Aweh, Dear Ruminants and Groupies,
Please Respect My Suffering
There are people suffering from war, hunger, homelessness, and diseases for which treatment is unavailable.
Then there is me.
I have a PhD and an internet connection. Every morning, these two unfortunate circumstances collide.
I encounter something so confidently idiotic that I briefly lose the will to participate in civilisation. Then I make coffee, inspect my investments and resume suffering.
Please do not minimise my experience. Being a member of the educated liberal elite is exhausting. I read, consider the evidence and construct a careful argument, complete with qualifications and an acknowledgement of uncertainty. Some fuckwit then types “DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH” beneath a conspiracy theory and receives ten thousand likes.
My distress is considerable. Not only is he wrong, but nobody has asked about my PhD.
What Exactly Is an Educated Person?
Before we get carried away with my suffering, we should establish whether I’m actually educated or merely overqualified.
Is education a bachelor’s degree? A master’s? A doctorate? Must the certificate be in Latin, or will an institution with parking and a competent accounts department suffice?
Would a PhD in early Byzantine church music qualify?
Certainly, although I would recommend introducing yourself cautiously at a braai.
Such a person may have spent years examining manuscripts, mastering languages and distinguishing evidence from conjecture. These are substantial achievements, even if nobody cares.
What about somebody who scrapes through a bachelor’s degree at the prestigious Wharton School of Finance?
Does the institution’s reputation automatically transfer to the graduate? Can one subsequently spend the early hours of every morning posting vulgar, inarticulate, boastful, prejudiced bullshit, while waving one’s Wharton credentials as proof of a superior intellect?
A PhD and Other Inflatable Devices
I possess a PhD in chemical engineering.
This establishes that I once investigated something sufficiently narrow, for sufficiently long, to persuade several overqualified people that I deserved one.
It does not establish that I understand constitutional law, monetary policy, human relationships or why the milk frother has stopped working.
Nevertheless, I find the title reassuring.
“Dr Bruce Young” sounds like somebody whose opinions deserve consideration. Then I read half an article about labour law and explain it to Nerine, my wife, who is a subject matter expert. My knowledge is close to zero, but fortunately my confidence remains unaffected. She must deal with the exquisite irritation of being lectured in her own field by a man whose principal qualification is that he has opened a browser.
An educated person should presumably be curious, reasonably well read, capable of following an argument and willing to change his mind. He should also be able to roam beyond his speciality to engage with history, science, politics, literature and even early Byzantine church music without demanding that everything relate to his thesis.
Otherwise, he may simply be a highly trained idiot: formidable within three square metres of human knowledge and hopelessly lost everywhere else.
Unfortunately, none of these qualities requires a PhD.
Some people acquire them without university. Others pass through university without acquiring them.
A PhD may reveal less about genius than about persistence and an unusually high tolerance for drudgery. I spent years worrying a small problem to death and survived the revisions. This deserves some recognition, but perhaps not the assumption that I should now be consulted on the future of civilisation.
Trespassing With Academic Credentials
The difficulty begins when curiosity starts to resemble authority.
I would like to discuss history, economics, religion and politics without submitting four additional theses. I might even investigate Byzantine church music.
Here we encounter epistemic trespassing: venturing beyond your expertise and making judgments you may lack the knowledge to justify.
It is a useful concept with an unnecessarily pompous name.
There is a difference between visiting another intellectual neighbourhood and declaring yourself its mayor.
I can read about economics. I can question an economist. I can notice when an argument has lost all contact with reality and wandered off into fantasy.
But my understanding of distillation does not automatically qualify me to reorganise the Reserve Bank.
The difficulty is recognising where curiosity ends, and unwarranted authority begins.
My own excursions are interdisciplinary inquiry.
Other people’s are reckless epistemic trespassing.
You can see why the distinction requires careful scholarly supervision.
By me.
Too Long; Didn’t Read
Long-form writing has not disappeared. You are reading some, unless you have already skipped to the conclusion.
But it demands something increasingly awkward: sustained attention.
A writer must earn that attention. Length is no guarantee of depth. Academics have demonstrated this repeatedly, often across several volumes.
The world is complicated. Most serious choices involve trade-offs, uncertainty and costs that don’t disappear because somebody promises free stuff. You can act on the best available evidence and still get a bad result. Often there is no easy answer, only imperfect options with consequences you need to understand.
This requires thinking, which is an irritating amount of work when you could simply blame immigrants.
Unfortunately, this takes longer than announcing that somebody is a communist.
So, I labour over paragraphs while wondering whether the reader has wandered off to watch a Labrador stealing a sausage.
I understand the temptation.
I, too, would like to see the Labrador.
Perhaps civilisation can wait until we establish whether he gets away with it.
Wharton, My Wounded Vanity and the Abyss
After listening to its most boastful alumnus, I’m struggling to understand why Trump bothered founding Trump University when Wharton had already given him everything he needed to confuse bullshit with education.
This creates an awkward situation.
I work in a business school.
Apparently, my objection to credential worship contains a generous exemption for credentials resembling mine.
There is a similar problem with my liberalism. I favour open discussion, intellectual humility and the free exchange of ideas. Then somebody exchanges an idea I consider moronic, and I become nostalgic for editorial gatekeepers.
So here I sit: educated, liberal, privileged and traumatised. Some of my anguish concerns the actual damage being done. The rest is the wounded vanity of a man who spent years learning to think and assumed this entitled him to be heard.
Instead, I get to watch a fucking idiot command the world’s attention while I write an obscure blog.
Retirement approaches. I shall continue reading, writing, pissing into the wind and screaming into the abyss, convinced that a carefully revised paragraph might yet make a difference. The abyss has offered no encouragement, and the wind continues to return my contributions.
Perhaps the answer is another PhD, this time from the Wharton School of Finance. If a mere bachelor’s degree can produce such spectacular certainty on every subject known to humanity, a PhD should finally eliminate the last traces of doubt, restraint and contact with reality that are holding me back.
I could stop agonising over evidence and begin posting my ultimate wisdom at three in the morning, in capital letters.
Until next time
Bruce
