The Problem with “Trust the Experts”

We’ve been through all this before. It was known as the Dark Ages.

Long ago, in a distant, halcyon epoch known as the mid-90s, I took a philosophy degree. I specialized in the History and Philosophy of Science. I took classes in what, to most people, probably seems like a senselessly esoteric subject: epistemology, the study of the foundations of knowledge itself.

We studied things like: when can a knower be said to “know” something? And, what are the foundations of “justified true belief”?

It’s the sort of academic intellectual exercise that most people think has no application to real life. And, stimulated though I was, that’s just how I thought of it, too.

Imagine my astonishment when twenty-five years later, these exact issues would grind our society to a halt and have us at each other’s throats in the grips of red-hazed hatred.

We are now in a war over epistemology.

I say “war” with no sense of exaggeration, since there have been, and will continue to be, casualties, both in terms of human life, and in the dooming of society to perpetual conflict, ty…