Jordan Peterson’s much awaited fourth book, We Who Wrestle With God, was quite a disappointment. His robust and courageous opposition to the madness of wokeism over the past decade has been an inspiration for many, and probably single-handedly he has done much to slow its spread in the English speaking world. But being a gifted defender of common-sense, a brilliant lecturer in psychology, and one of the world’s best known public intellectual does not make one a biblical exegete. I think that even the great Jordan Peterson has fallen into a trap which has become all too common since the advent of the web: laptop expertise. Peterson is an extremely accomplished academic in his field but he is not by any stretch of the imagination an expert in the very complicated science of scriptural exegesis.
This got me thinking about a bit of a paradox: we need to entrust ourselves to the guidance in all kinds of areas, and yet you already need to have a certain expertise to recognise a non-expert. In the area of academic publishing, experts in the field carry out expert reviews of their peers’ work. As established experts they have the competence to pass judgement on whether a work is, or is not as the case may be, well researched and worthy of attention.
And of course virtually nothing on line is peer-reviewed in this way. Last year a 1993 The New Yorker cartoon was sold at auction for $175,000, setting a record for the highest price ever paid for a comic. By then it had come one of the most popular ever cartoons and online memes. The cartoon shows a large dog sitting on a chair at a desk, with a paw on the keyboard of the computer, speaking to a smaller dog sitting on the floor beside him. The caption reads: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” This meme clearly resonated with many as it addressed one of the most salient – and negative – features of the web: anybody can set themselves up as whatever they like online. We have entered the age of the pundit.
It must be a bit depressing for those who have spent many years learning a trade: scriptural exegesis, epidemiology, mechanics or whatever it may be, to be confronted with those who consider themselves competent in the subject on the basis of some online research. That is not to say that one can be respectably self-taught in some subjects, and yet it is virtually impossible to rival the knowledge and the expertise of a professional who has studied and worked for years in the area. We saw it with COVID: during the lockdowns with all that time on their hands, too many people became overnight experts in the most arcane aspects of epidemiology. In this case the problem of online punditry seems to have been exacerbated by the apparent failure of many of those that society relied on to have the right answers: the experts. Both their predictions and their proposed solutions seem (to a non-expert like myself) to have often been grossly mistaken. I suppose experts in epidemiology and community health are obliged now to do their own stock-taking.
In my mechanic’s workshop there’s a sign on the wall saying that a consultation about an engine costs €50, and €100 if you already know the answer from YouTube. I always keep my mouth firmly shut when I’m dropping in with an engine problem to be sorted out.