Notice first - think later

A narrow squeak, suggesting that it's stupid to reject 'experts'

These header images are mostly random because, whatever. German WWII bunker on Belle-île-en-Mer

A bit of a recap on first principles

Hello and thank you to the latest influx of new subscribers and recent upgraders.

If we approach these things similarly you may never have bothered reading the about Rarely Certain page.

Following a somewhat successful 2022 for this thing it was interesting to revisit that preamble to see how on topic most of RC remains as it evolves from pot shots at culture war silliness into bits of mindfulness exploration and occasional metaphysical speculations.

Were that intro to be honed down to its essentials, it would say something about noticing before you start thinking.

Looking inward at our innate reactivity.

Because awareness seems to be a useful guardrail against being jerked around by actors who have an interest in how you feel about things.

Establishing influence is the first step to guiding how you think, so that you'll think like them.

We think we're sophisticated because we can mostly spot this when its done for advertising or overt campaigning.

It’s become a red rag, that sense of being manipulated rather than informed.

A beautiful distressed child depicted in my inbox some time ago

<See throat clear>¹

About Rarely Certain would also aver to a liberating quality of updating beliefs and recognising when you were wrong.

Or spotting that you're being subliminally led into a two-dimensional world of this OR that, when the real world comprises blends of this, that AND the other.

Also, something about guarding against confusing your identity with the epistemic foundations of our reality models. How you are not what you think, but are what you do.

Why this isn't more widely recognised seems weird.

Perhaps it’s partly a function of social media. Platforms where you do nothing but air the contents of your brain. And where it seems many people find their place in the world.

Twitter and places like it entirely collapse you so that all you are is your opinions, moral positions and lots of signals to others that your opinions and morals are the right ones. So that people who think the same will like you and then you’ll get some dopamine hits.

Flattening and totalising every point and position

Talking of guardrails, it has become tedious that the scepticism many of us have about institutions, worship of credentials, scientism (as opposed to scientific endeavour), the academy (especially - but not limited to - social psychology and the humanities) leads many to reject the value of 'experts' per se.

Having dwelled more than at any previous point in life among conservative thinkers this seems to be among the most unfortunate quirks of the right-coded mindset.

But it's easy to see how it's happened, with so many dissenting experts obviously keeping their heads down in a media landscape that relentlessly misrepresents contested questions as settled.

And we're often insulted by the dreadful communication practices of dissembling institutions. To be surprised that so many people struggle to accept what they're told by their 'betters' at this point requires wilfully ignoring a lot of salient issues.

I too have become more sceptical of 'expert' figures too, during a process of discovery that revealed ideological trajectories or perverse incentive effects in fields that I once thought were exclusively the domain of good faith scholarship and objective research.

Dotted with honest mistakes, but essentially always erring toward truth, was how I once saw science and scholarship in general. Less so, now. It’s much messier than that.

But, just as it seems puerile when people dismiss all professional journalists or other specialists in favour of doing your own research, I can see why people gravitate to the corners of the internet that give them some semblance of comfort.

How insidiously seductive those places can be.

You don’t like the thought of being poorer for some climate-related reason, so it makes sense to seek reasons why that would be unjust. What better way to prove it than to believe that it’s all just a lie to make you poorer. I get it.

Internal monitoring is handy if you want to make sense of things

We all have our priors. But we don’t necessarily know that.

Being sceptical that any real, substantial good will ever come of being avidly 'anti-racist' rather than just not being racist and refusing to tolerate discrimination that isn’t based in material reality,  I was briefly suckered by an ambient prior over the new year.

It was an essay I saw that seemed to surface a historical injustice suffered by certain white people that was Being Ignored by The Libs.

No one enjoys an example of Liberal Hypocrisy and its technique of cherry picking for narrative reinforcement more than me.

But this fondness for owning the ideologues turned out to be a personal vulnerability.

I was saved from myself by someone who knows what they're talking about. An expert, if you will.

Here's how it unfolded. A helpful lesson to start the year.

It started with curiosity piqued by a perspective advanced in what seemed like a good faith scholarly-seeming essay.

It was about the experiences of mainly Irish - but also British and other European down-and-out people - indentured as servants in 17th century America.

Casually, rather than hyperbolically, it argued that they lived in a comparable way to black slaves - a fact that is overlooked today, obviously because discussion of injustice suffered by poor white people is now passé.

Vaguely aware that my growing impatience with the excesses of 'anti-racism' (#CancelWhitePeople, ‘white women's tears’ etc) was priming me to savour another nugget of social justice hypocrisy I spent some time digging around.

Soon it became clear that I had neither the time nor the chops to surface anything more than some remarkable individual stories.

One, about cannibalism aboard a sloop carrying these passengers really grabbed me. Another, about a woman's legal challenge to the way in which she was bought and sold, kept me engrossed.

Not going to lie. Part of me wanted this to be an example of being permitted by The Culture to care about the horror of one kind of servitude while being expected to overlook another.

I was doing my own research.

Research for which I have no domain knowledge.

How to make sense of it all?

Half of the internet was telling me these indentured white servants often lived an equivalent nightmare to black slaves, a fact now conveniently overlooked in the interests of racial justice. The other half was debunking that claim. And I have grown skeptical of debunking as a thing.

Activist mainstream journalists in areas like gender ideology have 'debunked' too many objective material facts for my taste.

Even the word debunk raises my hackles now. Too often it reeks of smug midwits playing to a section of the crowd that gets off on looking down on everyone else.

I needed an expert. But what about the ‘expert problem’? As in How the hell do you work out which experts to trust? from a year ago.

So I pinged a note to a historian I read and trust. This particular historian seemed a good bet because she often expresses scepticism around aspects of social justice ideology, but always seems careful to separate fact from opinion.

Thank you to

Katrina Gulliver

for permission to reproduce our correspondence.

I share it unedited because it's edifying on the process and the question with which I was wrestling.

---

Me:

I don't know if this is even worth mentioning, but I've been fascinated by a story I stumbled upon about an old ship.

https://bullmule.wordpress.com/2009/09/15/terror-on-the-sea-flower/

It's the sort of history that gets warped and twisted, according to ideology and there's lots of that to be found online. Some people say that white indentured servants shipped from Europe to the US were treated as badly as black slaves and others are outraged at such a suggestion. Facts seem thinner on the ground than opinions and I've just given up trying to understand it all better, at least for the time being.

But you, as a historian, might be curious enough to get deeper into it.

KG:

Interesting story, I hadn’t read that one - though cannibalism and starvation on early modern ships not unfortunately unheard of! (see the awful case of the whaler ESSEX). 

On the indenture stuff, indeed a lot were convicts - more convicts were sent to the US colonies than would later be sent to Australia. (And establishing a penal colony at Port Jackson was a response to the crown no longer being able to export them to America). Some people elected to indenture themselves, usually to escape poverty, and because there was the promise of being granted land at the end of it. 

Whether indentured were treated as badly as slaves, the quick answer is no, just because their situation was time-limited. And they had greater rights to appeal to the courts than the enslaved (indentured people did sue over the terms of their indenture, its ending, and other claims). The early days of (African) slavery in the Chesapeake — before slavery laws became formalized and chattel slavery became perpetual — there was overlap in status; some indentured English servants married black people they were working alongside. (That’s 1620-1660-ish). 

 “My people were slaves too” has been a weird Irish claim in America in recent years; pretty effectively debunked by Liam Hogan among others. 

https://limerick1914.medium.com/all-of-my-work-on-the-irish-slaves-meme-2015-16-4965e445802a

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Everything shifted.

I'd already seen some references to Liam's work in my clickety clicking around. It seemed to be popular with certain highly partisan media. The kind of media that capitalises ‘black’ when talking about a skin-colour-based classification of people. Or calls men ‘people with penises’. Or makes demonstrably false statements to cast certain people in the worst possible light.

So I’d felt unsure about what to make of their support for Liam’s perspective.

But, because I wasn’t expecting it, Katrina's endorsement of his writing carried weight. She, knowing how to assess such things and not being a shrill progressive, had been satisfied by his arguments.

Also, her giving short shrift to a popular talking point in certain conservative circles in particular gave me extra comfort.²

Someone I tend toward trusting on the basis of their credentials as a dispassionate historian saved me from myself.

It can often be better to outsource your sense-making in this way. Carefully, though, not recklessly and blindly deciding that because you liked one thing someone said once, they must be right about everything.

What was going on

Specifically, I was nudged away from a growing disposition. A disposition that leads me to actively want a story to play one way, rather than another.

Without the initial noticing of this disposition I may never have reached out to her.

I might not have been aware of that ambient feeling. Instead I'd have been straight into the thinking and evidence-building and that may not have ended well.³

That’s what often seems to happen when people do their own research.

Being as sceptical of doing your own research as I am about accepting whatever is presented in the mainstream as the expert view is inevitably somewhat unsettling.

Uncertainty does tend to feel that way. We want to have a settled view, whether or not we even know how to arrive at one reliably, without shortcuts that connect to how we feel about the subject.

It would be easy to self-flagellate after noticing that I kind of wanted the issue of indentured white people to be unjustly overlooked. But noticing that propensity was good.⁴

I'm calling it a win.

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To sign off, a recent comment on another piece from RC reader 'Clever Pseudonym'.

This is from the Chuang Tzu, is on embracing incertitude as good intellectual and spiritual hygiene:

"Qu Boyu has been going along for sixty years and has changed sixty times. There was nothing he didn’t initially affirm as right that he didn’t later repudiate as wrong, so he could never be sure whether what he presently called right was not fifty-nine times wrong.

All beings have that from which they are born, but no one can see their root; they have that from which they emerge, but none can see through what door they enter. Everyone esteems what his knowing knows, but none knows how to know by relying on what his knowing does not know. Is this not the greatest uncertainty of all? Enough! Enough! There is nowhere to escape it! This is called saying both “It is right!” and “Is it right?”

My New Year's resolution is to try to be more like Chuang Tzu and less like just another angry internet-addicted monad wielding opinions for attention and validation.

Wish me luck!

Indeed. You and me both.

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1. Yes, I believe that very bad things are happening due to climate disruption, with shocking consequences around species loss, and that they’re not just normal weather pattern cycles, the sun getting hotter or any of the other do your own research explanations cherry-picked from a pool of disgruntled geologists or right-wing think tanks. I just don’t need the kid in my face.

2. Having dwelled far too online for many years I’m surprised never to have come across this trope until now. I just didn’t know it had been so popular on right wing FB for so long.

3. To be fair, I’d noticed that the people advancing this story included some fairly alarming right-wing evangelical websites, so that was a red flag. But when ‘liberal’ media has become activist media, there are often genuine stories that can only be found on dodgy right-wing platforms. See the bind?

4. Doubtless, wanting white people’s suffering to have been unjustly overlooked MUST mean that I'm a massive racist who hates black people and thinks that slavery was fine, but we can't all be perfect.