EXPERT PILLORIED

Wairarapa Times-Age, 26 December 1940, Page 6

EXPERT PILLORIED

NEED FOR SOME CAUTION. Notably tiresome among the many plagues which descend on us in wartime is the swarm of alleged “experts," writes Mr Ivor Brown. Not long ago there was a craze, for applying the noun “key” as an adjective to anything of importance. The land swarmed with “key” men doing “key” jobs in “key” places. This bunch of "keys” now being less employed, we are subjected instead to the loquacious dominion of the “expert.” Not a theme, not an organisation, but releases this usually pompous, prolix, and platitudinous nuisance at our defenceless heads. Our world may still be on the whole contemptuous of genuine education, but it is increasinglymenaced with a dangerous respect for the technicalities and palaver of learning. Those who may be least responsive to the charms of literature are often the most easily impressed by rows of letters after a name. They .are ready to be’ humbugged by any show of degrees and diplomas, howsoever and wheresoever obtained, and immediately take their owners to be inevitably the possessors of deep wisdom and of knowledge no less profound. On this servility the bogus “expert" feeds richly and swells into his corpulence of pride and power. If all our talk about freedom and democracy is not to become the idlest cant we have to guard ourselves as much against the dictator with a diploma as against the dictator surrounded by his tommy-gun men.