of expertise, as I wrote a few years ago, is the Doomsday Clock. If I may quote myself: “No actual science goes into the decision of where to place the hands of the clock. The scientists who make the decision have no particular expertise in geopolitical strategy, military and political risk assessment, or even climatology (relevant since they incorporate climate change into their assessment). They just read a bunch of stuff and take their own emotional temperature.” 

Related to this is the reluctance of many experts to acknowledge the vital distinction between what can be known precisely — and therefore precisely anticipated — and that which is too complex, or too dependent on unknown unknowns, to be subject to confident prediction. If you listen to Dr. Fauci’s full testimony, you’ll see, I think, that it’s an outstanding example of how to distinguish between what experts can know and what they cannot. But that sort of caution is, alas, not the norm.  

That’s why I think Nichols ends his chapter on the wrong note. It’s not that what he says is incorrect — it isn’t. It’s true. Here’s his last paragraph: 

For laypeople to use expert advice and to place professionals in their proper roles as servants, rather than masters, they must accept their own limitations as well. Democracy cannot function when every citizen is an expert. Yes, it is unbridled ego for experts to believe they can run a democracy while ignoring its voters; it is also, however, ignorant narcissism for laypeople to believe that they can maintain a large and advanced nation without listening to the voices of those more educated and experienced than themselves. 

But had I been writing that I would’ve placed more stress on the need for experts to police themselves far more carefully then they currently do: to maintain the strictest standards of impartiality, and to make clear distinctions among (a) what they know, (b) matters about which they can reasonably surmise, and (c) those topics on which their opinions are no better than yours or mine. One of the primary responsibilities of genuine experts, in a heavily polluted informational ecosystem, is to give uninformed laypeople no justification, however implausible, for preferring their own judgment to that of the genuinely knowledgable. That wouldn’t eliminate the Dunning-Kruger effect, nor would it get rid of a President who thinks he has a “natural ability” to understand complex scientific matters in which he has no training whatsoever; but over the long haul, incrementally, it would help. 

 

UPDATE: A fascinating and illuminating comment on this post from Samuel James: "You know what the most interesting thing is about Limbaugh’s COVID commentary? The fact that he was recently diagnosed with advanced lung cancer. It stands to reason, does it not, that a man who desperately needs the best experts and credentialed information in this season of his (possibly fading) life would see the value of expert testimony? But in my experience, this actually has little effect on people. My family tree is full of people who practically live in the hospital and eat prescriptions for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but who are confident that Sean Hannity knows more about anything than any scientist, lawyer, or even theologian. The death of expertise is so nefarious precisely because it’s resistant to cognitive dissonance.” 

Shai Held:

Earlier today, a friend posted on Facebook about an experience he’d just had on the Upper West Side of Manhattan: “I heard a guy who looked to be in his 20s say that it’s not a big deal cause the elderly are gonna die anyway. Then he and his friend laughed … Maybe I’m lucky that I had awesome grandparents and maybe this guy didn’t but what is wrong with people???” Some have tried to dress up their heartlessness as generational retribution. As someone tweeted at me earlier today, “To be perfectly honest, and this is awful, but to the young, watching as the elderly over and over and over choose their own interests ahead of Climate policy kind of feels like they’re wishing us to a death they won’t have to experience. It’s a sad bit of fair play.”

Notice how the all-too-familiar rhetoric of dehumanization works: “The elderly” are bunched together as a faceless mass, all of them considered culprits and thus effectively deserving of the suffering the pandemic will inflict upon them. Lost entirely is the fact that the elderly are individual human beings, each with a distinctive face and voice, each with hopes and dreams, memories and regrets, friendships and marriages, loves lost and loves sustained. But they deserve to die — and as for us, we can just go about our business. 

This is what generational thinking always does — indeed, this is what it is meant to do: dehumanize. It is a rationalization of indifference or even hatred. That’s how it works whether the instrument deployed is “OK Boomer” or “snowflake millennials.” It’s an absolute social curse — as I keep saying (see the tag at the bottom of this post) to no avail. 

Near the end of The Code of the Woosters, Bertie sagely comments of Roderick Spode that one can be either a fascist dictator or a designer of women’s undergarments, but not both. I thought of that as I read Russell Kirk’s wooden thriller Old House of Fear. You can make your villain either a Communist or a necromancer, but not both. Not both.

Spoilers ahead.

Watching the first episode of Season 5 of Better Call Saul, something occurred to me: This story isn’t about Jimmy any more. It’s about Kim. (And, in an only slightly less serious way, about Mike and Nacho.) The metamorphosis has occurred: Jimmy McGill is Saul Goodman. There’s no way back for him. The guy who was always, and would always be, “Chuck McGill’s loser brother” is dead. Saul may have some fascinating adventures from here on out, but his character arc is complete. The key question that remains is: How can Kim extricate herself from her entanglement with him?

One of the key moments in the entire series came in the final episode of Season 4, when Jimmy, arguing before a committee of attorneys for the restoration of his license to practice law, makes a moving speech about his desire to honor his late brother. The members of the committee are touched; Kim’s eyes well up. And then, afterwards, when Jimmy learns that his license has been restored, Kim begins to tell Jimmy how much his speech touched her, only to have him leap in to say, “Did you see those suckers? That one asshole was crying. He had actual tears!” Rhea Seehorn should win an Emmy simply for the look on her face when Kim hears those words.

From this point on we know that Jimmy is, functionally if not intrinsically, a sociopath. The problem for Kim is that she is not wholly unlike him. We know from earlier seasons that their relationship was largely built on their mutual fondness for scams, their pleasure taken in turning people into marks. And here at the beginning of Season 5, there’s one more chance for a scam. One of Kim’s clients — in her public defender work — needs to take the plea deal offered by the D.A. But he won’t. He wants to go to trial because thinks he can charm the jury and get off. Kim can’t talk him out of it.

And then Jimmy/Saul shows up ready to improvise a scam that will scare the client into taking the plea deal … and Kim, after forcefully telling Jimmy/Saul to bug off, ends up playing the very game he had suggested. And of course it works. The client is scared into good sense. All in a good cause, right? Everyone’s better off, right?

Maybe. But at what cost to human dignity — of the client and of Kim? She sees how easily she could go down Jimmy’s path. She feels it. But will she? And if not — how does she get out?

Here’s something I wrote several years ago at The American Conservative, something I still believe, something I need occasionally to remind myself that I believe.

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What people call political realism often seems to me a kind of short-sightedness. The idea that valid political action requires us to choose from among the most prominent current alternatives — in short, to decide whether you’re going to be a Republican or a Democrat and then work to bring your chosen party more closely in line with your convictions — makes sense if your chief goal is to gain a political victory and to gain it now. Or soon.

Sometimes for good and often for ill, I am temperamentally incapable of thinking in that way. I tend to see politics in terms of a history that’s considerably longer than that of today’s political parties, or indeed of America itself. My political vision, such as it is, has two components: a long defeat followed by a long joy.

The phrase “long defeat” comes from J. R. R. Tolkien, who in The Lord of the Rings puts it in the mouth of Galadriel, and in a letter uses it himself: “I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’ — though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory.”

The promise of a “final victory” is the context of the “long joy.” Stanley Fish coined that phrase in response to a scene from Milton’s Paradise Lost in which Adam gets too readily excited about a scene from the future revealed to him by the archangel Michael, so that when the darker realities of the situation are revealed to him he finds himself “of short joy bereft.” Michael warns Adam that he needs to cure himself of political and social idealism and focus instead on the simple but challenging work of obedience to God. Fish explains the “politics” that Michael recommends to Adam: “It cannot be too much emphasized that the politics of being — the politics of long joy — is not quietism. Its relative indifference to outcomes is not an unconcern with the way things go in the world, but a recognition that the turns of fortune and and history are not in man’s control and that all one can be responsible for is the firmness of one’s resolve.”

When I wrote about this passage some years ago I commented,

It seems to me that this politics of long joy is the one thing needful for the Christian cultural critic, as for a warring angel like Abdiel or a poetic polemicist like Milton. Perhaps the chief problem with the “culture wars” paradigm that governs so much Christian action and reflection, in the North American context anyway, is that it encourages us to think in terms of trophies rather than testimonies. It tempts us to think too much about whether we're winning or losing, and too little about the only thing we ultimately control, which is the firmness of our own resolve. If the culture warrior would prefer not to be governed by Stanley Fish, or even by John Milton, maybe Koheleth provides an acceptable model: “In the morning sow your seed, and at evening withhold not your hand, for you do not know which will prosper, this or that, or whether both alike will be good” (Ecclesiastes 11:6).

It may be that the most important political acts I can perform do not involve siding with one of the existing parties, or even necessarily to vote at all, but to try to bear witness through word and action to this double vision of the earthly city: a long defeat followed by a longer joy.

We are too prone, I believe, to think that voting is the definitive political act. That would be true only if politics simply belongs to the government. There is a far vaster sphere of politics — the life of the polis — that belongs to everyday acts of ordinary people. In this maybe Gandalf is a pretty good guide: “Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.”

We planted this Monterey oak in our front yard three years ago, and it has flourished, but it has this really odd behavior: Each early spring it starts putting forth new leaves and discarding old ones at the same time. Live oaks behave similarly, but more gradually and less obviously. (Though two years ago I thought one of our live oaks was dead because in March it had not a single leaf on it. Then, two weeks later, it was full of new leaves.) 

Tony Tanner, in his great essay on Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, comments extensively on the peculiarity of a heroine, Fanny Price, who so rarely does anything. Contrast her to, for instance, Elizabeth Bennet, who marches miles across fields to care for her ill sister Jane, thereby arousing contempt from some — How she muddied her skirts! — and admiration from others — What a lovely flush the exercise brought to her cheeks! Fanny, by contrast, mainly ... sits.

It is next to the ebullient Crawfords that we must try to appreciate Fanny’s stillness, quietness, weakness and self-retraction.... It is a way of showing that she is not quite at home in the world, that she cannot compete with its rampant appetitive energies. In Fanny’s case this weakness is also a token of the exhaustion and strain she incurs through her ‘heroism of principle’. In her stillness she is not inactive: on the contrary, she is often holding on strenuously to standards and values which others all around her are thoughtlessly abandoning. Typically she welcomes the ‘tranquillity’ made possible by Mansfield Park at its best. She is content to remain apart, silent, unnoticed, out of the ‘festivities’. Whereas Mary [Crawford] is a distinctly forward woman, always in her element in the arena of society, Fanny is marked by ‘natural shyness’. Indeed, when all the others complain of the dullness which comes over the house after Sir Thomas returns, she defends it, saying, ‘There must be a sort of shyness.’ To appreciate the full implications of this we should bear in mind a late remark of Jane Austen’s: ‘What is become of all the shyness in the world?’ By which she clearly means not a false modesty but a true unassertive reticence of soul. A selflessness; a quietness.

Tanner calls our attention to the ultimate clarification of this trait of Fanny’s in what for my money is the single most brilliantly conceived and executed scene in all of Austen. (And that’s saying a lot.) The characters have taken a day trip to Mr. Rushworth’s estate, and while they all go off exploring, often in pairs, sometimes in pairs that should not be pairs, Fanny finds a pleasant spot and, once more, just sits.

It is here that Fanny desires to sit down and be still, and she does so on a bench which confronts an iron gate which separates the wilderness from the unenclosed spaces of the park beyond. This is one of the most important gestures in the book. Mary, typically, has no taste for stillness. ‘“I must move,” said she, “resting fatigues me”’, and leaving Fanny immobile, she entices Edmund back into the wood. Then Henry Crawford and Maria and Mr Rushworth appear. Maria, always impatient of all restraints and enclosures, wishes to go beyond the gates and into the wider freedom of the park. The gate — perfect image for the rigid restrictions imposed by the conventions of civilised life — is locked. Mr Rushworth goes to fetch the key. Being engaged to Maria, he is in many ways the lawful person to ‘open the gates’ (there is perhaps a reference to virginity here, just as the locked garden represents virginity in medieval paintings). But in his absence, Henry engages in some very persuasive and suggestive double entendre with Maria. The improver of the estate is also the disturber of conventional life. The whole conversation should be looked at carefully; particularly when Maria complains that the iron gate ‘gives me a feeling of restraint and hardship’ and Henry answers, ‘I think you might with little difficulty pass round the edge of the gate, here, with my assistance; I think it might be done, if you really wished to be more at large, and could allow yourself to think it not prohibited.’ Their final adultery also a bypassing of the ‘iron’ codes of society is here prefigured.

Tanner continues,

Again, Fanny is 'left to her solitude'. And so it goes on. Mr Rushworth appears, upset to find he has been left behind; Julia turns up breathless and angry; Edmund and Mary continue their 'winding' walk in the woods. Only Fanny is still, silent, alone; not involved in the confused antics of all the others, who are variously pursuing their own desires and indulging their impulses. When they do all meet up again, one feels that some irreparable damage has been done.

A masterful scene, masterfully exposited by Tanner.

I’ve been thinking of this scene, and Tanner’s account of it, as I have reflected on Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life. Franz Jägerstätter’s virtue lies almost wholly in stillness, in refraining, in simply maintaining his stability when all around him have lost theirs. They make vows he does not make; they talk emptily, while he keeps his counsel; they serve their Mortall God, which he politely declines to do; in the end, they kill him, while he is killed by them. Such is his passion — passio, passive, suffering. To quote Tanner with a change of pronouns, “In his stillness he is not inactive: on the contrary, he is often holding on strenuously to standards and values which others all around him are thoughtlessly abandoning.”

We are, generally speaking, not impressed. “Stillness, quietness, weakness and self-retraction” — rather negative as virtues go, wouldn’t you say? Not much to get excited about, is there? But maybe Jane Austen and Franz Jägerstätter understood something we don’t — maybe more than one thing — about what it takes not to be blown about by every propagandistic breeze (for so I render ἀνέμῳ τῆς διδασκαλίας), and about the distinctive kind of weakness in which Another’s strength may be made perfect. Christians who are “not quite at home in the world,” and cannot, or will not, “compete with its rampant appetitive energies” may not deserve our contempt. I find myself longing to exhibit something that no one has ever accused me of exhibiting: “true unassertive reticence of soul.”