“Who, we are obliged to ask, looks with respect any longer to the professional man of knowledge: whether scientist or scholar?
Robert Nisbet
Twilight of Authority — pg. 110
Nisbet goes on to explain why this is so. This is so because the putative “wise men” for so many generations have disappointed and let us down. People have gotten wise to the con that the “Professional men of knowledge” pulled for so long. For a couple generations now these men have been all hat and no cattle.
In my environs, I see this most commonly among the clergy. The clergy was once accepted as the “professional men of knowledge” par excellent. This is rightfully no longer the case for those who are not simpletons or groupies.
The clergy has shown themselves too often to be vacuous hacks whose expertise is more akin to the kind of expertise one finds in those who have made a career of building McDonald franchises or in the skill one finds in Shamans among animistic peoples.
Clergy as “Professional men of knowledge?” That is almost as incongruent and ridiculous as the idea of Psychologists as being “Healthcare providers for the mind,” or “Friends of the Court” as being “Friends of the family.”
And so, we must each, on our own, go to the well of knowledge, and labor to be our own “Professional men of knowledge,” because it is unlikely (though not impossible) that we are going to find Professional men of knowledge in this culture.
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* = This is a post where I am speaking of general truths as opposed to universal truths. I acknowledge that there remain solid clergy out there. I just am convinced they are a minority.
