The Sage Forge: Expertocracy

The expert: Our culture’s institutionalization of self-perceived genius.

The expert is born of a literary tradition. In literature it is simply impossible for one author to show the entire ebb and flow of the process of ideation as it happens across whole cultures in the grand sweep of time. In literature, to solve this problem of the limitations of the human author, we have the hero, the personification of a grand idea bringing victory to his people. It is an intoxicating idea.

Yours truly is not immune to this idea. Harbored in this mind has always been the secret longing that its efforts would some day be labeled "genius". Can’t you see the heroic pose, face to the warm glow of the sun, wind in the hair? There he is; the indispensable expert.

What do you mean- "What hair?"

That individual ideas were crucial to the exact shape of the world as it is today is not open to question. What is open to question is the notion that some special few of us can identify the ideas that are crucial to the necessary shape of the future, and in doing so invest the whole of society in the success of those ideas. It is this notion, embodied in such systems as communism, Marxism, socialism, and some religions, that I have given the label "expertocracy".

In an expertocracy the expert identifies ideas and assigns to them values to which the whole of society is committed. The "wild-card" contribution of the individual is an inherently unqualified dynamic. In an expertocracy the masses are to go where they are pointed. Individual inventiveness, even if it produces marginal increases in efficiency, is a threat to cohesiveness in a class of people who should be invested in uniformity and equality. The expert knows better than you do. You should know your place.

The vast social experiment that America historically has been flies in the face of expertocracy. Where innovation in the working classes begets instabilities in expertocracies, (See what being twice as productive as your fellow union members gets you, for example.) ideas for increasing productivity spread like wildfire in American-style capitalism. This often begets individual injustices, but has the effect, none the less, of raising the general standard of living. A perfectly equal, perfectly just society is a stymied society.

On the other hand no society in human history has been driven more inexorably toward justice than America. Here the great experiment of the states has flown in the face of the expertocrats. Wincing at their enormous losses in property to the non-slave-holding states of the North in the 1840s the southern states and their financier allies in the North forced the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 through Congress. This law extended the reach of the property-holder through the barriers erected by those states that held the atrocity of slavery to be illegal and exposed even the freeborn black to capture and enslavement on little more than the word of a bondsman. Compounding this horror the 1857 Dred Scott case established an expert opinion that NO black of African origin, free or slave, could be said to be a citizen of the United States as the Constitution would have the word "citizen" defined. The Congress and the Supreme Court had established the expert opinion, a one and only one right way, to which we all were to give heed.

"States Rights" is a phrase usually denigrated for association with the support of slavery, but in this case it was not. For the next three years and at the risk of disunion Northern states more and more vociferously agitated for the tenth amendment right to decide for themselves who would and would not be citizens. In that case the states made of themselves a laboratory for social change. Had the economics and morality of slavery trumped that of freedom in the War Between the States slavery would still exist today.

The right of states to go their own way has, in that great issue and a thousand smaller ones, created the environmental pressure that drove America to become a more just society.

Webb Pomeroy was a very practical man. He delighted in being able to coax to life the balky automobiles of hapless fellow deep-thinking professors. As an auto mechanic he apprenticed me out of cluelessness to mere ineptitude. That same practicality inhabited his thought and teaching on the Bible and theology. One day, as I puzzled in his office on the diffusion of Christian denominations when there could only be one truth, his patience with my tendency to finesse ideas wavered somewhat.

"Do they keep people from knocking each other in the head?"

I was playing to the pretensions of the experts of the day. He was listening to the call of a loving God. I thought there was a right way to do things. He saw a million different ways to do the right thing.

I may get that day in the sun, the wind in what’s left of my hair. I may have the "genius" type grand idea, but a thousand people, doing their best a little bit at a time can still do better.

All we have to do is keep the expertocracy out of the way.