Intellectual Authority and Its Discontents

We can’t break free of the circle of authority. Of course, I’m not denying that it’s possible to do truly original research—where you become the new authority—but that is not what we’re talking about here. Doing one’s own research almost never entails running the relevant experiments in virology oneself, or searching the Soviet archives oneself, or translating the speech from Arabic oneself, or interviewing the long-dead politician oneself. Most of the time, we simply have to trust that other people did their work responsibly, that their data isn’t fabricated, that they didn’t devote their entire careers to perpetrating an elaborate hoax. Again, there are exceptions—but they are simply not relevant most of the time. (That is what it means to be an exception.) Most of the time, if you no longer trust the experts, you’ve started trusting someone’s uncle.

For instance, you cannot, with any confidence, venture into a department of Middle Eastern studies at an American university and get a morally sane (much less accurate) account of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, or between western values and those of conservative Islam. But the reasons for that failure are also knowable, and ultimately correctable. One reason is that Qatar, an Islamic theocracy and patron of terrorists, has given more money to US universities than any other country on Earth has. This is a totally bizarre situation that fairly shrieks of intellectual corruption, if not suicide.