Consider this a continuation of a two-part series I wrote last week about two Supreme Court rulings that trimmed the sails of federal bureaucrats. Specifically part two.
This sequel is a response to the criticism of one particular phrase I wrote describing those Justices who advocated for the (now defunct) ‘Chevron doctrine’ as appearing “… to naively believe (like many highly educated people) in an imaginary omniscient infallibility of so-called ‘expert’ bureaucrats.”
A reader strongly disagreed with my characterization of “highly educated people” being “naive”.
The critique of my critique of the “highly educated” came from a person signing himself as a “professor” (name withheld to protect the naive) who explained in no uncertain terms that he was “certainly NOT naive!” — then went on to give me examples of his lack of naivety, most of which entailed undisguised disgust at Donald Trump for having appointed the “dumbass justices who overruled the Chevron doctrine”.
As is usual, I did not respond directly to the professor preferring to present my response here for my readers to judge.
Being myself what society (and, presumably, the “Professor”) might consider a “highly educated” person, I will rely on my education to explain my mockery of the “highly educated”. But first I’ll explain that my idea of an education may not meet the professor’s, or the “highly educated” intellectual elites’ definition.
My notion of an education has nothing to do with having earned an advanced degree – which is, in reality, just a mechanism to expose students to what has been learned and written about by others. Anyone who has been properly taught to read can acquire the same on their own without the need of attending college. https://pagosadailypost.com/2024/04/11/a-different-point-of-view-by-inclination-a-researcher/
While professors can provide useful insight to what students read, that insight is filtered through the professor’s subjective bias. Not only is that bias directly expressed by professors during classes, but is inherent in what they assign to read for their courses — which these days, in most American colleges, is tilted toward a ‘progressive’ world view.
Professorial bias can have its place. When I was teaching trial practice to law students I made it clear that much of what I told them was based on my own courtroom experience – since my experience was what the school hired me for. I also told them to only take whatever I taught them that they found useful to develop their own courtroom method.
But I was teaching “practical skills”, not theory. What’s the difference? Practical skills evolve from what works in practice, while theories are just that — theoretical — which often don’t work in the real world.
Which brings us to the topic at hand — a naive belief in an imaginary omniscient infallibility of so-called “expert” bureaucrats. Here’s where my education (eg. ability to read proficiently) comes into play. Just stay with me.
Friedrich Meinecke (1862-1954) was a German professor of history and editor of a history journal, until he got removed from that job by the Nazis, despite the fact he was antisemitic. (The ‘why’ of that apparent oxymoron is beside the point here.)
After WWII he wrote a book critical of Nazi Germany entitled Die deutsche katastrophe (The German Catastrophe) part of which illustrates my point. I don’t pretend to read German, so I’m relying on others to tell me what he said — one person in particular, historian Niall Ferguson
Ferguson says one of Meinecke’s explanations for the emergence of the Nazis was that German educated elites became “excessively technocratic” and at the same time “ethically uncoupled”. The best educated elites came to believe that government bureaucrats knew best because, after all, those bureaucrats were among the best educated elites.
At that time in Germany, civil servants (bureaucrats) were the products of universities — much the same as in modern America where the managerial class of our bureaucracies are university grads. Most mid- and upper level federal bureaucrats come from what are considered “prestigious” universities. So of course they trend to believe in their own superior knowledge of how government is supposed to work. More dangerous to society, as Meinecke describes, is how this supposed sense of superior technical wisdom about a subject they administer can become a belief in moral superiority — resulting in ethics being sublimated to expertise such that the ends justify the means.
Where can that lead? Well… more than half of the attendees at the 1942 ‘Wannsee conference’ held doctorate degrees. That was the meeting where the ‘final solution to the Jewish question’ – gas chambers – was formalized. All the attendees were among the senior management of government bureaucracies. As illustrated in Hitler’s Philosophers “many civil servants … have been disclosed as central to bolstering the power of the tyrant.”
That educated Germans would succumb to such amoral bureaucracy can be traced, in part, to another German. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) was a philosopher whose ideas greatly influenced the higher education and belief system of the German elites.
I’m not going to offer an thorough explanation of Hegel’s philosophy of government, but simply stated, he espoused that sublimation of individuals to government is the epitome of human achievement.
His ideas can be summed up by one quote from him: “It is those who know, hoi aristoi, who ought to reign…” He believed bureaucrats to be the modern elite ruling aristocracy, by virtue of their superior education about how government should work.
But faith (literally) in the expertise of elite intellectual bureaucrats running the world is not limited to Germany. The Fabian Society was a 19th century London-based organization of elite English intellectuals dedicated to bringing about a socialist world order.
Hoi aristoi may be my new favorite phrase to describe pretentious intellectuals ! When I, who they presume to be among them by virtue of my advanced degree, openly mock their pretensions they direct a lot of hostility my way – the e-mail from the ‘Professor’ being an example.)
But are the attitudes of Hegel — and the highly educated at the Wannsee conference — just artifacts of history? Let’s see how the current hoi aristoi handled a more recent “solution” to a “question”… the COVID pandemic.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, and the other “experts” were wrong about nearly everything they advised governments to mandate in response to COVID.
“In summary, we find no patterns in the overall set of models that suggests a clear relationship between COVID-19 government responses and outcomes. Strong claims about government responses’ impacts on COVID-19 may lack empirical support.”
That’s the conclusion in ‘Epidemic outcomes following government responses to COVID-19: Insights from nearly 100,000 models published this month in Science Advances…
And that is what I mean by “… to naively believe (like many highly educated people) in an imaginary omniscient infallibility of so-called “expert” bureaucrats.” Many who enacted and enforced those mandates considered themselves ‘highly educated’, yet they naively followed what they were told to do by ‘expert’ health care bureaucrats — who were wrong.
And three (highly educated) Supreme Court Justices believing in the expertise of bureaucrats – uber alles – dissented from the idea that bureaucratic expertise can be questioned in the forum (courts) that our Constitution affords we the people to challenge government.
Gary Beatty
Gary Beatty lives between Florida and Pagosa Springs. He retired after 30 years as a prosecutor for the State of Florida, has a doctorate in law, is Board Certified in Criminal Trial law by the Florida Supreme Court, and is now a law professor.