Blog

Credibility Still Counts

The recent scandal involving a Wikipedia editor’s falsified credentials has laid bare the hypocrisy of the open-information movement’s disdain for academic authority.  It turns out that the disgraced “Essjay” repeatedly invoked his fictitious doctoral degrees in theology and canon law to settle disputes in his favor, a remarkable achievement in a forum where credentials ostensibly do not matter.

These fake credentials also served to improve the project’s standing in the media. In the now infamous New Yorker article, Essjay had been cited as an example of an academic expert willing to devote extended time and effort to the “free encyclopedia,” breaking the stereotype of the anti-authoritarian adolescent or young adult with too much free time.  The revelation that Wikipedia’s most notable expert contributor is in fact a 24-year-old community college dropout with too much free time only reinforces the stereotype that most of its editors are homebound young white males, explaining its inordinate emphasis on pop culture and computer science.

In this demographic sector, anti-authoritarianism dies hard (it is usually cured by age, maturity, and life experience), so many of Essjay’s fellow Wikiphiles have taken care to emphasize that he was an excellent contributor, proving that academic credentials are worthless.  In fact, all that is proved is that very little expertise is needed to produce mediocre content, especially when most of it is copied from other sources.  The quality content on Catholic topics came not from Essjay (who had a shallow understanding of most complex issues, regurgitating popular liberal theology), but from the public-domain Catholic Encyclopedia.  The fact that someone as ignorant as Essjay (see his wrongheaded imprimatur comment) could pose as an “expert on Catholicism” (as he laughably styled himself, while admitting to be a non-Catholic – strange vocation!) only reveals the level of illiteracy of the average editor.  This ignorance can be seen throughout the Wikipedia, especially in areas like philosophy, history and theology, where a writer needs to be more than a compiler of facts.

The information iconoclasts claim to judge people not on credentials, but on their expertise as proven by their ability to back up their edits.  In the world of amateur encyclopedists, backing up a claim means linking to an online source that repeats the claim. This practice is a poor substitute for expertise, since just because something isn’t on Google doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. In 2007, the vast majority of human knowledge is still offline, including most scholarly sources published before 1995.  Those journals which are online are usually available only through secure access, and will not be accessible by linking from a search engine.  Thus the expert who appeals to any offline source of knowledge will be at a disadvantage in a dispute with an amateur who can back up his claim with a link to an online newspaper.

In the final analysis, all content disputes appeal to authority, not the authority of the editors themselves, but that of the references they cite.  It will not suffice to compose one’s own argument, since “original research” is prohibited, but one must appeal to the authority of journalists and academics, the same people whose authority is disdained in the editing process.  This appeal to “reliable sources” (and how can an amateur determine which sources are more reliable?) is a tacit admission that credentials are a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for the construction of a credible article.  Authority cannot be derived from its opposite, but from other authorities who proved their expertise through the rigors of education and experience, and being subjected to expert peer review, for it is the expertise of the reviewers that makes peer review a potent indicator of credibility.  While it is easy to find numerous examples of bias or incompetence among experts, this is not a rational basis for rejecting the entire class in favor of amateurs who are completely dependent on the expert class for information, but lack the experience and judgment to discern the strengths and weaknesses of these authorities.

Modern Mythmaking: The Talpiot Tomb

All too often, the veneer of secular rationality is cracked by the spontaneous eruption of the most implausible beliefs. We have seen this phenomenon in the conspiracy theories surrounding the JFK assassination and the moon landings, in Erich Von Daniken’s “ancient astronauts” and other extraterrestrial legends, and in less grandiose manifestations, such as Elvis sightings, psychics, Ouija boards, and horoscopes.

In each of these modern myths, there can be found a form of wish-fulfillment, whether by depicting a noble, democratic people opposed by an evil establishment, or by fabricating a sense of purpose in a secular cosmos, often by radically reinterpreting the traditional legends of human culture. The myths pretend to empower the people, by freeing them from the establishment’s supposed lies, and in some cases by offering them some control over the preternatural world.

Most recently, the religious establishment has been the target of such mythmaking, as shown by the commercial success of The Da Vinci Code and its derivative works. As the popularity of such works greatly exceeds their scholarly plausibility (which is nil), we must acknowledge that they appeal to a popular desire, in particular the desire to “outsmart” the religious establishment. At the same time, this modern legend would validate contemporary fascination with feminine sexuality by reinventing Christianity with a narrative that reflects 21st-century mores.

Such reinvention is obviously ahistorical, but we must understand that “critical thinking” in common parlance often means skepticism towards the establishment, rather than cold, impartial analysis. The desire to prove the establishment wrong trumps the usual rules of evidence, resulting in pseudoscientific claims. Biblical archaeology is replete with implausible claims and outright hoaxes, motivated by a desire to prove a preferred interpretation of Scripture. Those who advocate a radical reinterpretation of the Bible are no different in this regard.

An especially clumsy attempt at special pleading can be found in today’s amateur claim to have found the tomb of Jesus’ family. As the highly esteemed Israeli archaeologist Amos Kloner has noted, the claim is devoid of scientific merit, since only well-to-do families had such crypts, and the names Jeshua, Joseph, and Maryam were exceedingly common. We may further add that Jesus would have been denied burial altogether had it not been for the intercession of Joseph of Arimathea, who offered his tomb. We could also remark that the fact of the empty tomb was acknowledged even by the unbelieving Jews, as evidenced in their own writings.

This sort of argument would fall on many deaf ears, since, in the “skeptical” mentality, authority is not to be trusted, whether that authority is in the Gospels or in professional archaeologists. It is therefore of no concern that even non-Christians should refute this revisionism. The incoherence of an anti-authoritative epistemology is evident to any careful thinker, but our immediate concern is the fact that the experiment of secularism has failed in an important task. It has failed to produce a populace that values critical thinking, so that instead they synthesize new myths, revealing in this need the failure of secular philosophy to provide any sense of purpose to human destiny.

The Unsanitized Martin Luther King

The popular image of Martin Luther King, Jr. is that of a “safe,” moderate civil rights leader, as contrasted with the unseemly radicalism of Malcolm X and the black nationalist groups. This sanitized version of King, revered every January, scarcely resembles the real man, who was a revolutionary in the best and worst senses of the word. Discussing the real Martin Luther King would force us to examine the unpleasant issues of American militarism and the social consequences of capitalism.

Most hagiographies of King leave a gap between 1965 and 1968, his most radical period. It was during this time that he stridently denounced the current form of capitalism, advocating redistribution of wealth not only on the basis of race, in the form of hiring quotas and reparations for slavery, but on the basis of economic class. Had King lived through the 70s and 80s, he would have been scarcely different in his politics from Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton; in fact, he probably would have stood to the left of them.

King spoke powerfully against U.S. militarism, calling his government the world’s biggest purveyor of violence. His speech “Beyond Vietnam” was widely scorned as sympathizing with Communism, a common accusation against those with insufficient nationalist bloodlust.

Contrary to popular perception, King was not of the Christian faith in any traditional sense. In his collegiate writings, he denied the divinity of Christ, the virgin birth, and the bodily resurrection of Christ. As St. Paul said, “And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.” King’s Christianity was hollow as a religion; he followed Christ only in matters of ethics, and even then very selectively. By his own confession, he pursued ministry only as a means to preach his social gospel.

If we were to judge King “by the content of his character”, we should find alongside his saintly commitment to non-violence some evils that cannot be dismissed as mere lapses of judgment. His insatiable adulterous appetites were so perverse, that even the philanderous Lyndon Johnson was shocked by the “hypocritical preacher.” While the full details of his carnal sins will not be known until FBI tapes are unsealed in 2027, we already have ample evidence of another dimension of his deep dishonesty, in the form of systematic plagiarism. His doctoral thesis contained entire pages of verbatim copying; this egregious violation of academic ethics would have resulted in a revocation of the degree if we were speaking of anyone else. Plagiarism remained a lifelong habit, and numerous writings and speeches, including the famous “I have a dream” speech, were systematically plagiarized, far beyond the innocent uncited paraphrase.

Despite these personal failings, King’s message of human dignity, racial equality, and non-violence does not lose any of its luster. Even if historical reality compels us to move beyond the false idol of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who was really neither a reverend nor a doctor, nor a particularly honest man, we will nonetheless find in his works, original or otherwise, ideas that challenge the legitimacy of our social structure, and force us to address questions far more disturbing than the innocuous banalities that greet us each January.