Dave Smith, Douglas Murray, and a Decade of Institutional Failure.

We are going through a decade on institutional failure and nobody knows what to do about it.

There was a rather large number of people who came to prominence in the late 2010’s and early 2020’s through their opposition to Critical Social Justice (Critical Social Justice is the academic term for the progressive left race and gender obsessed identity politics that eventually came to be known as “woke”). This group of critics opposed the (at the time) socially and culturally dominant woke ideology, and they came together on podcasts, substacks, and social media platforms to discuss how wokeness came to dominate the social and cultural landscape, and what to do about it. Given that a number of these people got cancelled for their efforts (lost jobs, livelihoods, and opportunities) there was an understandable amount of solidarity among those who publicly took a stand against Critical Social Justice, and the solidarity-as-survival strategy employed by the anti-woke papered over a number of intellectual and political fault lines. The thing about a counter-movement is that being counter to something else is not an ethos, and counter-wokeness was only ever going to hold together as a coalition while wokeness still commanded the heights of culture, the academy, and politics. With Critical Social Justice in retreat in the political, social, and cultural realms, the counter-woke no longer feel the need to hang together lest they be hung separately, and thus now the adjudication of the intellectual disputes which had been set aside while fighting a once dominant woke ideology has begun in earnest.

And so begins a sort of intellectual civil war among the influencers, podcasters, public intellectuals, and writers that comprise that emerging counter-elite that comprise the counter-woke movement. While the intellectual fault lines have been producing tremors for at least a couple of years, the ideological earthquake appears to have occurred during the Douglas Murray - Dave Smith episode of the Joe Rogan Podcast.¹ The ostensible topic was the Gaza/Israel conflict. But the matter which caused the flare up is the classic dispute over the value of expertise and the degree to which we ought to “trust the experts” or defer to expertise in matters of great significance. This dispute is highly salient among the counter-woke in particular owing to the fact that many of these people watched credentialed experts use their positions of trust to advance a political agenda by burying evidence, censoring opposing views, cancelling those they disagreed with, and by refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy of anyone who opposed them. This sort of behavior has resulted in an erosion of trust in our social institutions, credentialed elites, and official experts; an erosion that is acknowledged by everyone who is counted as counter woke including Murray, Smith, and Rogan. A rather heated dispute arises, and fault lines are exposed, when one asks what to do in the aftermath of the collapse of trust in our institutions.

The difficulty that arises here is that the collapse of institutional trust raises a number of very thorny and difficult problems to solve, and it is in the various attempts at solving them that the fault lines in counter-woke world emerge. As it turns out, the fault lines on the issue of institutional trust are not merely strategic or tactical, they actually touch on substantive disagreements that go very deep, and therefore we cannot solve them by trying to paper them over for the sake of peace.

In order to understand the terrain of the dispute we need conceptual clarity about the issues that underlie the larger disagreement.

1. The epistemic division of labor

The epistemic division of labor refers to the fact that in a large and complicated society nobody can, by themselves, be in possession of all the various bits of knowledge that is possessed by the entire society. It is simply impossible for a person to have expertise in every are of knowledge because here are too many different fields containing to much specialized knowledge for any one person to learn all of it.

By way of example, in order to define “internal combustion engine” in a way which was both accurate and useful for understandings car engines, mechanics and engineers needed to posses an incredible amount of knowledge regarding the way car engines run, and the principles of engineering that make turbo charging possible. Those of use who know what an internal combustion engine is (as opposed to an electric engine) is have received that knowledge because of the work of engineers and mechanics who did the work of figuring out the principles of engineer involved.

This does not mean that only mechanics know what an internal combustion engine is. To quote Robert Pasnau you can “think of the acquisition of knowledge as like the acquisition of property. One can acquire it the hard way, by mixing one’s labor with it, or the easy way, by gift or inheritance. Either way, it counts equally as yours.”² We can inherit from the mechanics an understanding of what an internal combustion engine without having spent years working of vehicles or studying engineers. However, like an heir with many siblings, we do not get the entirely to the knowledge of the engineers and mechanics, only what we need. In this example the engineers and mechanics are the legitimate experts with genuine knowledge, and we rely on their knowledge to both define the terminology used to describe car engines, and also to inform our decisions.

2. Elites vs. Expertise

The epistemic division of labor means that expert knowledge in society is diffused across a number of disciplines, and contained in a number of institutions. The knowledge for how to build an electric engine is possessed by some people, the knowledge required to maintain the electrical grid which powers such cars is possessed by a different group of people entirely. Society being what it is, the various knowledge domains need to be able to co-operate with each other in order to larger goals to be accomplished. A nice example of this can be seen in a city, where the co-ordination of electrical grids, pluming infrastructure, natural gas lines, the placement of roads and streets, the building of buildings, location of hospitals, and so much more must be co-ordinated in way that allows all these things to function together. This means that the various institutions that house experts in each area must work together.

This is where elites come in.

The role of experts in society is to have deep and thorough domain specific knowledge in a particular area (examples of this are doctors, lawyers, scientists, mechanics, farmers, engineers, and so fourth). The role of elites in a society is social co-ordination and consensus building in the service of accomplishing goals and achieving various social ends. Examples of elites are journalists, politicians, writers, public intellectuals, activists, CEO’s, government Agency Heads, etc). Rob Henderson describes the difference this way:

“Elite talk is less about getting things exactly right and more about keeping people on board. Building consensus, projecting optimism, saying the kind of thing that motivates rather than scrutinizes. It’s not that one is better than the other—they serve different functions. Expert talk is for getting to the truth. Elite talk is for getting things to move…”³

He continues:

“Knowing a lot about a specific subject makes you an expert. It qualifies you to make technical judgments in that domain. But that doesn’t automatically make you an elite. Elites aren’t defined by deep knowledge of one area—they’re defined by general social impressiveness. They move easily in leadership roles. People listen to them, not because of what they know, but because of who they are and how they carry themselves.”⁴

There is a certain amount of cross-pollination between experts and elites, and many experts seeks to leverage their expertise in the service of becoming elites, and there are elites who began their careers as experts. That said, many experts never become elites, and many elites lack expertise. There is a sort of elite-expert spectrum: “At one end: the pure expert—say, a mathematician—does proofs all day and needs zero social skills. At the other: the pure elite—a politician, a CEO—who might not have much technical knowledge, but knows how to talk, how to read a room, how to get people on board.”⁵

3. Democratic Legitimacy

The debate between Murray and Smith occurred against the backdrop of the loss of trust in social institutions, and the subsequent forfeiting of legitimacy by the expert and elite classes. There is a rather robust literature discussing how it is that institutions generally (and democratic institutions in particular) achieve their legitimacy. Some theorists think legitimacy is a product social consensus, some believe legitimacy is matter of tradition, and still others think legitimacy is matter of rationally justifying the claims of institutions and experts. I think that all of these various views have merit, but when it comes to the nuts and bolts of maintaining legitimacy in the eyes of the public I think that what actually matters is “output legitimacy.”⁶ In my view the legitimacy of various institutions and institutional arrangements is dependant on the output of those institutions.

The public views institutions generally, and democratic institutions in particular as “having a job to do.” If the institutions do their job to the satisfaction of the public, then the institutions (and the experts and elites the run them) maintain their legitimacy.⁷ If there is a minor failure, or a one time lapse in competence the legitimacy of the institutions can be rebuilt when the institution demonstrates competency in accomplishing its mission for sustained period. In such situation the loss of legitimacy is temporary and can be rebuilt over time.

However, there is one major way in which institutions can damage their legitimacy in ways which make if very difficult, if not impossible, to rebuild trust. IF experts, elites, and institutions use the influence and prestige they have gained as a consequence of their technical expertise and social importance in order to to subvert the will of the public and force a political agenda on the public which it is opposed, they can lose their legitimacy in ways that are impossible to recover from. When elites use institutions to pursue their own ideological ends, the institutions they run cease to be viewed as reservoirs of knowledge and competency and come to be seen as nothing more than vehicles through which power hungry bureaucrats advance their own political agenda. When the standard by which everything an institutions produces becomes “does this advance our political cause” the institution forfeits all of the goodwill and trust that the public has invested in it.

Over the last 5 years we have all watched as many of the most important sense making institutions destroyed their credibility and legitimacy by attempting to use the prestige and influence they had accrued in the service of pursuing the political agenda of the Critical Social Justice/Woke movement. The list of institutions implicated in this includes: universities, colleges, NGO’s, non-profits, Charities, Corporations, news-media outlets, cultural institutions, publishing houses, entertainment networks, movie companies, medical organizations, government agencies, social media and tech companies, and so on. The list could go on for pages. Professors (most famously Jordan Peterson and Bret Weinstein) got mobbed by students for refusing to go along with Social Justice activism while their colleagues sided with the protestors. Social media companies deplatformed people for disagreeing with Gender Ideology. A seemingly endless parade of people got fired for innocuous comments while the corporations they worked for sided with the cancel culture mobs. Most damningly, we watched the institutions of public health use the influence they were given during a pandemic to advance Social Justice political causes. At one point a letter, signed by 1200 public health professionals, declared that Black Lives Matter protestors ought to be allowed to break quarantine,⁸ and public health officials claimed they needed to take a side on matters of social justice, and justified this on the ground that their political coalition have momentum.⁹ Finally, it appears as though our journalistic class was complicit in hiding the cognitive decline of a sitting president while he was in office in order to prevent Donald Trump from winning an elections.

The function of our sense-making institutions is to manage and steward the epistemic division of labor that is necessary for the functioning of our society. This means that their job is to generate knowledge according to the highest standards of truth, and then help non-experts make sense of that information so that they can be active participants in democratic decision making. They have a knowledge creation function, sense-making function, and a gate-keeping function, and it has now become clear that the institutions did not serve these functions. Rather then creating reliable knowledge, they used their prestige to launder transparently political work as real knowledge. Instead of sense-making they instead sought to force a consensus in favor of their preferred political ends. Instead of using their gate-keeping function to prevent us from being duped by liars, frauds, and poor quality, they instead choose to use their gate-keeping function to silence, deplatform, delegitimize, and socially malign anyone who opposed their political agenda.

The issue that we are wrestling with is what to do now that the institutions have lost the trust of the public. One of the things I warned about as far back as 2020 was that using important social institutions as vehicles for advancing leftists politics would result in a destruction of the credibility and legitimacy of our social institutions, and now we are living in the aftermath.

4. Tying the Gordian knot

The problem that arises in the aftermath of the loss of trust in our institutions is that not only have people lost faith in the institutions, they have also lost faith in a number of the functions that the institutions (and the elites and experts that ran them) were supposed to carry out. Two of these functions are most salient to us: curation of knowledge, and gate-keeping.

Earlier I distinguished between expertise and elites and I said experts are concerned with domain specific knowledge, while experts are concerned with the curation of narrative with an eye toward consensus building. The issue here is that when it comes to actually making policy, and deciding on specific recommendation it is the opinion of the elites that actually matters. Part of the reason for this is that elites have something that experts tend not to have: a social skill-set that allows them to navigate across institutional contexts, general social impressiveness that allows them to be taken seriously, and high social status.¹⁰ The fact is that socially impressive people have a far greater capacity to be taken seriously and build consensus than socially awkward experts. The small awkward math nerd may have the better part of the argument, but the politician who wins an election with an impressive margin has the social influence and clout to build consensus in a way the awkward math nerd does not. The prestigious writer with a weekly column and a dedicated readership can be taken seriously in a way that the academic publishing in niche journals can’t.¹¹ It is sometimes suggested that the elites can manage and determine public opinion in just whatever way they want. This is wrong. The fact that our elite class has lost its credibility is proof of that. So, while the elites do not have carte blanche to determine public opinion, but they do have the power to shape and mold the official narrative that emanate out of institutions, and to use those narrative to shape public policy. This means that elites have the power to set aside the advice of people with real knowledge and chart a course of action around whatever consensus they think they can build. Sometimes this takes the form of “the people will never agree to that, so we need to do something else,” but all to often it takes the form of “we can create a narrative to shift public opinion just long enough to get the policy that we want to advance our political preferences.” In both cases what generally happens is that the expert will advise the elites as to the facts, but it is the elites that will actually determine the course of action using the advise of the experts to legitimize their actions. In many cases elites will go “expert shopping” to find and expert that will agree to the course of action they already find appealing. Either way, the elites can very often maneuver through the institutional landscape in a way that allows them to get what they want.

Over the last several years it has become more and more obvious that the elites are using their social positions and consensus building ability to achieve their political goals over and above the will of the public. The result of this betrayal is that the elite class and the institutions it runs has lost its social and moral authority. Alongside this, the unwillingness of experts to speak out on issues that are contentious, or to stand up to elites when they are wrong, has resulted in the loss of trust in the credentialed experts class as well. The combined effect is that gatekeeping can no longer happen because gatekeeping is now seen as little more than an exercise in raw power carried out by elites and experts seeking to advance their own political goals.

In the wake of the collapse of institutional legitimacy a number of thinkers, writers, and influencers took to the world of social media and podcasting in order to try and carry out at least some of the functions that had been carried out by institutions. The idea was to create an online marketplace of ideas where various claims could be adjudicated through public debate. In this way, various people could put fourth ideas which could be advocated for and debated without elites gate-keeping out the ideas they didn’t like. The result has been a sort of wild west of open discourse and debate. While far from perfect, this arrangement has been viewed as a welcome antidote to gatekeeping, censorship and cancel culture.

This brings us to the Dave Smith-Douglas Murray debate.

The debate, largely centering around the Israel Gaza conflict, was a typical example of a podcast debate. During that conversation Douglas Murray on several occasions attempted to appeal to expertise, documented evidence, rigorous scholarship, and other notions that have their home in the epistemic division of labor that was housed in the institutions. The issue that arose in that debate is that Dave Smith does not see the institutions as legitimate, and therefore is not willing to simply grant epistemic legitimacy to claims on account of the fact they emerge from experts, even if those experts have impressive credential. So any conclusion that resulted from the work of credentialed experts were not automatically taken to be correct, and were not necessarily taken to be more informed, serious, or rigorous than any other claim made by any other person. What Dave Smith wanted was to “have the debate” and to adjudicate the weight of each claim himself using the logic that they could debate each claim, weigh the evidence, and allow people to come to their own conclusions.

In fairness to Dave Smith, this is far preferable to censorship by elites, or having experts be able to force their conclusions on people no questions asked. Dave Smith is being honest when he says he wants to have the debate and sort these matters honestly. The issue has to do with the matter of adjudication itself.

One of the problem with moving the truth finding function of institutions into the podcast sphere is also its greatest strength: anyone can say what ever they want, and everyone has to weight the evidence for themselves. However, when it comes to very complicated matters (like the longstanding Israel-Gaza conflict) proper adjudication of various claims requires a great deal of knowledge about the matter. In order to properly adjudicate between various truth claims, courses of action, or moral judgements one must have the knowledge necessary to weigh such things properly. For example, to weigh the appropriateness of any course of action in the Israel Gaza matter one must have a thorough knowledge of at least:

-the conflict and its antecedents
-the history of the region
-the geography of the region
-the various social and religious contexts
-the major political players in the conflict
-international law
-the sorts of military operations possible
-the political issues arising from various courses of action
-the interests of the various other nations who support either side

Without knowledge of all the things I laid out above (and a whole lot else besides) a person is simply not going to have the requisite knowledge required to make sound judgements about various courses of action with respect to the Israel-Gaza conflict.

The level of knowledge required to adjudicate the Israel-Gaza conflict can only be accrued through years of careful and rigorous study. This sort of intense study is exactly what the function of experts is supposed to be, and institutions were the place where we housed such people precisely because it is very difficult to accrue such knowledge in the absence of institutional support. The problem is that the elites used institutions as vehicles to advance their political agenda and many experts either went along with this or refused to push back, and the result was a predictable and understandable loss of trust in elites, institutions, and credentialed expertise. For this reason appeals to “experts” are seen as unjustified appeals to authority, and attempts to gate-keep are seen as censorship. Anyone who attempts to do either is seen as attempting to win a debate by circumventing the debate process by illegitimate means.

This problem is particularly intractable because the strategy for dealing with the problem of knowledge gaps that were employed when institutions were still trusted were typically gate-keeping out people who lacked the knowledge to properly adjudicate claims while at the same time appealing to the knowledge of experts to fill in the gaps. In the aftermath of the collapse of institutional trust both of these moves are out of bounds because the experts are no longer trusted to provide unbiased and accurate information, and the elites are no longer trusted to gate-keep.

This is, I believe, where the disconnect between Dave Smith and Douglass Murray lies. Murray was attempting to avail himself of the institutional knowledge created as a result of the epistemic division of labor and to try to set the debate on solid epistemic footing by making sure the debate was informed by genuine knowledge coming from legitimate experts. Dave Smith has no confidence at all in the integrity of the knowledge produced by the credentialed experts that inhabit those institutions and so was not willing to give experts the benefit of the doubt without adjudicating each claim himself. As such, the conversation generated little consensus regarding anything save for the fact that institutions had lost our trust.

With the collapse of institutional trust the function of institutions with respect to adjudicating very complex problem has been shifted into the public sphere where people must attempt to adjudicate between various claims regarding incredibly complex matters without the requisite knowledge to do so. In the absence of trusted experts, the advantage shifts to people who have strong rhetorical capability, large platforms, and dedicated followings, even when those people are not capable of accurately assessing the claims up for debate. What makes this even worse is that “you’re not in a position to accurately assess this information” was often the same excuse that the elites used to cram their political vision down on the public without their approval. In certain segments of society even suggesting a person lacks the knowledge to accurately assess a complex situation outside their knowledge base is seen as a cynical attempt to marginalize that person within the conversation in order to avoid having to actually engage with their concerns and objections.

There are generally two approaches for responding to the loss of institutional trust and the loss of credibility by experts and elites. For someone like Dave Smith the chief concern is making sure that people who are making claims “show their work” and do the job of properly answering objections from people who disagree with them. This means making people who call themselves experts demonstrate that they really do know what they are talking about by forcing them to present the evidence for their views and to subject their arguments to criticism from those who disagree with them. For someone like Murray the concern is to make sure that the public is being informed by legitimate experts with genuine knowledge and expertise who are giving honest assessments of complex situations within their domain of expertise. This means ensuring that elites and experts who are using their credentials and institutional positions to advance their politics are removed from institutions, gate-keeping out bad actors and uninformed people positioning themselves as sources of good information, and platforming people with legitimate expertise and genuine knowledge to present arguments and debate the evidence.

In essence the difference in these approaches boils down to this:

Dave Smith: “The institutions, experts, and elites have lost their legitimacy and credibility because of the actions of certain institutions and elites over the last ten years. As a result they now need to run the gauntlet of taking on objections from all comers so we can see if they really know what they are talking about. We will not be told to just shut up while politicized elites, experts, and institutions use their authority to force their political ideology on us.”

Douglas Murray: “The institutions, experts, and elites have lost their legitimacy and credibility because of the actions of certain institutions and elites over the last ten years. As a result we need to do our job as citizens to ensure that experts and elites who used their positions of authority within institutions to advance their political agenda are removed from the institutions and are no longer given the power to use those institutions in the service of their political agenda. It is our job to ensure that we find legitimate experts with genuine knowledge to inform us regarding complex situations so that we can make informed decisions.”

This is the divide that we are currently dealing with.

The question that lies at the heart of this matter is “how do we legitimize experts and ensure that the information they give us is accurate, and that they are not using their positions to advance their own political preferences and interests?” There is no agreement whatsoever about how to even begin to answer that question.

I said back in 2020 that if the elites continued to use our sense-making institutions to advance a political agenda we would end up going through a decade of institutions failure.

However, the elites, experts, and institutions did not heed my warning and now the decade of institutional failure has begun. We can see this everywhere: University presidents are getting fired after being caught plagiarizing, donations to Universities, non-profits, and NGO’s are beginning to decline, post-secondary degrees are losing their value, government institutions are no longer taken seriously, public health officials are being ignored, and the list goes on endlessly. In 2020 I hoped that we can build new, trustworthy, competent institutions to replace the ones which so badly violated our trust. Today the epistemic landscape is so fractured that building institutions with widespread legitimacy has become exceedingly difficult, if not impossible. And that leaves us exactly where we are, with a fractured information landscape in which our apparatus of sense-making institutions has been delegitimized by the actions of the very people we trusted to ensure the quality and rigor of the information we need to make informed decisions.

To be frank, I’m not entirely sure how this end, but I am quite certain of one thing: this is just the beginning.

Sincerely,

Wokal_distance.

1.

2. Robert Pausau, Divisions of Epistemic Labour:Some Remarks on the History of Fideism and Esotericism, proceedings of the British Academy, 189, 83–117

3. Experts and Elites Play Fundamentally Different Games

4. ibid

5. ibid

6. Joseph Heath, The Machinery of Government: Public Administration and the Liberal State, Oxford University Press, 2020. See Chapter pp.83-85

7. Joseph Heath, The Machinery of Government: Public Administration and the Liberal State, Oxford University Press, 2020. P.83

8. https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-monday-edition-1.5603024/over-1-000-health-experts-sign-letter-supporting-anti-black-racism-protests-despite-covid-19-risks-1.5603025

9. https://x.com/wokal_distance/status/1293856738685247488

10. ibid

11. ibid