Adelphiasophism
Problems, Pressure Groups, Experts, Leaders
Abstract
© 1998 The Adelphiasophists and AskWhy! Publications. Freely distribute as long as it is unaltered and properly attributed
Contents Updated: Sunday, March 07, 1999
Problems
There are two sorts of problem—those to which we know the solution and real problems.
The first sort of problem is simply a task that needs to be done. Similar tasks have been done before and there are people around who have done them. Assuming their solutions to the problem have been successful—and sometimes even if they haven’t—these people are experts at that particular task. They know what to do to go about accomplishing the task and can generally be relied upon to complete it. Such a problem might be how we can get a lot of traffic across a bay. The answer is to build a large bridge and the experts know how to do it.
You might wish to have your poetry translated into Ugarit. The expert would know English and Ugarit and have a good sense of the poetic in both languages and be able to complete the task. They are judged as expert or otherwise by their results.
Real problems however are those which have not yet been solved. Political questions. How can we run the economy fairly so that everyone benefits and no one suffers? How can we make our leaders accountable? Scientific or medical problems like how to cure cancer or provide a plentiful safe source of energy. Or religious or spiritual problems like the existence of God or the forgiveness of sin. Or both. What is consciousness? What makes people criminals? There can be no experts on matter like these because no one knows the answers.
The most influential experts in our lives are exactly those people who claim expertise in these unsolved problems: politicians, scientists and evangelisers. We want to improve community relations or get better social services so we set up a pressure group. We choose a politician to lead it—one of the experts who have consistently failed to solve or even address the problem. And politicians always set up a circus of other experts—sociologists, policemen, probation officers—to obfuscate and delay for as long as possible under the guise of looking into it. We want to get justice and better conditions in our inner cities. We turn to the local priest or bishop. Forget it! Experts in matters spiritual have never consistently chosen God above the secular authorities.
If we are public spirited and have raised money to finance medical research, to whom do we give it to decide how it should be spent? All of those medical experts who have failed to solve the problem hitherto. They will vote the money to themselves to continue their unsuccessful methods and comfortable lifestyles. The paradox of these experts is that, on the definition of the expert as someone who knows how to solve a problem, they are not only not experts, but also failures! They have been trying for long periods, millennia in the case of religious experts, and they still do not know the answers to the problems lay people think they had solved.
Experts must be highly regarded by others in the same field—their peers, so they set up orthodoxies. The purpose of this is self-enhancement and safety in numbers. Christianity is the oldest orthodoxy of Western societies. The Bible was regarded by many, even learned people, as being the infallible word of God and unquestionably true. Since there is not a single professional Christian that can prove they have saved someone’s soul as they claim to do, it is important that they should all stand as one and make their claims in unison. It is hard for the confused onlooker to believe that so many clever people are charlatans or deluded.
Science and Experts
Surely, scientists are just honest people doing a job. There is all the difference between science and scientists. Science is a method of discovering about the Goddess, but scientists are human and subject to the failings of us all. That is why, however much respect we have for science, we are not obliged to believe the scientists.
In fiction, scientists are depicted as inhuman fanatics, as dispassionate robots or abstract old dodderers. Rarely are scientists any of these in real life. Scientists can be passionate about their pet theories despite their training to be objective, but rarely are they fanatical.
Great discoveries have been made through scientists engaging in contests over their competing ideas. The fight ends when successful prediction and application establishes one theory over another. But every established theory will eventually be challenged in its turn as new observations are made.
Science is conducted within an accepted framework of thought that is called a “paradigm”. Everyone is happy with it until at some stage it is challenged—someone has a better idea. Then the learned professors close ranks, rally to the orthodox view and hasten to discredit the innovators.
Defenders of the old paradigm are the majority of established scientists in the field, at least at the beginning. The revolutionaries, the new thinkers, attack it. Competition takes place and the paradigm holds or it falls. The scientific establishment invariably insists that old, accepted views are correct until there can be no doubt. Then the new paradigm is accepted and destined to become the canon in its turn.
New truths begin as heresies and end as superstitions.T H Huxley
Some proposals will have little merit and will fall quickly when assailed by the evidence—but something is usually gained in the exercise. Even when the revolutionary idea finally proves not correct, the tendency to accept orthodoxy unchallenged is beneficially shaken.
This is healthy. What is not healthy is when experts set up a scientific establishment with its own rules of acceptance, a scientific freemasonry from which others are excluded. Theories no longer belong to individuals but to the group, whose vested interest is served by cleaving to them and ridiculing alternatives. New thought is stifled while yesterday’s innovation, a dynamic force for progress, becomes a new orthodoxy, and establishment opinion becomes oppressively conservative.
Members of the fraternity and those aspiring to it may even become liars and forgers if status and respect is gained or retained thereby.
In these self-congratulatory and crooked societies, some of the greatest advances have come about because someone, often amateurs, spotted an analogy by intuition. Yet, experts consider amateur analogizers as overenthusiastic and cranky. The successful scientist and the raving crank are separated by the quality of their inspirations, which amounts to an ability to reject foolish analogies and to pursue helpful ones. The trick is to know the difference.
It sounds reasonable but is it wise to inhibit originality even if cranky? Who knows how many important ideas do not see the light of day because their originator feels wrongly they are a bit too cranky, or is timid about the response of their peers.
Perhaps overenthusiastic analogizing should be encouraged. The true criterion of the quality of an inspiration is not its crankiness but the influence it ultimately has. We have to consider whether we are disregarding the potentially valuable ideas of enthusiasts because they are prematurely and unjustly classified as cranky.
What then is the lesson of this? Simply to remain cautious but open minded. That does not mean to sitting on the fence. Since science progresses through the jousting of different ideas until one is unseated, there is nothing wrong with people defending their theory during the tournament. What is wrong is closing one’s mind to the merits of other ideas and, what is worse, closing ranks against them. It is openness, receptiveness, the desire to look at something new, that helps to keep societies and their methodologies healthy. Dogma of any kind puts a straitjacket on the mind and a jackboot on society.
Public Relations
Experts have to be taken with a pinch of salt. They are comedians of error. They claim an authority bounding on infallibility. Yet, from the Eighteenth century to the present day, professors were wrong and again wrong.
For the general public the really dangerous experts are those who sell their objectivity for pieces of silver. They are employed by governments and businesses to defend their employers’ position and take a partisan view irrespective of the facts.
In the last ten years, in the UK, scientists working for the government, the food corporations and farming interests have sworn that beef infested with prions causing a brain disease (BSE) were quite safe. Now there is a serious danger of an epidemic of CJD, a human brain disease similar to BSE.
Today the most notable professors are swearing that GM foods are absolutely safe, when they haven’t the least idea whether they are or not. These experimental foodstuffs have not been subject to long term tests, so how can they know? Yet, they say they do! They say it either through sheer arrogance and pomposity or, more likely, because the big food corporations want a carte blanche over GM foods to add to their megabucks.
So, take care when the news media announce that an expert has declared food fit to eat, cigarettes safe to smoke or nuclear power safer than crossing the road. Scientists are naturally cautious people except when their paymasters want help get out of some publicity hole. Then they will make any number of ill-judged statements to allay public concern and save their paymasters’ bacon.
Ask yourself; who is paying this person to say this? The opinion is not independent of its owner—whoever employs the expert! The truth can safely be assumed to be the opposite of their declarations! People should ignore experts like these, and instead should study all the pros and cons and follow their intuition.
The world would perish were all men learned,
said Thomas Fuller, but he would not have recommended that everyone should be ignorant instead. Ordinary people are not tied to the conventions of the professional man. They can be more creative, use their intuition and make imaginative leaps with no worries about reputation—they can think the unthinkable. They can speculate about hidden agendas and where the truth lies. They can reject bullshit.
Some experts on the biosphere of the earth often sound like public relations executives for the polluters. They do not wish to ridicule “legitimate concern” about the state of the terrestrial environment, but simply to “place in perspective the puny attempts of industrialists and farmers” in polluting the environment. They compare them with what nature has done in the past through glaciations, volcanic eruptions and meteoric collisions. Despite all of these natural disasters, whose scale dwarfs the attempts of man, life continues. There is no need to worry about human pollution—the earth has been able to cope with far worse. All species modify their environment just by being alive. Humanity is no different and cannot degrade his surroundings to the point of extinction.
They conclude: “Our power to destroy the world, or even ourselves, is quite imaginary, a product of our hubris. ”
Yet, elsewhere they tell us the control systems of the earth would break down if the human population were to reach ten billion. Mankind would then desperately have to artificially maintain what formerly were self-regulatory feedback systems. We would no longer have a natural environment that sustained life but a “spaceship earth” with life support systems provided by the occupants.
Unless, of course, we succumb to “gigadeath”, in which case mankind will have done—simply through procreating—what these same experts claimed was “quite imaginary, a product of our hubris”.
And why chose ten billion as the danger level? What if he has overlooked some factor and the figure is five billion? Then the threshold has already been crossed and we are passengers of spaceship earth without realizing it. Experts have unquestioning faith in their own pronouncements no matter how arbitrary they may be. Yet, we accept them.
One expert, James Lovelock, writes:
Each time we significantly alter part of some natural process of regulation or introduce some new source of energy or information, we are increasing the probability that one of these changes will weaken the stability of the entire system, by cutting down the variety of response.
Bravo! Surely urgent action is merited to make sure we do not increase the probability that some danger point is exceeded. What does he recommend? No need to panic—there is,
ample time and every inclination on the part of scientists to investigate and prove or disprove allegations, and then leave it to the law-makers to decide rationally what should be done.
He wants to involve a cabal of experts. Not only are the scientific experts to mull and ponder over the diagnosis but the political experts are then to debate it in the legislature and legal experts are to test it in courtrooms. Too bad if the patient dies in the meantimee.
Others are less sanguine. We are staring into a murky crystal ball and cannot clearly foresee the future; if we waited five years hoping the ball would clear, the vision awaiting us would be all the more horrific. Far from there being ample time, no time to study, no time to understand the cybernetics of our environment, no time to be certain, no time to decide what we can safely do. Deterioration continues daily. We must stop the damage now. But we may already be too late!
We are all, let alone the experts, indifferent to the fate of the earth. We do not seem to have grasped that we are on the list of endangered species, and as more go, so we get nearer to the top.
Leadership and Power
One of the psychological differences between humans and other animals is that some human desires, unlike those of animals, are incapable of complete satisfaction. The activities of animals are inspired by the needs of survival and reproduction and, with few exceptions, do not exceed what these needs make imperative.
Yet, when humans are secure in their desire to have a livelihood, they usually do not cease to be active. Some motivating force is found in all but the laziest minority of people. Human beings have no limit to envies and ambitions that motivate effort to achieve them. Snobbery and ambition goad us into seemingly unnecessary exertion though our basic needs have been satisfied.
We begin with little and feel just a little more would satisfy us, but mostly we are wrong. These desires seem insatiable and infinite, and only in the appreciation of the infinity of our kinunity with Nature can they be satisfied.
Every human wants to be God, and priests encourage the desire through the dream of immortality. Often though, ambitious people, like Milton’s Satan, will not admit the impossibility of the desire. They refuse to admit the limits of human ambition, effectively rejecting patriarchal religious norms, though often professing a profound piety. They dream, like most of us, of being Alexander the Great, but want to be really acclaimed a god, and determine to be a god at any cost! Hubris it might be but it drives them, and poses difficulties for cooperative and symbiotic existence in the world.
They want to be god and have their own way, and the world is of minor importance to a god. Humans have reached their evolutionary success from cooperation. But, we find ourselves training and encouraged to compete, and expect adoration or fear, for our personal success. At an impasse, we might have to yield or compromise or rebel, causing social tensions or violence. Morals and laws were developed in earlier times to restrain personal self-assertion in favour of a cooperative society.
The rewards of being a god are power and glory. Some prefer power while some prefer glory, but usually glory necessitates power unless the honour is posthumous or trivial, such as winning at football. Normally, power is the way to glory.
Power has many forms, such as wealth, armaments, civil authority, influence on opinion. All forms are equally valid—equally powerful! Working class and middle class popularist politicians seek wealth from first gaining civil power, and a voice among public opinion makers, for propaganda is a form of power. Once it has created a unanimous or even a majority opinion, propaganda can offer irresistible power. But civil or media power is usually needed to achieve it.
Perhaps the failing of democracy is that those who offer themselves for election are not necessarily the best people but they are the ones who most want power, and such people rarely seek that power for anything other than selfish reasons. If only power-grubbers are on offer, then power grubbers are what we get. Such people are not representative of Middle Britain or Middle America. If they seem it, then it is a tribute to the power of their propaganda machine!
Few people do not dream of power but for most people it is tempered by other desires. Those whose love of power is not strong are unlikely to have much influence on events. It is a sad fact that any genuinely altruistic seekers after power cannot be distinguished from their hyped-up selfish colleagues.
When comfort is assured, ambition pursues power rather than wealth though, in our society wealth is often a route to power. In the US, particularly, wealthy men dream of spending some of their riches to secure power as a state governor or President of the Federation.
We can only naturally consume so much, and with a minimum of stewardship, we can therefore satisfy our wants without destroying our environment. In the twentieth century, we have proved that the satisfaction of economic needs does not protect the resources of the world. Conspicuous consumption is not driven by a particular love of comforts or gadgets, it is a display of power, and more especially a display of power by those who manipulate us into believing that we “do” want comforts and gadgets.
It is essential for human survival that our leaders are chosen only for their sincere desire to serve the world. If that proves impossible then people should be chosen at random, as they are for jury service, and obliged by law to serve as representatives for a restricted period. Astrology would be as good a random method of selection as any, and yet can be presented as selecting people of admirable quality. It can hardly be worse than we have already.
