Experts: Can't Live With Them, Can't Live Without Them

Douglas Murray Takes On Joe Rogan

Catch-up service:
How To Communicate Health Risks…
How To Write a Book
Podcast: James Marriott on Britain’s Elites
Nine Principles For Success In the Age of AI
What ‘Adolescence Doesn’t Tell Us About Boys’
Did John Lennon Think He Was Jesus?

• ‘The four moments that made the Beatles’ - I was on the The Times podcast, The Story, where I talked through how I would tell the story of the group in four films, as Sam Mendes is going to do. This was one of my favourite pod conversations from recent weeks, quite different to the others I’ve done. Check it out.

• This week I talked J&P in Swansea and Wanstead (Essex). J&P is still in the bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic. Thank you for buying and reading it. The great Tracey Thorn says she feels bereft having finished it. The solution to that is simple, of course: start again.
  

Experts: Can't Live With Them, Can't Live Without Them

Douglas Murray loves to debate. A smoothly articulate talker with a very English, Oxbridge arrogance, he is self-consciously in the mould of Christopher Hitchens, albeit lighter on erudition. Murray, a devout enemy of multiculturalism and wokeness, has a big American fanbase on the right but has not gone for the full MAGA burger. For one thing, he is a passionate supporter of Ukraine in its war against Russia. This made him an interesting choice of guest for Joe Rogan, who is ambivalent about the Ukrainian cause, or at least America’s support for it.

Murray is also an uncritical supporter of Israel in its war with Hamas, while Rogan is a furious opponent. One of Rogan’s favourite guests is Dave Smith, a comedian who has become an online personality not because he’s funny but because of his strongly anti-Israel takes, which Rogan has allowed him to expound at length. When Rogan invited Murray on to his show he invited Smith on too, ostensibly so that these differences could be aired, but perhaps because he wanted an ally. Either way, the result is compelling, and exposes a faultline in the online right.

Murray moves on to the offensive almost from the moment he opens his mouth. Ignoring Smith, whom he clearly sees as beneath him, he addresses Rogan directly. First, he asks him why his guests skew so heavily towards anti-Israel and anti-Ukraine positions. He then accuses Rogan of giving free rein to guests who purvey wild theories about twentieth century history and flirt with fascism. This becomes the focus of Murray’s attack.

He mentions Darryl Cooper, a popular history podcaster who is fond of takes that are, to put it mildly, contrarian. Cooper has suggested that Churchill was the “chief villain” of WWII, because he recklessly escalated an otherwise-salvageable peace. He also claims that Hitler downplayed his anti-semitism during the 1930s because it wasn’t popular with Germans. Cooper is not a historian (did you guess?) and has not written any serious books. He is a pure-born creature of the podosophere, a blabber-mouthing sensationalist who pre-empts criticism of his shaggy dog stories by putting his theories in air quotes. His basic stance is something like, “I’m not saying this is definitely true, but wouldn’t it be funny/interesting if it were?”

Rogan and Smith defend Cooper, pointing out that he does not pretend to be authoritative. Murray responds, “But there’s some point at which, ‘I’m just raising questions’ is not a valid thing. You’re not asking questions; you’re telling people something.” He suggests that Rogan has become an unwitting host for ideological parasites: “People are playing a double game on your show because you’re so open minded. They push edgy, frankly horrific opinions. Then if you say ‘That’s wrong’, they say, ‘I’m a comedian. What do I know? I’m just throwing stuff out there.’”

Murray says that Rogan and others win downloads and views for airing wildly contrarian takes, but doing so is irresponsible. “If you only get the contrary view - isn’t it fun to pretend Churchill was the bad guy of the twentieth century - at some point you’re going to lead people down a path where they think that’s the view. And it’s horseshit, of the most profound kind.” He says that by opening the door to Cooper and others (including, by implication, Smith) Rogan is playing a dark and dangerous game. “If you mainstream fringe views that are easily debunked, at some point that view will become what disconnected, lonely people start playing with.”

Rogan: “So what’s the solution?”

Murray: “To have more experts around.”

Experts! This does not go down well, and it becomes the nub of the disagreement, between Rogan and Smith on one side, and Murray on the other. “What’s all the ‘appeal to authority’ stuff?” asks Smith. “You have to be an expert to have an opinion?” That’s elitist, he says. Rogan crows that on Covid (including lab leak, which looms large on the right) he was right and the experts were wrong.

Murray agrees that experts have proven to be arrogant, dishonest, and plain wrong over the previous twenty years. But he doesn’t want to let go of the concept of expertise. “Yes, everyone is free to air their views. But it does not mean that everyone who sounds off on an issue has an equally valid point of view.” Later on, when discussing Gaza, he appeals to his own expertise, as someone who has visited the conflict. “Have you been to the crossing points?” he asks. As others have pointed out, this is somewhat at odds with Murray’s previous attacks on the idea of “lived experience”.

In fact, it is striking how much Murray’s critique of Rogan mirrors criticisms of free speech and populism he has previously dismissed. For instance, leftists have argued that free speech advocates overlook the relationships of power and money that determine who gets to dominate the discourse. When Rogan attacks the powerful experts who have in his view led America astray, Murray says, “But maybe you have power. We live in an era where podcasters have a lot of power.” He notes that there are commercial incentives, embedded in algorithms, to favour the most extreme and outrageous viewpoints: “The marketplace of ideas ends up pushing you really some crazy shit.”¹

While it’s fun to point out that Murray is, in a sense, arguing against himself, and not wholly successfully, he is at least grappling with a real problem to which the solutions are not obvious (and Rogan and Smith, to their credit, hear him out). Everyone likes the idea of a pure democracy of speech but nobody enjoys the reality of it. We want everyone to have a voice, but we don’t want everyone speaking at the same volume. We may not trust expert credentials, but how else are we to distinguish between opinions we take seriously and those we can dismiss without a hearing?

Despite being himself a bombastic and attention-seeking public figure, Murray is reflective enough to see that the American right is in danger of becoming stupefied by its own success at winning over audiences - and voters: “We saw years of crazy left overreach where they tried to make us all say the craziest things. And completely predictably, there are now figures on the right playing with really dark and ugly stuff. There’s some damn hygiene required. Let’s have some hygiene on our own side, not lift every sewer gate.”

Here the debate becomes circular, like bathwater going around a drain hole, because Smith and Rogan half-agree with Murray. They don’t trust credentialled experts, but they know that to abolish all epistemic authority would be dangerous. They believe in a democracy of speech, but they know that you cannot have a thousand different views of reality and treat them all as equally valid. They are magnetically attracted to conspiracy theories; to the slaughter of history’s sacred cows; to “dangerous knowledge” - but they don’t want to come off as nutcases.

Smith that someone once told him, “When you take the red pill you’re supposed to take one, and not the whole bottle.” He continues: “When the establishment are exposed as lying about one thing, you tend to think, ‘What else have they been lying about? The whole thing? I agree with you [Murray] that there is danger in that, and people jump to totally wrong conclusions. But then maybe the people with real power should do a better job of not lying through their teeth about everything.” Note how Smith observes how dangerous it is to assume that experts lie about everything, before concluding that they lie about everything. He can’t help himself.

This is symptomatic of where the American right is now, at least the remaining sentient part of it. For all that they wish to overthrow the gatekeepers of the discourse, Rogan and Smith and Murray know at some level that experts should be listened to, but they are reluctant to admit it. If they did that might have to concede that despite the manifold and often disastrous failings of experts - in geopolitics and healthcare and economics - the expert consensus is right much more often that it’s wrong. They might even have to admit that academic historians are more reliable than podcasters, the New York Times is a more accurate guide to reality than Reddit, and economists know more about trade than Donald Trump. And that, for them, really is dangerous knowledge.

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