Competence Vs. Understanding

Dr. Ben Carson has endorsed Donald Trump for president yet again. Carson is a renowned brain surgeon, a man as respected and accomplished in his field as anyone can be. And yet, in the name of saving the American republic, he has thrown his name and reputation behind a man who openly sought to undermine and override the Constitution for his own interests and deliberately riled a mob up to murderous hatred of his own vice president; who boasts of having based his election campaigns on crowd-pleasing promises that he never had any intention of fulfilling; and who has given his followers, Carson included, eight years of solid and overwhelming evidence of his moral infantilism, his sociopathy, his cowardly passing of every possible buck to a vast array of individuals whom he had formerly identified publicly as “the best people,” but subsequently condemned as losers, idiots, and traitors when they dared to question or disagree with him about anything.

If you needed another argument against the progressive bromides of convenience about “trusting the experts” or “listening to the science” when it comes to broad matters of public policy or moral philosophy, witness Ben Carson, world-famous neurosurgeon. Throw him into the same bucket with Neil deGrasse Tyson, world famous astrophysicist, Bill Gates, world famous computer geek, and Anthony Fauci, world famous liar — er, that is, immunologist — and all the rest of those experts who, precisely due to their expertise, remain permanently deaf to the most indispensable lesson about themselves, namely that a specialist is by definition oblivious to the whole, and therefore incapable of properly judging anything beyond the narrow and non-transferable realm of his expertise.