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I don’t like experts. Well, maybe that’s a somewhat extravagant generalisation.
After all, the label can be properly applied to many millions of my fellow
citizens, ranging from competent plumbers and successful market gardeners
to brain surgeons and radio astronomers, and I couldn’t and don’t dislike
the lot of them.

So I’d better modify that first statement. I don’t like experts who
are vain in the possession of their expertise. And, having narrowed the
target, I can go further, and say that I don’t just dislike them, but hate
them.

Hatred is commonly defined by lexicographers as a feeling of intense
antipathy, but the dictionary makers neglect an essential element in the
emotion, for true hatred involves an element of fear. And I both dislike
and fear experts who are vain in the possession of their expertise.

Take judges, for example.

Within recent weeks a British couple, wishing to adopt an orphan from
the wreckage of the late and unlamented Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romania, were
told by grey-suited and grey-minded civil servants (acting through the voice
of the Home Secretary) that they couldn’t do it because the adoptive father
had a bad heart, and had undergone a by-pass operation, and might not survive
the infant’s childhood and adolescence, and was thus ‘unsuitable’ as a father.

Frustrated and rightly incensed, the would-be parents sought a judicial
review, but the judge upheld the official verdict on the grounds that the
unfortunate child had already experienced undue suffering, and should not
be exposed to the possibility of the further grief that would flow from
the early loss of the father of its proposed new family. It would be better
off staying where it was in a bleak and poverty-stricken Romanian orphanage.

This ‘expert’ in the law was deaf to the argument that the woman in
the case was well aware of the possibility that she might be left to care
for the child on her own, and was confident of her ability to provide the
needed love and care, even should her partner perish.

Now, lawyers are a self-appointed bunch of referees. They are not elected
to their powerful position in society by their fellow citizens because they
have demonstrated exceptional wisdom. They choose, when very young, to read
law at a university, or otherwise gain entry to the trade, and thereafter,
if they play their cards well, within the confines of their own profession,
they may hope for advancement, even to become Lord Chief Justice. And in
the senior reaches of the trade they are able to define the morals and the
mores of the nation.

This is an unacceptable nonsense. Judges are not (except rarely, and
by chance) Solomons. They are lawyers who should stick to their trade of
administering the law as decreed by Parliament. They should recognise that
they’re technicians. They should be humble, and could make a start by ridding
themselves of those damned silly robes and wigs. That judge who decided
that a Romanian orphan would be better off in its orphanage than in the
home of a loving family with a father with a dicey heart had no qualification
whatsoever for taking such a view.

Let’s go down the scale a bit. A recent article in the British Dental
Journal described how toothwrights could attempt to identify those among
their customers who drink too much.

That’s the limit! If I go to a dentist it’s because I want to get a
tooth fixed. As a matter of fact, I’ve steered clear of dentists for years
now. It’s not because I’m frightened of their beastly little drills, but
because I can’t stand their assumption that they somehow own my teeth, and
the way they try to make me feel guilty for not looking after them in the
manner they prescribe. And if, in addition, they’re going to try to investigate
and modify my drinking habits, then that’s it. Dentists are out. Fortunately
the vigorous use of new toothpastes has absolved me from the need to seek
their services.

And I read that a pregnant woman is having to threaten legal action
in an attempt to force her doctors to tell her the sex of her unborn baby.
They’ve done an ultrasound scan, and they think they know the sex of the
fetus in her womb, but they won’t let on. They fear, it seems, that she
might seek an abortion if the child isn’t the kind she wants, or might otherwise
mismanage the information asked for. But dammit, it’s her baby, not theirs,
and it’s her right to be told, not their right to withhold.

Experts should accept the fact that they are only valuable to society
by virtue of their expertise. Knowing a lot about a little doesn’t give
them any kind of right to play God in matters beyond the narrow field of
their special competence.

I hate experts.

Well, I hate experts who are vain in the possession of their expertise.