Cult of the Expert

We live in a very organized world. Most of our daily lives are dominated by institutions, structures and protocols, which more or less create the preconditions and possible directions of our lives. These rational structures are in part inherited from the rationalist cultural revolutions of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. During that period of history a loosely connected feudal society rooted in prejudice and religious mysticism was transformed into a society of nation states with powerful national (monarchist) governments rooted in facts and scientific knowledge. The rational method was a way for scientist like Francis Bacon and Nicolai Copernicus to liberate themselves from church dogma and prejudice. It was also a method for a new secular elite to invoke the same rational principles to consolidate their power.

Democracy was not a product of the enlightenment. Democratic and participatory principles are much older than that, and probably date back to hunter-gatherer social habits. The great success of these rational methods is due to the greatly increased span of control you can achieve with them. The rationalist revolution in a nutshell is: big simple ideas used to organize and control large complex and dynamic environments. Rational structures allow you to design and organize large complex entities like factories and societies. The application of rational structure to the design and organization of complex entities celebrates its greatest success with its contribution to the industrial revolution. Industrial production, and the enormous social changes it has produced, is the great showcase for the merit of rational structure's dominance in our society. So we like our rational structures. They were an appropriate answer to a world dominated by irrational prejudice and abuse of power by the leading institution of the day (the Catholic Church). They have brought us enormous leaps in standards of living, a better educated population, which in turn led to a more democratic society. What could possibly be wrong here?

Like many successful systems, our rational structures posses inherent properties that can backfire. The very success of a system is often caused by the same aspects that eventually causes its demise. Rational structures divide things up. By pigeonholing reality into small manageable chunks the structure achieves its ability to control and stabilize large systems. Control, stability and efficiency are core values, they provide the raison d'etre for any organization based on principles of rationality and structure. To ensure the sustainability of a rationally structured organization the system uses strict rules. Everything outside and passing through the system has to be categorized rigidly and processed consistently and predictably.

What happens if such a system or structure runs into something it hasn't run into before? It cannot recognize the new object as such. The system's integrity demands that the new fact must be categorized according to existing categories, thus getting its stamp of recognition which enables the system to digest it. Of course in the process the real meaning of such a new fact is lost. It's newness and uniqueness has been lost. This is one of the reasons that truly rationally structured organizations cannot learn.
Another reason has to do with the role of knowledge within rationally structured organizations. These organizations are typically structured as a hierarchy. The relative strength of positions within the hierarchy is determined by how much knowledge relevant to other levels and positions in the hierarchy can safely be controlled. The knowledge you have or have access to, becomes one of the most important instruments for you to fulfill your agenda. Controlling knowledge means power, hence the profoundly rationalistic adage "Knowledge is Power". But this is a kind of relative power, having only meaning within the structure. Sharing or withholding knowledge are ways to consolidate positions of power. One may just as easily redefine the principle as "Secrecy is Power" for its implicit meaning is more compatible with actual practice. This leads to extreme forms of knowledge fragmentation within organizations. The degree to which this is reality can easily be observed all around us. Whether we look at universities, government institutions or large companies, knowledge is fragmented and each fragment, covering some subset of facts, becomes the domain of an 'expert', and so we naturally associate 'knowledge' with 'expertise'. Experts are all about knowledge, but only knowledge limited to their domain of expertise. The implication is straightforward and profound: any issues involving relevant facts across different domains of expertise become invisible to the rational structure. The facts required to see and understand the issues is present within the organization, within the structure, but they're not connected to each other, making it impossible to notice what is really going on. And so we have come to live in a fact-based reality, without understanding much of what goes on around us, let alone be in a position of thinking about effective strategies for dealing with what is happening around us. The Expert, addicted as he is to his knowledge domain, tends to dig deeper into his own area of expertise as some kind of defense against pressure from outside. The reaction is understandable, logical even, but only exacerbates the problem.

It is very difficult to change this for a different much more systemic reason. Rational systems tend to become self-justifying. The core of our rationality lies in our logical assumptions. One important assumption of the kind of rationality that dominates our society is that it is right. Rationality, and science--which is just an instance of applied rationality-- champions the use of method. The merit and justification of an outcome is determined by the method that produced the outcome. Scientist literally define their profession this way. Science is the investigation of nature following a certain (well defined) method in doing so. Following protocol is therefore a guarantee for quality. The rules of investigation are valid by definition. Validity is no longer related to outcome, only to method.
Now what happens if such a method-driven mentality encounters an anomaly, something, some fact, that does not seem compatible with the set of existing assumptions and conclusions. Step 1 is for the system to criticize the method with which this anomaly was found, which is consistent with everyday scientific practice. Whenever a scientist produces a remarkable and unexpected result her methods are critized first (personal attacks may follow later). The reason for the system to make such attacks is again logical. Since the rational method is valid by definition it cannot deal with exceptions. If a certain result, a certain fact, is not produced or reproducable by the rules of the system, the system itself collapses. The anomalous facts contradicts other facts that are produced or predicted by the system. Logicians call this Ex Falsum Sequitur Quodlibet: from the contradiction follows everything. It means that when a system becomes inconsistent, supporting both a fact and a denial of this fact, we no longer have anything to rely upon. The one contradiction means the entire system is faulty. In other words, the more strict the logic of your system, the more vulnerable the whole enterprise becomes. So science, and rational structures in general, have good (logical) reasons to avoid and deny the existence of those nasty facts that contradict the rules. In the meantime the world changes faster and faster in more and more unexpected ways, while our institutions remain inherently blind.

What are we to do?

How to do Change?

I was at a meeting of De Publieke Zaak last saturday, which left me with some fairly ambiguous feelings. De Publieke Zaak is a platform in which active citizens work together on ideas to improve the functioning of our government and society in general. I'm all for changing the dominance based power structure, blatantly inspired by the industrial paradigm, that charactirizes all institutions in my society. From schools to political parties. The system must change, or perish, is my belief still. But how to change such a system?

I went through some profound changes in how to answer this question. When I was young, I really believed in activism, change that is forced upon a system from outside. The ANC in South-Africa, Greenpeace, Amnesty International, and similar activist organisation were inspirations to me as a teen-ager. The idea was that you stay independent, so you can criticize the system from a position of independence. Later, when I was teaching in Hungary, being confronted with a very rigid, bureacratic, corrupt administrative system inside higher education, I realized that there is another avenue, and perhaps a more effective one. Being inside a system that I thought needed profound change, I at least had a chance to make an impact. To install new ideas and attitudes that would katalyse the changes I sought. I was aware of this different strategy, and discussed this often with like-minded friends. We agreed that there was something moral, and courageous, in joining the system, and tolerate its inhumanity, in order to create change from the inside.

I lost that fight. Mainly due to my reckless disregard of the political sensitivities inside the faculty. I learned that my uncompromising character had the effect of the proverbial elephant in the porcelain shop. I left the academy, and joined the corporate world. There I discovered that systems and relations are equally dominated by politics and power, and, believe me, I learned the hard way. I don't belong inside a large organization, so I joined a small internet start-up that we turned into a success within a year. There I learned something profound: business can be an arena for creation. This experience, and a number of others, has led me to understand that there is a third path to choose in answering the question of How to Change a System.

You can fight for change as an outsider, you can join the system and create change from within. You can also do something else. You can ignore the existing system, and all its undesirable characteristics, and create something else. In fact, this has proven to be the most effective answer for me. It is also the most difficult path, and that is probably why I took it. The part of me that is an educator decided to start a school, and now it exists: www.guuskieftschool.nl. The same realization, and the necessity of generating income for my family, also drove me to become an entrepreneur, and the result is Crossing Signals: www.xignals.com.

In addition to these creative efforts, I was able to participate in the ultimate act of creation, resulting in the birth of our son Timur. Now I'm really on the spot as an educator, because a parent has a huge responsibility with regard to the values, attitudes, behavior and degree of happiness that a child internalizes. I have been part in creating a new human being. This changes everything. Timur is also a system, with internal controls which are very much in development. He therefore depends greatly on influence from the outside (affection, respect, nourishment, nurturing, discipline, understanding, support etcetera). He is changing on the inside, based on his own internal values. He is being influenced and changed by me, his mother, the other kids in the creche. I myself am changing, and deliberately so, I wish to be a good father and a good human being, and there is some room for improvement there. Thinking about it in this way changes my perspective on the question of How to Change a System yet again. Inside change, outside change, new creation. These are all forces at play in the same field, interacting, clashing, sometimes enhancing each other, always moving. In the end it is a question that has no simple answer, which is true for most questions.

Realism revisited

I was reading a newspaper the other day, something I rarely do, and came across an article written by John Gray in which he puts forward his case for a new embrace of realism. Dr. Gray is a philosopher and professor at the London School of Economics. I agree with much of what he says, but most of what I agree with is trivial, at least in my eyes. There is no hope of engaging the problems in todays world through any kind of dogmatic, idealistic let alone ideological thinking. In this sense Gray is fighting a noble battle against anti-rationalist trends (often inspired by religion) alongside staunch defenders of our scientific tradition like Richard Dawkins. We certainly need more of such voices in a chaotic world with daunting problems of complexity that is not at all helped by a resurgence, or should we say regression, of non-rationalist dogmatic religious system.

I am no great apologist for rationality. We as human are certainly only very partially rational. But our ability to reflect and rationalize is certainly one of the great mechanisms for learning to manage our vicious unconscious drives and at times boundless violence towards each other.
I agree with Gray, as I do with Dawkins, that it is important to create alternatives to the voices of impassioned anti-rationalism, but I certainly disagree with some of Gray's other suggestions.

The analysis is blatantly based on mainstream conceptions of 'reality', and therefore the espoused 'realism' is presuposed. This is still business as usual. Philosophy is the art of both exposing and creating unexamined presupositions. In this article Gray describes the neo-conservatives as pursuing an agenda of 'global democratic revolution'. I'm certain such terms occur in the writings of Rumsfeld et alii, but these neo-cons are the ones who have systematically sabotaged their own American democracy, with illigitemate wars (Nicaragua), electoral fraud (2004), and the insanity of an ever growing prison industrial complex. Attricuting the term 'democratic' to the American system of government is commiting a semantic crime.
In the end Gray is a rationalist in the old school tradition. An enlightenment man who believes that universal concepts, inspired by humanism and a scientific worldview, can save the day. And, much as the naive philosopher in me might wish otherwise, he is wrong there.
To illustrate my point I will put my finger on exactly where I think he turns concepts upside down. Gray argues that we will always have conflicts in this world (something I agree with), and need not dabble in utopianism. His argument is that the conflicts are about differing needs, and that universal values can help us mitigate these conflicts. This is incorrect. The conflicts in the world are all about values, these conflicts exist because of the fact that there are no 'universal' values. You can make a much stronger arguments that it is the needs that are Universal, if only for the fact that we share biological needs throughout our own species and with other animals, and we would be wise not to underestimate the degree to which we are biological creatures. Homo Sapiens Sapiens is a special kind of animal, but an animal still. Culture and technology are fascinating phenomena, but no reason to distinguish fundamentally between us and all other creatures in nature. All traditionally constructed formal rigid distinctions between man and animal, juxtaposing man against nature, are easily dismantled or 'deconstructed'. Homo Sapiens? Most of our drives stem from our limbic system, not our cerebral cortex. Homo Habilis? Many animals use tools, and the sonar technology dolphins have built into their sinuses or the electrical sensitivity of shark senses are tools of extraordinairy and superior quality. Home Ludens? Play is everywhere in nature. We are less unique than we think, and we are still too arrogant.

Paranoia in the Information Age

When I was studying logic we learned a number of different ways to formulate so called truth conditions in the different systems of logic, or 'languages' we were fooling around with. Some of my friends were studying Derrida and the other post modernists at the same time, and we would have interesting, sometimes confusing, and usually polemic discussions. We logicians learned that truth is a fundamental point of reference for the semantics of any formal system (including presumably post-modern philosophy). The students of Derrida would hold that 'truth' is a social construct, contextual, ambiguous, and therefore entirely relative. Of course rendering it relative does not make it meaningless. I consider myself greatly influenced by Nietzsche's writings, and I always loved his sharp criticism of the complacency and hypocrisy in many traditionally accepted 'truths', so I’ve never been very hostile to the ideas of the postmodernists, although I’ve never felt completely satisfied with them either.
Logic does not tell you anything about truth, it tells you something about the legitimacy of an argument. Truth is something we know from the facts, and no matter how much I appreciate the value of the insight that meaning is socially constructed -- eloquently treated in Wittgenstein's “Philosophical Investigations” --, facts are facts. We need facts. Even in a world where the observer and the observed exist in a relationship of mutual influence -- an idea that permeates oriental thinking but was forcefully inserted into western thinking by the theory of quantum mechanics -- facts are still meaningful reference points. 'Truth' may be more of a social construct than our scientific worldview would be comfortable with, facts may even be influenced by consciousness itself, this still does not mean that anything goes. At least I would like to think so.

Now we live in an ‘information age’, which is one way of referring to the developmental stage that follows the industrial age. We see that the amount of information increases explosively. More and more pieces of information, some of which contains truth, are available to an ever-increasing part of humanity. The universe of digital information, “cyberspace”, has expanded globally and inspired a great hope for knowledge sharing, empowerment, democratization and the dissemination of truth.

We have more information, more media, more communication, more interaction, yet are exposed to less and less truth. We increasingly live in a world of lies. Political spin, disinformation, semi-facts, the madness of corporate ads everywhere, truly a society of the spectacle. The acceptance of ‘truths’ is a function of media access, repetition, and the ability to avoid a dialogue on facts. Facts may still exist, but they have little bearing on the information that is made available. The recent WMD controversy is only one poignant example. This problem is fairly well documented. Activist and scholar Noam Chomsky has been crusading against political lies for decades (on political lies read his "Manufacturing Consent"), but there is enough other material. On corporate lies you read Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber’s "Toxic Sludge is good for you", on mass media fabrications there is the recently produced documentary “Outfoxed”, there is Al Franken's "Lies, and the Lying Liars who tell them", and a whole range of books on the inaccuracies surrounding the September 11th tragedy, of which Michael Rupperts seminal “Crossing the Rubicon” is arguably the best researched.

If information has become disassociated from facts, is the ‘information age’ and its concomitant ‘knowledge society’ still such a good idea? Is it a step forward? Is the internet, with its decentralized subversive qualities, a force to balance the spin and interest-driven anti-facts influencing our personal and collective awareness, or does it generate more opportunities for creating lies and distorting truths? The ultra-democratic internet itself is not going to protect us from lies.
Should we just give up on truth?

It is a fact that the ability for us as individuals to check the facts behind the information is disappearing, but this is not only an effect of the internet. This ability disappeared a long time ago. We hear a lot of news from areas in the world to which we have no access. Most television news shows may just as well be completely fabricated. Paranoid as it may sound, how are we to know?

As facts become more difficult to find and know, and this arguably undercuts the legitimacy of some of our beliefs, something else becomes more important. In Jurgen Habermas’ theory of communicative actions he distinguishes between truth and truthfulness. These two concepts have their relevance in different domains of reality. Truth is something determined by objective reality, it is an aspect of statements, and it can be observed or proven by a repeatable experiment. In the absence of such guaranteed foundations of knowledge, i.e. facts, truthfulness becomes relevant, and it is a crucial notion in the domain of social relations. Truthfulness is about integrity; it is an aspect of humans. It is about being trustworthy in your communication; telling the truth about your inner state. Is someone expressing what they believe to be true, or are they deliberately (or inadvertently) distorting it? Truth and truthfulness do not coincide; someone may be truthful in expressing a statement without the statement being true. There is therefore no external test for truthfulness, it is derived from trust. If I believe you are being truthful I will trust you. The interest-driven communication specialists, “spin-doctors”, marketers, PR firms, understand this. People listen to and believe you because they perceive you as being truthful; it has nothing to do with facts. This idea explains the success of the most important PR innovation of the 20th century, conceived of by Edward Bernays: “third party techniques” where you create a seemingly independent and trustworthy third party to communicate messages that would be hard swallow from your own mouth (e.g. “smoking does not cause health problems).

All this puts great emphasis on the notion of trust. We need to develop very keen instruments in gauging the truthfulness of what we hear. Truthfulness is not a property of messages (truth is) but of people. That is a kind of leverage that can be used. The con artist is friendly and charming, but does NOT have your best interest in mind, even though he says he does. To gain trust it is crucial to exhibit those qualities commonly associated with trustworthiness. We live therefore in a world in which we more and more will find the qualities we associate with truthfulness (charm, charisma, power) used to package blatant and dangerous lies that jeopardize the interests of all but the manipulators themselves. The corporate message saying that profit is not the most important object, the politically biased journalist claiming to be completely objective, the pharmaceutical company claiming that its new anti-depressant has no side effects. This is how the world has been turned upside down. This is the modern paranoia.

Soul

I grew up with Errol Garner and Oscar Peterson, and Miles Davis and Duke Ellington. Paul Desmond was my favorite musician before I discovered the brilliance of Charlie Parker and John Coltrane, and Dexter Gordon and Sonny Rollins and all those guys. I remember myself as a 10 years old kid in his room on a Sunday afternoon, playing his tapes on a Phillips portable tape recorder… playing Brubecks Time Out.

Jazz.

I remember someone, I think it was Wynton Marsalis, explaining that the word Jazz originated in the brothels of New Orleans -- one of the few places where black folk could develop their unique art in freedom -- as a eufemism for what men do with women in brothels. You could have worse asscociations, allthough in a puritan culture such connotations have a tendency to work against you. Many great musicians in fact resented the term.
But I grew up with Jazz, and it is still where my soul is. Only now am I starting to understand more about what music means, the depth to which it touches us, and what music means as a culture force: much more than a mere art-form. African-American improvised music is where my soul is, its where I’m at, its what makes my heart sing, and what cures my despair.

Jazz, of course, is also an artistic movement, or rather a stream of creativity that exemplifies some of the great tragedies of unrecognized genius and the creativity-destruction (self-destruction) dynamic that seems to befall so many truely creative spirits in our world -- myself included. Tragedy and beauty; such an ancient dialectic.

Dialectics

I have a critical mind. That is not always a blessing. Coupled with impatience and a strong sense of justice, my critical mind can be a source of great unrest. I have been possessed with an interest in contoversy for as long as I can remember. I have always enjoyed asking the questions that lead to the opposite of what is being claimed. If someone is saying this, what happens if the opposite is true? If this is what we ought to do, what happens if we do the opposite? If I am supposed to believe this, what happens if I believe the opposite?

If matter is ultimately reducible to very heavy, extremely dense pingpong balls called protons and neutrons, what happens if that is not true? If the force of gravity and the electromagnetic force have no direct relation to each other, what if that is wrong? If you tell me you want the best for me and you actually believe your own words, what if that still is not true? If you say happiness is produced by a practicing a certain conduct, what if you are wrong? If you tell me this behavior is inadmissible, what if you are wrong?

I will never stop asking such questions. Of course it is necessary to reach conclusions at some point, otherwise I will forever yoyo between the truth and falsehood of all propositions. I imagine then that my decision to accept a certain answer, thus bringing the critical dialectic to an end, will be a product and a revelation of the center of my beliefs. My true self, my original face.

Introspection

Obstacles to development: I've had a series of events happen to me at a young age that effectively destroyed a lot of self-value. I say this not as an excuse, but as something I am confronted with almost daily; a severe inability to be proud of who I am. Not that pride is necessarily a good thing, but in my heart of hearts there are things I despise about myself. Other than that I've always been very creative, and functioned as something of a creative center to my childhood friends. School was easy. I was lazy, uninspired, felt unable to apply my creativity to the tasks at hand. The hard, abstract subjects became a confirmation of my self-sabotaging thoughts and feelings of valuelessness: “not smart enough, not good enough”. Much of it under the surface, or 'subconscious’, to be sure. The easy subjects, those I enjoyed, were unchallenging, and I avoided them as legitimate choices. I was not going to allow myself to pursue an intellectual development that would be so easy; that would readily provide me with success. For me always the hard way; a recurring theme in my life. Avoiding the fun easy stuff was a way to avoid success, and provided a confirmation of a something that became a basic ground rule, induced by the trauma, which implied that I had no value.

At the university the pattern continued. I was lazy, yet passed the exams, excelled at subjects I would soon abandon (political and oriental philosophy), and sought out subjects (mathematical logic, proof theory, thermodynamics), that were too abstract and specialized to fulfill my strong need for integrated knowledge, thus re-confirming the internal destructive mechanism.

Seeking out experience became a driving force in those years, manifested in a profound interest in consciousness altering drugs (marihuana and hashish, later on LSD and psylocibine mushrooms), and sense numbing substance like alcohol and herion. This same drive for experience pushed me away from home, to an American college campus, to Amsterdam, Edinburgh and later Hungary.

All the while I kept developing myself intellectually, reading myself into whatever knowledge domain I was unfamiliar with, never specializing, always moving on to the next domain. During my studies I provided myself with a decent basis in science, philosophy of science and 20^th century European literature (notably Kafka and Celine). I was into Russians for about a year (Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky), and was especially struck by Solzhenytsin. His writing inspired me, describing a cruel world which struck a snare with my own internal dark dominions in which fear, shame, anger and other demons raged continually in the nether regions of my consciousness.

After my M.A. in logical semantics I stopped reading philosophy and got into literary theory and psychology, digging deep into deconstructionism and the postmodern controversy. I discovered Chaos theory and felt that there was finally a formal system, or something resembling it, that would be able to integrate all the fragmented knowledge domains. I did some writing during the period, fragmented in terms of subject matter, although acceptable in terms of quality. Still not in touch at all with the true mechanisms behind my desires and behavior. Existence seemed to oscillate between limitless ambition and a despondent frustration with a cold hard ungiving world.

Even in my music the pattern played on. I challenged myself to learn to play Jazz, pursuing the highest standards, and failing to achieve them. My attention waned into other genres: rock, classical, and experimental avant-garde.

When I was 25 a good friend and fellow musician, he played didgeridoo in our avant-garde project, introduced me to a life altering set of practices: sexual Kung Fu and Chi Kung. I feel that only since the time I started out practicing these esoteric and martial traditions of chi cultivation has my life found a direction. They had a profound impact on me from the very start, that is, the sensation of chi flow literally knocked me off my feet and blew my mind. In fact the years preceding this discovery were a time of tredding on the edge of the abyss. In hind sight a path of inadvertent yet consistent self-denial and destruction.

Do these historical facts explain my feeling of disappointment in my achievements, in myself? Am I able to continue walking the path towards beauty love and self-acceptance? Am I seeking out some kind of justification or excuse for my own self-accusations?

This story is not finished. I have not made peace with myself yet.