Where have all the experts gone? Far, far away
Pete the Stump left the pub last night without saying good night to anyone and without upsetting the barmaid by inviting her to his place for “a bit of rumpy-pumpy” after she shut the bar. Sometimes we feel sorry for him, even though he doesn’t deserve sympathy or forgiveness from anyone.
Pete is the village expert. He is especially expert on landowners’ obligations to keep drainage waterways (ditches to the rest of us) flowing freely. He pontificates, constantly, on the amount of parking, to the nearest inch, (he doesn’t approve of “the French way of measuring”) allowed to those whose houses front onto the village high street. Wikipedia could not match his expertise on racing pigeons, ferrets and greyhounds. He has more empathy with his birds and animals than he has with any of us his neighbours.
His self-appointed role as the village expert was not won by any recognisable award, other than that the other self-opinionated experts who went before him all died.
Pete is the oldest male in the village by three days, but his status as an expert has been stripped from him leaving him a shell of his former bombastic self. He is an expert in terminal decline. His going leaves a vacuum behind him.
The rot started in the Referendum argy-bargy that passed for debate. Expert after expert was dismissed as ‘stupid’ or ‘in the pay of those who pulled his strings’ or ‘doesn’t know what he is talking about’, or ‘what do experts know about anything?’ Even the expert Leavers, who abused all the experts on the other side and led us out of the EU, have proved not to be expert enough to avoid being dumped. Rough justice, but duly deserved.
No one has time for experts anymore.
When the word ‘expert’ becomes a term of mockery you remove one of the shorthand ways of quickly gathering information and developing insight. When you protest that all experts push a slanted and manipulated interpretation of facts, you silence all those who have spent years developing understanding of complex issues.
Without experts to guide those in charge we will be left with a form of leadership and government that is more akin to the barbarism of ‘might over right’ than it is to civilised democracy. Dictators and oligarchs know it all. They have no need of experts.
Pete the Stump left the pub, deflated by the expiry of his expert status. With him went the ability of anyone to take up the mantle of authority on a range of issues that govern the life of the village. Who now can chastise a landowner for not clearing his ditches? Who will mediate in parking disputes? Who will instruct trainers walking greyhounds that they too must carry a poo-bag? Who will determine that a young racing bird has been properly ringed and registered? The destruction of legal, financial, constitutional, international law experts in the Referendum debate has had more devastating consequences than was appreciated at the time.
The silence following Pete’s departure from the pub was broken quietly by a new incomer who has lived here for only twenty-three years. He began with, “I’m not an expert…” and paused to look around the table. That refrain will surely be heard at the start of all convoluted, drink-fuelled debates in pubs from now on by those not wishing to be subjected to gratuitous abuse and ridicule.
He was encouraged to go by the absence of voiced hostility. “I’m not an expert, but it seems to me, that in future we will have to find out things for ourselves. We will make our own decisions, rather than be fed information digested by others. That will be a good way to go, especially if we are ever again asked to decide something important that affects us all.”
We nodded, agreeing with him that he wasn’t an expert and he didn’t know about anything real because he worked in IT. He nodded in turn at our dismissal of his silly comment and ordered another pint of Peroni.
What a frightening thought, that one day electors might inform themselves before voting on critical issues, rather than going on the say-so of braying asses or the unthinking dictates of traditional and ancestral behaviours.
Pete the Stump is well out of it.
