The greatest sin in the muddled mess of ideas we have around democracy is to say that some people know more…

The greatest sin in the muddled mess of ideas we have around democracy is to say that some people know more than others. The cult of opinion forbids hierarchy when it comes to ideas, though we have hierarchies of expertise in every other area of life. Not accidental, a 🧵/1

Ideas/beliefs are the raw material of society. Even what we call physical objects or technologies, like cars, are really mostly ‘IP’. Modern conservatives know this, and much of their culture war is the attempt to completely control the flow of ideas in society. /2

They buy and set up mass media platforms, they fund think tanks that spew propaganda 24/7. They know that by controlling ideas, they control society. The assault on expertise for climate change and Covid is a graphic illustration of the fault-line in politics - always ideas. /3

Remember too that conservatives and the vested interests they represent are the overwhelming *minority* of people in our societies. The top 1%. They know that by controlling ideas, they have their leverage point to control everything else. The trick is to neuter or hijack…/4

…the existing institutional homes of expertise, such as media and universities, and then fund continuous campaigns and technologies (like social media) that encourage everybody else - most of us - to think democracy means our own opinions shaping society. /5

And that all these opinions are equal. Both patently false claims, and they know it, it’s the counterweight to them taking over the hierarchies of expertise that actually do shape society, and at the same time preventing criticism emanating from within these hierarchies by…/6

…turning the rest of the population against them, by describing them as privileged ‘elites’. There’s an own-goal dimension to this success though, to do with education. Cultural change starts in schools. DH Lawrence, himself originally a primary school teacher, saw this with…/7

…brutal, unpopular clarity. By refusing to accept that knowledge and ideas have hierarchies, that it’s not elitist to say a person is not suited for the ‘life of the mind’, we’ve created a hostility against expertise that it may be difficult to ever recover from. To quote…/8

“Every teacher knows that it is worse than useless trying to educate at least 50 per cent of his scholars. Worse than useless: it is dangerous; perilously dangerous. What is the result of it? Drag a lad who has no capacity for true learning or understanding through the…/9

…processes of education, and what do you produce in him, in the end? A profound contempt for education, and for all educated people. It has meant nothing to him but irritation and disgust…A little learning is a dangerous thing: how dangerous we are likely to be finding out. /10

A man who has not the soul, or the spirit, to learn and to understand, he whose petty education consists in the acquiring of a few tricks, will inevitably, in the end, come to regard all educated or understanding people as tricksters…the uninstructible outnumber the…/11

…instructible by a very large majority.” (From his ‘Education of the People.’) Why do we have no problem at all recognising hierarchies of expertise in every other area of life - plumbing, driving, singing etc. - but refuse to do the same for knowledge? /12

Because schools stopped believing it, in a disastrous attempt to create some sort of democracy of genius. Schools were seen as a political levelling ground for society itself, but this just turned them into job-training for business, when (gasp) most students didn’t turn out…/13

…to be geniuses. A well-motivated attempt to have more ‘inclusive’ education became a nightmare levelling of all expertise to the lowest common denominator. I’ve tweeted before about how society today was generated in high schools, that’s our culture generator, because…/14

…by severing the world of adolescents form the adult world and putting teenagers in schools, we generated an artificial culture there that is the only society they know. So when they leave school, that’s the culture they remake all of society as. /15

And that culture is hostile to expertise. So society now is as well, which the conservatives tap into. I was reminded of this talking to one of my old high school teachers. I went to a school in a poor area, with no history of academic achievement. A handful of us there…/16

…topped the whole town, against multiple selective high schools. We put the school on the map, academically. The response? Almost nothing, the school was and is still so infected with the democracy of education idea, that it became vital to almost downplay these results. /17

When I asked the same teacher if I was the first student from the school ever to achieve a PhD, he said ‘that sort of thing doesn’t matter in life, we all achieve in our own way’. A school like so many others which worships sporting achievement. As does Australian society. /18

Don’t be surprised if dumb is worshipped in society, when learning is the only human activity that isn’t allowed to have a hierarchy of status. And the libertarians will encourage you to critique this by caricaturing it as people being ‘up themselves’, elitist. /19

The jocks who won the school the blues and trophies were carried on cheering shoulders. Expertise isn’t about individuals telling everybody else how clever they are, it’s assessed collectively, by institutions, as sport and other activities are too. By unis, for example. /20

Libertarians shut down true expertise by pretending it’s clever-dicks talking down to everybody else. But learning has collective measures of quality, peer review, and it’s these that are the true libertarian enemy. Anything collective, anything public. They’ll encourage you…/21

…to cheer for sporting heroes and even musicians, because they don’t see those as a political threat. But they’ll tell you expertise in the running of a country is only about popularity. About letting the jocks win the academic awards too. /end