The Superstition of the Expert

There is a peculiar and noble sort of man who, upon seeing a village that has been half-wrecked by a flood, rushes to defend the town meteorologist. He does not defend him on the grounds that he correctly predicted the rain, but on the more curious grounds that his intentions were good, his instruments were the best available, and that to question him now is to invite a drought upon the land. The author of this article is just such a man, and his defense, while spirited, falls into the oldest and newest of heresies: the belief that the expert is more important than the experiment.

The whole essay is a magnificent attempt to prove that a conclusion is dangerous, and therefore the evidence for it must be untrue. The author fears that if the common man believes the doctors were clumsy, he will cease to believe in medicine altogether. This is like arguing that if a man discovers his cook has burnt the toast, he will henceforth resolve to live on air. The revisionists he decries are not, as he fears, proposing we burn down the hospital because a surgery went amiss. They are merely suggesting, in a rather English and understated way, that we ought to look at the patient who is now dead.

They are merely suggesting… that we ought to look at the patient who is now dead.

Our author performs a series of dazzling intellectual gymnastics to avoid the obvious. When confronted with the stark and stubborn fact of Sweden, which stands like a cheerful, unmasked man in a room full of suffocating people, he does not ask if the suffocation was necessary. Instead, he produces a chart to prove that the cheerful man was secretly miserable, and that the suffocating people were, in a deeper and more statistical sense, breathing freely. He tells us that a policy which produced five times more death than a neighbouring policy was, in fact, a failure that ought to have been more widely adopted. This is not logic; it is a loyalty oath to a hypothesis.

His most fantastical argument is reserved for the closing of schools. He argues that the experts and elites did not truly impose this strange new holiday upon the children, but that the parents themselves—the poor, the humble, the very people most harmed by it—clamoured for it. This is a very cunning defence. It is as if a king, having ordered his subjects to wear shoes on their heads, were to defend himself by saying, "But look how enthusiastically they are buying hats for their feet!" He mistakes the effect for the cause. The people were afraid because they were told, by every solemn voice of authority, to be afraid. To then use their fear as a justification for the policies that created it is an argument so perfectly circular that it is a wonder it does not spin off the page.

In the end, the author’s case rests not on facts, but on fear. He warns that if we look too closely at the blunders of the last plague, we shall be helpless before the next one. But the opposite is the terrible truth. The man who refuses to admit he took a wrong turn is doomed to walk in circles forever. The revisionist, for all his supposed "nihilism," is engaged in the most hopeful act of all: the act of learning from a mistake. The author, in his frantic defence of the mistake, is the one paving the road to the next disaster, a road paved, as always, with the very best of intentions.