Where Everyone's an Expert

Mad Dog recalls, only dimly, some novel by Flannery O'Connor--may have been Wise Blood-- which had a character, a twenty-something, who feels "called" to preach God's word and he stands on the street corner proclaiming "truths" which he just simply "knows, " like, "There is no man without sin."  This scene made a great impression on Mad Dog, because it portrayed so clearly that desire to be a person who "knows." This was an unschooled, thoroughly ignorant young person who, on some level, understood his own paucity of knowledge, rigorously examined,  and he wanted to become a person of wisdom and knowledge, without the drudgery of acquiring wisdom and knowledge. 

There is almost an Augenblick diagnosis of the man who has only phony, dreamed up knowledge: He is wide eyed, excited, eager, while the man who has acquire knowledge slowly, systematically, rigorously is slumped shouldered, burdened by the effort and almost burdened by the weight of his knowledge. Where the ignorant zealot is eager to convey the simple truths he knows, the genuine article has no simple truths, only complex truths. 

This will for instant understanding and enlightenment may be the same impulse which causes people to blog--instant punditry: I speak, therefore I know.

The same impulse is clearly what fuels many people to talk, read, exchange about politics and the blood brothers of politics: economics and sociology.

You can see this will to be a savant in Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and New Gingrich. They all share that sense of urgency, the will to preach, to make others understand the truths they "know," truths, which of course, are only the containers for the realities these men wished were true.

When Ted Cruz says the battle over Obamacare is really the first skirmish in the war between those who would abolish the free market in this country and those who believe in capitalism and free market, he is preaching his gospel on the street corner, speaking in tongues.

When Rand Paul says we need to cut government spending and reduce deficits because government spending is unsustainable and will cause economic catastrophe, he knows these things because he wants to believe them. Paul Krugman, of course, looking at history and at numbers and debating this proposition over the years, knows  just the opposite: We ought to be spending more in times of slow economic growth.

These articles of political and economic faith cannot be tested with double blind, randomized, prospective, controlled studies.  That's what makes them articles of faith. 

It is precisely because nobody can really know whether more spending will save us or sink us that the actors proclaiming, declaiming, exclaiming do so with such urgency and drama--when you don't really know, you better look like you have no doubt.