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The danger of seeking expertise from extremists [1]

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Date: 2024-05-05  

Many of my concerns about the disputes over the war in Gaza were expressed in the excellent essay “We are importing the worst of Israel and Palestine to our campuses” by NYU Israel Studies professor Lihi Ben Shitrit. She describes how supposedly progressive Americans have adopted the language of extremists, such that they become a barrier to establishing peace. Rather than reach out to an Israeli-Palestinian peace-seeking coalition like Standing Together, Americans seem to be taking our cues from ultranationalist extremists on either side. This extremism is nothing new; it has been the norm in how Americans engage with the Israel-Palestine conflict for many years. The seeming moderation of the era before Oct. 7 was due more to a lack of engagement than truly seeking a path to co-existence.

For instance, most of our political attention related to this conflict in the recent past was focused on the “Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions” (BDS) movement, and the counter-movement, both of which were extremist. While the name ‘BDS’ emphasizes the restrained methods of this particular campaign, the organizers have held onto extremist demands that basically amount to the unconditional surrender of Israel. Meanwhile, the anti-BDS crowd includes many people who likewise basically demand the unconditional surrender of the Palestinians, and who also encourage federal and state governments to punish the BDS crowd for expressing their opinions. These two extremist factions seem to be driving the current campus conflict, but with a greater sense of urgency and a bunch of new recruits who have turned their attention to the Israel-Palestine conflict as it escalated on October 7 last year.

This expanded activity among both factions brings my attention to a dysfunctional process by which Americans gather and process information — and how we routinely give too much credence to extremists while ignoring reasonable voices. The root of this problem is that people are simply incapable of staying fully informed about every potentially important topic, no matter how much some of us news junkies may try. Eventually, a crisis bring a certain topic to the forefront of our attention, and we rely on our media systems to gather and process the information that we then consume. This habit of shifting our attention between topics en masse leaves us struggling to identify experts who can bring us up to speed on the topic. Often, we find that very few people have bothered to study the topic, and those who have often have an agenda related to the topic, possibly including an unreasonable obsession with the topic. In other words, we find that many of the ‘experts’ are in fact extremists and fanatics. We turn to them as the only ones who are knowledgeable, and they drag us down their rabbit holes.

To resist this tendency, we can try to maintain a community of experts on any given topic so that we can turn to them during a crisis. The government has their agencies, but we often want to have independent information so that the people can guide the government rather than the other way around. We often get good expertise from academics, but journalists often can’t convert that expertise into digestible fodder as rapidly as the public demands during a crisis. To make it worse, even academic experts can have an agenda, either because that is what drives the passion that makes them a good scholar, or because wealthy donors have shaped departments to further their agendas. Under-resourced journalists may even turn to pseudo-academic institutions, such as partisan think tanks in order to scrape up any context for the current crisis. It’s hard enough to find reliable expertise even before considering the multi-million dollar propaganda campaigns that constantly saturate our media.

This is something Americans need to get better at, and it’s going to be along slog. It will require investments in education to raise the media literacy of all Americans. And it will also require investment in independent journalism, scholarship, and in developing new forms of media that help people to find reliable information rather than just pushing them to support one war-monger or another.

* In the current situation, a move to extremes is often supported by the desire to find someone to blame, and specifically to blame secret conspiracies. There is also an attitude that only dramatic acts can bring necessary attention to important causes. Ironically, many supporters of the pro-Palestinian campus activists are complaining that mainstream media focuses on the chaos on campuses rather than on the war in Gaza — but this is exactly what occupations are designed to achieve. Occupations force authorities to pay attention to the occupiers. If successful, they may ultimately bring attention to the initial cause, but it is a round-about and risky path for doing so. The campus occupations emphasize the intensity of commitment among a small group of activists, rather than expressing the broad objection to current policy. The occupiers may point to Biden’s pause on arms shipments as sign of the success of their actions, but leading Democrats have been signaling this move since before the current intensification of protests starting April 17. For instance, Schumer called for new elections in Israel on March 14, and Biden had previously delayed arms shipments in protests of Israel’s actions. These campus protests can’t even claim to have raised public awareness — the majority of Americans already thought Israel had gone to far as of Feb 1.

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