I should be posting about our very real and very immediate world crisis. There is a lot to say, to be sure, but really one thing that should be done: “25th Amendment: Now!”
I’d like instead to turn to a piece by Joel Stein that caught my attention and helped me see in a new way a deeper aspect of our current crisis, beyond the growing off-the-rails insanity of our current president.
I was never a great fan of the comic “Dilbert,” although I found it occasionally humorous, and frankly I would not have paid much attention to the passing of its creator, Scott Adams, were it not for this piece in the New York Times: “‘Dilbert’ Was Always MAGA”, which summarizes Stein’s interview of Adams.
This is not the most pressing issue at the moment — not by far — but I think it is worth a moment for what it reveals about the MAGA movement. Here is a particularly important passage:
“Dilbert” was a war cry against the management class — the system of deluded jerks you work for who think they know better. Workers posted it on their cubicles like resistance fighters chalking V’s on walls in occupied Paris. But their bosses posted “Dilbert” in their offices, too, since they also had bosses who were idiots. In the Dilbertverse, “It’s turtles all the way up,” Mr. Adams explained to me when we met. The bottom rungs are filled with put-upon competent workers, oppressed by an infinite bureaucracy of people upholding a system that isn’t actually based on actual expertise.
Maybe Mr. Adams was an early Trump supporter because “Dilbert” was itself proto-MAGA. The strip’s everyday resentments and cynicism added up to a now-familiar worldview. “There’s no such thing as expertise. It just doesn’t exist,” Mr. Adams said.
Mr. Adams thought this extended even to issues like international trade. “In these big, complicated situations, no one really knows if we have a good deal. It’s best just to negotiate from ignorance and hope the other side gives in,” he told me. “In the real world there is a fog. In a world where nobody knows, the loudest person is going to get the most.”
There is some truth in the Dilbert worldview. I’ve known a number of people, blue collar and white collar, who are frustrated because their practical, on-the-job knowledge is swept aside by — as some have said — the “suits” upstairs, who were more interested in their consultants and their Phi Beta Kappa colleagues. The resentment and the source of the resentment is real: experts often don’t know as much as they think they know, and particularly in the everyday workplace they inhabit a privileged class that too often discounts the views of those “on the floor.” Too often they operate on theory alone: models and statistical calculations that leave out human and experiential elements, the “tacit knowing” that many people develop over time doing a job.
To be sure, contra Mr. Adams, expertise is real, and it has and continues to have real effects. The modern world has benefited tremendously from the unification of science and engineering (broadly conceived) — our very term “technology,” unknown before the late 1800s, captures this unification. The last two hundred years have seen material progress absolutely unimaginable before this union. The union was not easily won, and it comes with certain psycho-social costs, among them the uncertainty that is inherent in scientific advance and the wrenching effects of technological change. Perhaps a more prudent culture with a more prudent economic system would handle some of these costs more effectively. And we have seen what the Trump Administration’s anti-expertise agenda has wrought across healthcare, higher education, foreign aid, the social safety net, and so on. Instead of expert management, we have seen the anti-expert guru Elon Musk and his team of neophytes wreak havoc.
Part of the problem, though, is that expertise in its various forms can develop its own interests and its own sphere of operation, sometimes only accidentally related to the problem on the floor, and all-too-often manipulated to serve only the bottom line of owner enrichment. So, I sympathize to some extent with Scott Adams’ Dilbertian perspective.
But, when Adams — and to the extent that he is representing others, MAGA — extends this resentment-analytic beyond the workplace, as in the last paragraph quoted above, very real and dangerous issues arise. “Negotiate from ignorance” might well be a MAGA rallying cry, expressing simultaneously nose-thumbing at the intellectual elites, frustration with the difficulty of grappling with unsure information, and worship of the idea that shouting is what brings results. But it is detached from reality. Because, contra the Dilbertian fantasy that a cadre of self-appointed experts are “in charge,” it is and has always been the case that what makes for success — at least peaceful success — is neither expert direction nor shouting the loudest, but genuine, multilateral discussion thankfully informed but not strictly driven by some common understandings that we call “expertise.”
Is there a “fog” in these situations? Of course. Do we ever know if we “have a good deal” — with certainty, of course not. Mature thought requires us to acknowledge that and to negotiate, in good faith, clear vision, and with respect (however guarded) for those on the other side. It requires the long view that says it is not all about us shouting to get what we want now but about knowing that we, no matter what, are and will remain in important respects in a co-dependent relationship with those we are negotiating with. The point of negotiation is to resolve issues, but it is also to keep relationships going, hopefully improving them over time.
In the end, Adams’ view is another version of Stephen Miller’s emphasis on power and force. Shouting is to discussion and negotiation as force is to cooperation.
And it reveals the magical thinking that drives MAGA:
From [Adams’] point of view, I had lived so long among the well-credentialed languishing in abstract thoughts that I was fooled into thinking complex problems required expert solutions. “In your movie,” by which he meant my perception of reality, “there’s a big, incompetent guy who doesn’t know the details,” he told me. “I’m telling you it’s the best thing possible. When President Trump acts without all the information and his facts are not accurate, he’s operating on a higher level, not a lower level. He’s operating in the real world.”
And I suppose when Donald Trump is literally babbling incoherently, he is speaking in divinely inspired tongues.
I’ll stick with Joel Stein’s movie.
Affirming Democracy, Gathering Resistance 