Dad,
I’m sure you’ve blocked this from your memory, or at least I hope you have, but when you and Mom lived in L.A. you had this toilet that was always breaking down. So there was a plumber who would come to fix it. But every time he did, he would explain in punishing molecular detail, down to the last rivet, what had gone wrong with the pipes. Mom, the world’s nicest human, would politely listen and say “very interesting,” which is Mom for “please let my soul depart from my body and return when this man is ready to shut up and fix my damn toilet.”
Did I have a point? Oh yes. The boring toilet man found his own lectures fascinating because they covered his area of expertise. Mom found them excruciating because—well, because they were, and because for non-experts, technical details only matter insofar as they serve the ends of human life.
The plumber enjoys a complete and righteous authority over the details of plumbing that the rest of us don’t have or, for that matter, desire. But now let’s imagine that one day the plumber said to Mom, “good news! My extensive research into post-modern toiletude has shown conclusively that toilets are actually supposed to overflow every time you flush them. It’s for public health.” At that point it would be Mom—or any other person of good sense, were there one living in the house—who had authority to say definitively that the plumber was full of what the toilet should be full of.
And this tells you something else about expertise: it ends where human nature begins. You can be an expert in neurochemistry, but in matters of the heart you can only be wise. Experts in engineering have nothing to say about architecture. Expertise means taking vast quantities of experience (a word from the same Latin root) and bringing it under the roof of theory. But our experts are, often explicitly, in the business of theory at the expense of experience. Which is why they think they can tell us the soul is a hallucination, when we know it isn’t if we know anything at all. So then you get a TED talk from Yuval Harari, who couldn’t so much as fix a toilet, about why centuries of communion between mankind and God has basically been a very elaborate brain fart.
There’s a legend that Dr. Faustus, the expert of his day in matters scientific, wanted absolute authority over everything. But as the playwright Christopher Marlowe depicts him, what’s really frightening about Faustus is that when he departs from God, he doesn’t leave his Bible behind. He takes it with him, along with Roger Bacon’s treatises on nature, because he wants to roll it all up—tech, sex, religion, love—into the grips of his one theory. In the end it’s not about knowledge so much as power. But famously, to get it, he has to give away his soul.
Love,
Spencer
Does anyone else think a gigantic picture of a golden urinal lowers the tone of the site? I have to have a talk with that kid.
Today, your plumber would develop Critical Fecal Theory, demonstrating that human history is best explained by ownership of the means of sewage control, as a tool of oppression over non-binary eliminators (NBE). He would pioneer a field of study, then a university department, then a college vice-presidency. Producing consultants, certified by a federal agency, hired to analyze your Domestic Fecal Unit, not to fix it, but to develop a dialogue to unmask power paradigms. Toilets with two flushing options only would be outlawed and replaced with those having a dial to adjust flushing capacity. Byword: "This shit is too easy."