When Experts Shed No Light

My favorite commentator, Michael Barone, writes today about the obsession of Democrats and others with covering up the very possibility that Saddam Hussein was dealing with Al Qaeda before the Iraq invasion. Here is the link. For Democratic politicians, it's clear why they are obsessed: they need to destroy Bush by destroying any support for the Iraq war. But there is another group (also likely Democrat and liberal in politics) for whom there is another motive closer to their resume: so-called Middle East experts. As Barone puts it, the "subtleties" of their supposed expertise in the Middle East, honed with years of training and living as experts, just can't accept the possibility that the radical anti-American religious terrorists of Al Qaeda would have ever cooperated with the anti-American secularist terrorist regime of Saddam Hussein. It just seems to be an unquestioned axiom of Middle East experts.

Most of us have seen the dangers of pompous and overly self-assured experts before in many other areas of life. As Catholics, we know that many psychological experts advised bishops that sexual molesters could be returned to parishes. You can find experts who will tell you that sexual promiscuity is good, that sexual cohabitation before marriage is not harmful, that abortion can be good for the "health" of the mother even when there is no danger of death, and that homosexuality is not an objective disorder. You can also find experts in academia who will make absurd assertions with no backing whatsoever. In the field of biblical studies, you can find experts concocting out of thin air the genealogy of texts with aplomb and certainty. Even worse, you can find them concocting new biographies of Jesus based on their own imaginations and agendas. The Da Vinci Code is just the popular expression of what has gone on in certain sectors of biblical studies for years. In medicine and psychology, the history of misguided theories and diagnoses, often announced with an air of absolute certainty, is another dismal history of expert failure combined with arrogance and great human cost.

Expertise is good; but, given our fallen nature, our tendencies to see what we want to see, a lot of expert advice has to be taken with healthy skepticism and a grain of salt. Much of what passes as expertise is an expression more of arrogance than of reliable knowledge. So it is not shocking that in the field of Middle East studies--a quintessentially "soft" field where highly subjective impressions and hypotheses can be easily maintained unchecked by reality--that we have political agendas driving experts to assert things with an air of certainty and finality that does not fit the evidence. The old saying from Vergil's Aeneid was "Beware of [literally, "I fear"] Greeks even bearing gifts" (Timeo Danaos et dona ferentis). Beware of experts bearing gifts for the anti-Bush agenda and for the purpose of covering up the failure of their expertise to keep up with realities in the Middle East.