A couple of days ago I read someone talking about the "cult of expertise." Of course, I thought. Why hadn't I thought of that? It's been a Thing for quite a while.
But then I thought about what experts do, especially during the present plague of experts during the Wu Flu.
Experts are prophets; they prognosticate about the future, but from the safety of administrative bureaucracies. Not quite like in the old days when prophets predicted from the entrails of birds. But the fact is that the whole purpose of knowledge is prediction of the future, to understand the behavior of things and agents in the wide world and try to figure out what comes next.
The truth is that the real story of man is his domestication, just as wolves chose to be domesticated into dogs.
Back in the day men were warriors and hunters. They engaged in frightful battles to the death with megafauna and patrolled the borders of their tribal lands to take out any male that dared to present himself on the border. But then humans killed off all the megafauna, and started to get into the domestication of wild animals rather than their destruction.
And war became less of a desperate border battle and more about marching and discipline. High born men started to become courtiers and leave the rough stuff to marcher lords like Harry Percy.
More than that, the deadly business of war and the hunt devolved into sports, probably because men didn't go to war and didn't really rely on the hunt for food. But high-born men needed something to do in between the vital acts of siring the next generation. So war devolved into sports: first the tournament and jousting with lances, and then team sports like cricket and football. And hunting devolved into useless sports like fox-hunting. Heck, we gentry could have left the vital work of the control of foxes or the hunting of deer to underlings. But it was much more fun to go out and ride around the countryside, or get the local yokels to beat the bushes to spring the pheasants and the grouse and bring them before the guns of the gentry.
Notice how there is now a further domestication, driven by women, where "blood sports" are bad, but other sports are OK, for the time being. In Britland the Labour Party when in power recently banned foxhunting. Because. But did they think about poor old Trollope turning in his grave?
We now see an even further domestication of sports. It's not just "blood sports" that are problematical, but now "contact sports," where the players are involved in violent enough activity that they are likely to sustain injury, particularly brain injury. And it is women that are leading the charge against "contact" sports.
Of course the rise of the male "career" is another domestication. Instead of well-born men going into the army they now get credentialed at selective colleges and work at a career, rising up the ranks in some corporate bureaucracy or profession.
There is a further domestication in progress, that occurred to me when I asked the checkout clerk how his friends are doing in the current Wu Flu lockdown. They were doing fine, he said, playing video games all day.
Yes, indeed. Young men are being domesticated from active sports into video sports, where the large-motor activities are reduced to brain function and small motor activities with the joystick control.
Here's another domestication. Used to be that the whole point of men was the war party bent on a campaign of loot and plunder. That's what the Romans were all about, pushing back the boundaries of the Roman Empire and coming home with loot and slaves. That's what the Vikings were all about, too. But then came the Age of Exploration. Now the purpose was not so much loot and plunder as the expansion of the "known world" and the establishment of trading posts. That's what the Brits were up to in India. Of course, the Brits felt honor-bound to civilize the "natives" and bring them the blessings of Western Civilization. What our lefty friends now call colonization and oppression. And of course there was the problem that Kipling raised, about "lesser breeds without the Law" by which he meant empires less civilized than the British: Krauts and Frogs and so forth.
Today, of course, the notion of exploration has become scandalous because imperialism and marginalization. So young men are not supposed to go exploring any more. They are supposed to go a-NGOing or do international development instead.
And don't forget the domestication implied in the notion of the public square, where men can argue and dispute about religion, culture, and politics without resort to fisticuffs. Jolly civilized, if you ask me. The public square is elegantly aligned with the two male cultures, of courage and insult.
The market system is a domestication. Instead of warring, aggressive young men start companies and compete for market share. This was rather shabby back in the day when nobodies were inventing machine textiles and steam transportation. But in our own time we have the "startup culture" in which young men of good families like Bill Gates drop out of Harvard and form new companies and work 24-7 bringing some idea to market and then, hopefully, making a "killing" when they take the company "public" on the stock market. When the whole thing gets going then the young men hire women to run the HR department, and young women like Melinda Gates come aboard and stop the men yelling at each other at meetings.
Now, there is another area of domestication. It is the domestication of the shamans and the priests. Back in the day these shamans were terrifying half-mad creatures that participated in the divine and were almost on the margin of the society of the kindred. But they were seers with an uncanny grasp of the future, and humans sought their advice and their divinations of the future.
In due course these shamans and seers because the priests of the temple culture, more predictable and less terrifying. But they still excelled as prophets and on occasion formed new cults with terrifying predictions of the future to come if we did not repent now. And they often required a constant supply of virgins and eldest sons to sacrifice on the altar of the the vengeful god. What a day it was when Abraham realized that God would be perfectly happy if he sacrificed a neighboring goat instead of the first-born Isaac: call it the domestication of sacrifice.
How domesticated then were the priests of the state church in Jane Austen and George Eliot novels! They could be annoying, like Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice, or wise and gentle like Mr. Irwine in Adam Bede. But really, they were completely domesticated and non-threatening.
A further domestication of the shamans and seers are the scientists and the experts. What is the point of scientists and experts but to divine the future with their mathematical runes? Thus we have scientists predicting doom and planetary disaster unless we act now. Or, as in the present emergency, death and destruction from the plague unless we submit to the experts. Good work, if you can get it.
But these are rather small beer compared to the temple priests of the Aztecs that pulled living hearts out of the still living abdomens of their sacrificial victims.
But, even in our own domesticated time, there is still a need for sacrificial victims.
The question is whether this Domestication of Man has gone about as furr as it can go. Who knows. But it is interesting that wild young men like Elon Musk are bucking for space travel, and want to go to Mars. Because how domesticated can you get and still maintain the male culture of courage and insult?
Now, of course, there have always been counter-movements that have critiqued the domestication process as taking the human out of the human. The Great Reaction of the past century, with socialism a return to slavery and the welfare state a return to feudalism and identity politics a return to tribalism, is one such. And the feminist movement, that proposes to de-domesticate women and make them into fearsome warriors: "I am woman, hear me roar."
But that is another story.
But then I thought about what experts do, especially during the present plague of experts during the Wu Flu.
Experts are prophets; they prognosticate about the future, but from the safety of administrative bureaucracies. Not quite like in the old days when prophets predicted from the entrails of birds. But the fact is that the whole purpose of knowledge is prediction of the future, to understand the behavior of things and agents in the wide world and try to figure out what comes next.
The truth is that the real story of man is his domestication, just as wolves chose to be domesticated into dogs.
Back in the day men were warriors and hunters. They engaged in frightful battles to the death with megafauna and patrolled the borders of their tribal lands to take out any male that dared to present himself on the border. But then humans killed off all the megafauna, and started to get into the domestication of wild animals rather than their destruction.
And war became less of a desperate border battle and more about marching and discipline. High born men started to become courtiers and leave the rough stuff to marcher lords like Harry Percy.
More than that, the deadly business of war and the hunt devolved into sports, probably because men didn't go to war and didn't really rely on the hunt for food. But high-born men needed something to do in between the vital acts of siring the next generation. So war devolved into sports: first the tournament and jousting with lances, and then team sports like cricket and football. And hunting devolved into useless sports like fox-hunting. Heck, we gentry could have left the vital work of the control of foxes or the hunting of deer to underlings. But it was much more fun to go out and ride around the countryside, or get the local yokels to beat the bushes to spring the pheasants and the grouse and bring them before the guns of the gentry.
Notice how there is now a further domestication, driven by women, where "blood sports" are bad, but other sports are OK, for the time being. In Britland the Labour Party when in power recently banned foxhunting. Because. But did they think about poor old Trollope turning in his grave?
We now see an even further domestication of sports. It's not just "blood sports" that are problematical, but now "contact sports," where the players are involved in violent enough activity that they are likely to sustain injury, particularly brain injury. And it is women that are leading the charge against "contact" sports.
Of course the rise of the male "career" is another domestication. Instead of well-born men going into the army they now get credentialed at selective colleges and work at a career, rising up the ranks in some corporate bureaucracy or profession.
There is a further domestication in progress, that occurred to me when I asked the checkout clerk how his friends are doing in the current Wu Flu lockdown. They were doing fine, he said, playing video games all day.
Yes, indeed. Young men are being domesticated from active sports into video sports, where the large-motor activities are reduced to brain function and small motor activities with the joystick control.
Here's another domestication. Used to be that the whole point of men was the war party bent on a campaign of loot and plunder. That's what the Romans were all about, pushing back the boundaries of the Roman Empire and coming home with loot and slaves. That's what the Vikings were all about, too. But then came the Age of Exploration. Now the purpose was not so much loot and plunder as the expansion of the "known world" and the establishment of trading posts. That's what the Brits were up to in India. Of course, the Brits felt honor-bound to civilize the "natives" and bring them the blessings of Western Civilization. What our lefty friends now call colonization and oppression. And of course there was the problem that Kipling raised, about "lesser breeds without the Law" by which he meant empires less civilized than the British: Krauts and Frogs and so forth.
Today, of course, the notion of exploration has become scandalous because imperialism and marginalization. So young men are not supposed to go exploring any more. They are supposed to go a-NGOing or do international development instead.
And don't forget the domestication implied in the notion of the public square, where men can argue and dispute about religion, culture, and politics without resort to fisticuffs. Jolly civilized, if you ask me. The public square is elegantly aligned with the two male cultures, of courage and insult.
The market system is a domestication. Instead of warring, aggressive young men start companies and compete for market share. This was rather shabby back in the day when nobodies were inventing machine textiles and steam transportation. But in our own time we have the "startup culture" in which young men of good families like Bill Gates drop out of Harvard and form new companies and work 24-7 bringing some idea to market and then, hopefully, making a "killing" when they take the company "public" on the stock market. When the whole thing gets going then the young men hire women to run the HR department, and young women like Melinda Gates come aboard and stop the men yelling at each other at meetings.
Now, there is another area of domestication. It is the domestication of the shamans and the priests. Back in the day these shamans were terrifying half-mad creatures that participated in the divine and were almost on the margin of the society of the kindred. But they were seers with an uncanny grasp of the future, and humans sought their advice and their divinations of the future.
In due course these shamans and seers because the priests of the temple culture, more predictable and less terrifying. But they still excelled as prophets and on occasion formed new cults with terrifying predictions of the future to come if we did not repent now. And they often required a constant supply of virgins and eldest sons to sacrifice on the altar of the the vengeful god. What a day it was when Abraham realized that God would be perfectly happy if he sacrificed a neighboring goat instead of the first-born Isaac: call it the domestication of sacrifice.
How domesticated then were the priests of the state church in Jane Austen and George Eliot novels! They could be annoying, like Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice, or wise and gentle like Mr. Irwine in Adam Bede. But really, they were completely domesticated and non-threatening.
A further domestication of the shamans and seers are the scientists and the experts. What is the point of scientists and experts but to divine the future with their mathematical runes? Thus we have scientists predicting doom and planetary disaster unless we act now. Or, as in the present emergency, death and destruction from the plague unless we submit to the experts. Good work, if you can get it.
But these are rather small beer compared to the temple priests of the Aztecs that pulled living hearts out of the still living abdomens of their sacrificial victims.
But, even in our own domesticated time, there is still a need for sacrificial victims.
The question is whether this Domestication of Man has gone about as furr as it can go. Who knows. But it is interesting that wild young men like Elon Musk are bucking for space travel, and want to go to Mars. Because how domesticated can you get and still maintain the male culture of courage and insult?
Now, of course, there have always been counter-movements that have critiqued the domestication process as taking the human out of the human. The Great Reaction of the past century, with socialism a return to slavery and the welfare state a return to feudalism and identity politics a return to tribalism, is one such. And the feminist movement, that proposes to de-domesticate women and make them into fearsome warriors: "I am woman, hear me roar."
But that is another story.
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