Expertocracies unmasked

The educated elite in Germany has not “betrayed” us — it is disappearing.

Expertocracies are based on the immaturity of the majority. Where citizens renounce their freedom of judgment, they fall on fertile ground. For Plato, the intellectual guardianship of an intellectual elite was still considered a means of self-knowledge, helping people to integrate into the “harmonious whole.” However, this ideal lost its innocence as soon as its universal values were placed at the service of worldly interests. To regain it, we must return to the enlightened spirit of Erasmus of Rotterdam.

by Lilly Gebert

[This article posted on 7/6/2022 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.manova.news/artikel/die-entgeistigung-des-intellektuellen.]


“Sometimes that light at the end of the tunnel is a train” — Murphy's Law.

Justice as a social structural principle

The people are too stupid for democracy. That's why they need experts to prevent them from being manipulated and deceived by selfish rulers. This call for a “truth-based” epistocracy (ancient Greek: episteme ‘knowledge’ and kratia “rule”) does not come from me, but from philosophers such as Plato, John Stuart Mill, and David Estlund.

According to them, society should not be based on equality, but should be organized according to the principle of justice. In Plato's view, for example, this would arise as soon as each individual limited themselves to the function to which they were entitled by virtue of their constitution: those who are naturally capable of guiding the whole should rule over those whose nature is to submit. The individual must recognize and understand themselves “to do their part” (1). Only in this way could they achieve a “just state of mind” and come closer to eudaimonia, the good life with oneself and within the community.

Just as Plato believed that a happy life was conditioned by just action, he also required the latter to be based on a hierarchical relationship between the three cardinal virtues of wisdom, courage, and moderation: To the extent that these were lived by the individual and the community, the inner harmony of the polis, the space in which ethical life is possible, would also intensify. However, if power, ambition, and the pursuit of glory triumph over morality, arbitrariness prevails and inadequate structures of order and permanent conflicts between private individual interests arise. For Plato, who saw the fundamental flaws of democracy in both an excess of individual freedom and the participation of unqualified and self-serving individuals, this meant the end of rational rule.

His ideal of a ruling aristocracy of philosophers thus has a serious flaw: it only works as long as its wise men are also interested in the truth. However, if universal values are placed at the service of the worldly, not only does any distinction between right and true or good and well-intentioned disappear, but so does any utopia of justice.

As soon as the freedom and personal responsibility of the individual are misjudged, just like the moral corruptibility of a philosopher, it is no longer a question of truth, but of power. If the desire to help citizens integrate into the “harmonious whole” through reflection and self-knowledge is turned into something illiberal, they may continue to be educated for the “good,” but this “good” no longer benefits them alone, but those who decide what it means.
In the service of the worldly

It was the French philosopher Julien Benda who, in view of the lack of conscience of his time, set himself the task of re-examining the nature of the intellectual in terms of the Platonic aspect of virtue. In his essay “The Treason of the Intellectuals,” written in 1927 and revised in 1946, he defined the natural constitution of the intellectual as “disinterested, static, and rational.”

For Benda, the classical intellectual represented justice, truth, and reason in their abstract form (2). He was not out to find justice on earth, but sought satisfaction within himself. If his primary interest was in cognition rather than knowledge, then “purely speculative thinking” represented (3) represented perhaps the noblest form of intellectual activity. If he returned to it, the intellectual lived according to what Spinoza once called “temporal perfection” (4): a kind of universalism within the intellectual way of life, from which a sense of eternity can develop.

If the intellectual's realm is therefore “not of this world” (5), then he is not out to use “subjective ideologies” to set certain ‘courses’ for people and thus “re-educate” them. His sense of the whole always leads him to regard human beings as an end in themselves, as subjects with dignity, morality, and reason, to whom no one can dictate what they should or should not do.

In 1940, George Orwell wrote about himself: “Emotionally, I am definitely ‘left,’ but I believe that an author can only remain honest if he keeps himself free of party labels.” (6), Benda saw the abandonment of impartiality as a betrayal of the intellectuals. For their real task was the impartial search for truth using their reason.

As soon as intellectuals labeled themselves and used their teachings to justify political passions instead of eternal wisdom, they ceased to be intellectuals in his eyes. They became servants of the worldly (7); experts or “media intellectuals” who devoted themselves to the dogma of “the continuous development of science” (8) and thus considered everything that did not belong to the “real” to be worthless. They began to act “as if thinking were not exclusively thinking, without wanting to place itself ‘at the service’ of anything” (9) and became supporters of a system “which respects thinking only insofar as it serves it, and condemns it as soon as it finds satisfaction in the pure execution of itself” (10).
The unmasking of the expert ethos

He wants to uphold doctrines, not people. — while this betrayal of the intellectual's intellectual heritage prompted Noam Chomsky to describe modern experts as anti-intellectuals, as followers of a “kind of secular priesthood” (11) for the power elite, this “division of labor” of intellectual activities serves Michel Foucault to distinguish between the ‘universal’ and the “specific intellectual” (12): While the universal intellectual was still free of ideology, this allowed him to clarify general values and use them to “awaken the conscience of all” (13). If he wants to feel differences in all their depth and indissolubility, the specific intellectual strives for agreement.

The specific intellectual should be seen as the result of a world whose horizons expand day by day to such an extent that specialization appears to be the only way to reduce complexity. This means that he, too, is no longer impartial and unbiased, just as his topics are no longer universal but specific in nature. As an expert or “media intellectual,” his task is no longer to clarify truth and justice, but “to influence through thought, to develop ideas for the powerful, and to proclaim to everyone what they should believe” (14). He can provide plans, strategies, theories, and justifications, but no autonomy, no recognition, no appreciation for the individual.

Ultimately, the expert ends up a prisoner of his own mental barriers—unable to recognize that in his attempt to establish universal morality and truth solely from his own discipline, he betrays precisely that. While his worldview is as fragmented as the interdisciplinarity of his sciences, he is so preoccupied with himself and his subject matter that his narrow-mindedness suppresses any form of unconventional solution-finding and ultimately becomes his own undoing.

So bound by the fragility of those “value scales of the earthly,” public places of long reflection or enlightened discussion disappear from his hearing, their concerns unable to be expressed in statistics or studies. His belief that research can generate greater evidence and certainty for “the good life” ultimately exceeds his trust in this “good life” itself.
Is this still politics or already obsession?

As soon as a society attempts to establish truth through itself, it becomes blind to the fragility of its own knowledge base. From this perspective, the loss of the classic intellectual as an intellectually and materially independent companion to events can also be seen: With the disappearance of his role as a “disruptive factor” (Joseph A. Schumpeter), not only did the fundamental criticism of the prevailing system—which had been common until then—disappear, but so did the spirit that had been able to stand up to the temptations of bondage.

What remains is a public discourse driven by celebrity and pride, and a collective mindset based on the disorientation of modernity and permeated by obedience, spinelessness, and command structures.

“The renewal of society must start with doubt” — Ivan Illich (15).

Freed from oppositional rebellions, those doctrines were able to gain strength that always find fertile ground where people are offered a morally acceptable reality with no alternative. It is therefore not surprising that our Western hemisphere in particular has fallen prey to such hubris: after all, it not only protects itself and its members from many forms of systemic pathologization, but also generates a momentum of its own that has nothing but universality, coherence, homogeneity, and precision in mind. If there is no friction, there can be no contradiction. And where people encounter no inconsistencies or run into brick walls, there is no reason to question things. This is a kind of loyalty that Rudi Dutschke defined as follows in his 1967 interview with Günter Gaus:

"But we have systematically been given governments that could be described as institutionalized instruments of lies, instruments of half-truths, of distortion; the people are not told the truth. There is no dialogue with the masses, no critical dialogue that could explain what is going on in this society. (...) after 1945, we saw a very clear development of the parties, where the parties are no longer instruments for raising the consciousness of the entirety of the people in this society, but only instruments for stabilizing the existing order, enabling a certain apparatus of party functionaries to reproduce themselves from within their own framework, and thus the possibility of pressure from below and awareness rising to the top has been made impossible by the institution of the parties themselves."

When power is built on oppression, truth loses its audience. It is no longer a question of knowledge, but of consensus: if bourgeois interests conflict with political and economic interests, the tendency is—instead of dropping the mask of the welfare state and thus becoming a horror itself—to invent circumstances that automatically bring about the desired action by suppressing certain needs. Washed clean by the intention of serving only the common good, the human being as the actual purpose of all endeavors disappears from view. What education, politics, or treatment ultimately consist of becomes secondary. Where only their application counts, their observance becomes an end in itself.

Although today's totalitarianism prefers suits and lab coats to uniforms, it has retained its corset of narrow-mindedness: while some plunge into a kind of sublimated conformism through consumption and mass culture, others suffer from what is known as déformation professionnelle, an adaptation of their professional perspective to their entire way of life.

While this may still play out within the confines of a penetrating everyday comedy in the case of designers, gardeners, or chefs, such universality has far more far-reaching consequences for politicians, police officers, and teachers, as well as scientists, doctors, and virologists: Suddenly, everything becomes political, everyone is potentially contagious or a supposed threat, and third parties are involved whose lives have so far been able to remain outside the realm of encroachment. According to Ivan Illich, when individual contours become blurred and people are seen only as stereotyped students, consumers, clients, or patients, there is a threat of the dissolution of privacy, which he once described as “disempowerment by experts.”
In the soup kitchen of political realism

Philosophers such as Aristotle and Hegel still assumed that truth was subject to an inner dynamic and that one could only ever approach it, but never achieve it. Their thinking was not only outside the contradiction between eternity and status. Rather, they lived a life of unpretentiousness toward the meaningful connections in this world, which is diametrically opposed to our current claim to sole validity: Especially in times of crisis, we see how politicians use scientific arguments to immunize their own decisions.

Whether it's climate change or a pandemic emergency, rules are drafted under the guise of sovereignty that require the procedural involvement of those who are subject to them—an inductive process that declares the correctness of individual cases to be valid in general. This represents a degree of encroachment that would have to provoke widespread outrage if our lifestyle had not reached a level of passivity that makes us perceive paternalism as relief rather than disenfranchisement.

Benda saw its origin in the threefold nature of political passions—consisting of the weakening of intellectual attitude, the abolition of idealism, and the decimation of discernment (16). Over the course of the past century, this has created a field of opinion in which the state's endeavor to mobilize all moral resources for itself no longer needs to be limited to times of war: instead of allowing people to develop their own ideas and values in the midst of an open utopia, it has been decided to keep them dependent on ready-made narratives by means of intellectual atrophy.

Whether the debate is framed by digitalization, gender, war mongering, eco-communism, or “dare more dictatorship” has become completely irrelevant—people's moral will is now so quickly integrated into the value system of these pre-established guidelines that the rise of a new political religiosity is difficult to dismiss.

Our inner and outer worlds are simply too one-sided for this not to be seen as a kind of “semi-permeabilization” of our selves: the more susceptible we have become to outside influences, the more our voice has lost its relevance. It has become irrelevant what we actually want, how we actually want to live, and what our emotional state actually is, if we weren't constantly being twisted around like this.

The mediatization, medicalization, and mathematization of our perception of reality have decoupled it so much from the reality of our everyday lives that auto-, expert-, and technocrats have an easy time reestablishing the detached uncertainties about right and wrong, good and evil with their own values. While individuals lose their voices in the toxic language of the masses, over time they have become so fragile that, for fear of making mistakes in their own decisions, they prefer to follow instructions rather than guidance, and commands rather than advice.

"Caring behavior has a tendency to disempower. Protection keeps people small. Care is therefore number one of the ten ways to make people passive." — Reinhard K. Sprenger.
The unwavering nature of Erasmus

Even if every generation has the right to fail because of its own stupidity, it is still far too simplistic to look for the reason for a lack of emancipation solely in the individual. In times when universities are mutating into corporations and discussion panels in all media formats are geared solely toward ratings-driven “confrontainment” rather than enlightenment and the formation of a critical public, it is simply no longer enough to ‘know’ the roots of former authoritarian systems—especially since these usually found the most fertile ground in the “cultured” social class.

Exposing the servitude to one's own zeitgeist, even though its representatives prove to be not only not champions of enlightenment but also profiteers and initiators of bondage, requires more than “knowledge” or insight into politics: In order to muster the courage to stand up for freedom and independence in the midst of a society that mistakenly considers itself free and independent, one needs a self that is unspoiled by the constraints of the times, that is not swayed by what one is supposed to think and say at any given moment, but—regardless of moral conventions—knows how to preserve the value of justice within oneself.

“We must create sober, patient people who do not despair in the face of the worst horrors and do not get excited about every stupidity. Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” — Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebook 28, Paragraph 11, 2232.

From Karl Popper, Isaiah Berlin, and Norberto Bobbio to Alexander Mitscherlich, Erich Fried, Michel Foucault, and Golo Mann to Hannah Arendt, Theodor W. Adorno, Primo Levi, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Jan Patočka, and Group 47: all of them, to varying degrees, refused to let their sense of justice be eradicated in “times of trial.” They not only resisted the temptations of bondage, but also made the voice of reason heard amid all the conformity. For them, freedom was still the absence of coercion.

This made them, in Ralf Dahrendorf's view, Erasmians, those “lateral thinkers” who, as representatives of the liberal spirit — and thus immune to the currents of their time — often stood alone. While they kept a clear head morally and politically when others lost theirs, loneliness became the price of their thoughts and thus also the price of their freedom. While Raymond Aron and Walter Benjamin died for this principle, today's court intellectuals lack any form of discipline, self-control, and prudence to make even a remotely comparable sacrifice in the “struggle for reason.”

There is no doubt that linking moral decisions to reason is rarer than ever. At the same time, there is a lack of those cool, clever minds that still thought things through to their end — How do we want to live? Who do we want to be (or have been)? — that type of character that always knew how to maintain its vision without losing its center.

There is a lack of voices that ask questions rather than make statements, of thinkers whose aphorisms still inspire people to think for themselves instead of boiling them down to a moralizing mush of emotions.

Those “guardians of truth” whose knowledge was so extensive that they could be called “world specialists,” but who never used their expertise to keep their fellow human beings down. Those whose concern was to provide people with differentiated ways of thinking so that they, in turn, would not lose their minds in this world? In short, there is a lack of thinkers whom we can look up to without feeling small. But who says that we cannot be these thinkers ourselves?

"When I say that people have always made their own history, but not yet consciously, I mean that when they do become conscious of it, the problem of self-perpetuating elites and self-perpetuating apparatuses no longer arises. For the problem lies in being able to vote elected representatives out of office again—to be able to vote them out at any time—and in being aware of the necessity of doing so."—Rudi Dutschke, in an interview with Günter Gaus, 1967.

Sources and notes:

(1) Plato, Politeia 433a.

(2) Benda, Julien: The Betrayal of the Intellectuals. Essay. VAT Verlag André Thiele 2012, page 71.

(3) Ibid., page 62.

(4) Ibid., page 73.

(5) Ibid., page 107.

(6) Quoted from Dahrendorf, Ralf: Versuchungen der Unfreiheit. die Intellektuellen in Zeiten der Prüfung (Temptations of Unfreedom: Intellectuals in Times of Trial). Verlag C.H. Beck, Munich 2006, page 174.


(7) Benda 2012, page 129.

(8) Ibid., page 48.

(9) Ibid., p. 77.

(10) Ibid., p. 56.

(11) Chomsky, Noam: An Anatomy of Power. The Chomsky Reader. Europa-Verlag, Hamburg 2004, p. 66.

(12) Foucault, Michel: The Political Function of the Intellectual. In: Ibid.: Writings in Four Volumes. Dits et Ecrits, Volume III: 1976-1979. Edited by Daniel Defert/ François Ewald. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 2003, page 146.

(13) Ibid., page 145.

(14) Chomsky 2004, p. 66.

(15) Illich 1973, p. 8

(16) Benda 2012, p. 194.

Lilly Gebert, born in 1998, likes to rack her brains. Be it about how to preserve humanity in a system based on inhumanity, or how humanity can even be measured in times of technocracy and alienation. Knowing how quickly a newspaper can cloud one's view of the world, she tries to bring clarity to the intellectual confusion of our time on her blog “Treffpunkt im Unendlichen” (Meeting Point in Infinity).