Diagnosis: Acute ThinkTankerism

There was the audible clicking of tongues, long sighs, and exasperated tut-tuts emanating from Slate last week when serial academic cum War Studies professor Thomas Rid fretted that the public debate over digital spying by the NSA, and its British counterpart the Government Communications Headquarters, has become – wait for it – “shrill.” As Rid sees it, it is the job of “intellectuals and public experts to add balance and nuance to a shrill debate.” I’ve looked without success for the post-9/11 moment where public intellectuals added that much needed nuance to the public debate over national security. Perhaps Thomas Rid has access to special information? He is, after all, an expert.

Rid’s solution to the problem of public shrillness? End the whole game by wresting away the ball:

Gauging if, and how, NSA may have broken the social contract is hard—intelligence successes, after all, are far less visible than intelligence failures. But it is easy to see that revealing more intelligence operations may indeed undermine the social contract. Sometimes protecting secrets is the moral thing to do.

In other words, no further information about the NSA should be revealed, and only the public intellectuals should have an extensive debate about abstract projections of morality and principle. Actually telling us what the agency is doing or what the agency heads might be thinking? Well, it’s just so counterproductive.

What we have here is an acute case of thinktankerism, of the idea that thought is a product best left to designated staff. The thing can be dangerous when unchecked.

At no point does Rid wrestle with the darkest aspect of the entire debate: The reality that the NSA and its Congressional defenders have consistently worked to cloud discussion with flatout lies. The point about the drip-drip of Snowden’s revelations is precisely that they unveil the wasteland of expert debate, the core dishonesty of everything that all those sober experts say to us in their grave and expert tones. The “intellectuals and public experts” are the very people whose opinion should be most aggressively disregarded. These are just work-a-day hacks who make their paychecks through their willingness to stroke their chin, scrunch their face, and lie like that proverbial rug to the rubes below.

The cold truth is that expertise, like everything else, is a business.

A test of the premise: Are we better off today because we listened to the highly credentialed experts, or would we all have been better off listening to those ”shrill and unbalanced” critics?