The cult of experts

I have lived across the street from old Mrs. Gliba for 22 years now. (Funny how I've aged and she is still just . . . old.) Mrs. Gliba has a thick Romanian accent and a lot of strange ideas. My kids were 5 and 4 when we moved here, and she was already promulgating such iconoclastic notions as (1) the desirability of marriage before procreation, (2) eating simple, fresh food, and (3) the weird opinion that college isn't for everybody, and that what we need are young people apprenticed to tradesmen.

I have always enjoyed our little conversations on her front porch, conscious of how fortunate I am to hear tales of World War II with a European flavor and old fashioned philosophies that are, even as we speak, disappearing into the slipstream of history. Then I cross the road back to my modern life and my modern thinking.

The priesthood of modern thinking is the Expert. There is an expert for every area capable of human cogitation---from sex to food to education. The expert has taken the job of thinking out of your hands, so that you can be freed up for other things. We believe the expert because he has letters after his name, so he must know (notwithstanding the Scarecrow's wry comment about the diploma class in The Wizard of Oz).

Now my kids are 29 and 26 (plus 2 more). Over the past two decades I have seen young people struggling because they took the non-marriage childbearing option, young people becoming obese on "new and improved" and "low fat" food, and young people with B.A.s who seem to me would have been better pursuing that knack with car engines.

And Mrs. Gliba still rocks on her porch and still has the welcome mat out for me when I feel like stopping by. But nowadays I listen with considerably less arrogance.

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