The professional class of experts should not determine political decisions
and not (necessarily) because there’s anything wrong with them.
Shalom friends. One of the reasons there is often a long pause between missives from me is because looking at a screen makes my headaches worse. This article was written using voice to text with minimal editing, to make it possible for me to write even when my headache is not great. I hope I managed to make sense with some eloquence despite that and I beg your forbearance for any obvious mistakes.
-Eitan
Military leaders have a particular view of reality. They spend all day every day on threat assessments, tactics, logistics, training for war, and a host of bureaucratic desiderata. They think a lot about the next war, what it might be, how to win it, and how to get what they need to win it. There is good reason that in democratic societies they don’t get to decide whether we go to war. War concerns the welfare of the entire nation, not just those fighting it.
In Israel we have been inundated for weeks now with numerous articles about ‘x number of economists’ and ‘y lawyers’ and ‘z CEO’s of tech companies,’ warning against the judicial overhaul which is ongoing under the new government in accordance with the will of those who voted for it. They are entitled to their opinions, and we should pay attention to them. Maybe some of their warnings are right. I don’t know. But the opinions of the professional class and tech elites are, and should be, far from determinative.
Let’s talk about the group in question, lawyers. How do we feel about lawyers? How do we talk about them? In our common culture do we think of lawyers as the people who should be making decisions about how our society is run, or do we think of them as experts in a technical field whom we sometimes require assistance from? And do we trust them to make moral judgment calls for the good of society in our stead? Many of the lawyers in Israel’s Bar Association have publicly declared their opposition to the proposed reforms, but that's not surprising since the reforms are intended to take power away from lawyers, who make up the pool of judges, as well as sitting judges, to appoint their own successors and instead place that power in the hands of the elected representatives of the people. On the other hand they certainly have a better understanding of the ins and outs of the legal system than the general public does. But this is not only about the law. This is about how the law functions in a complex society and interacts with its political system and its people, that is to say the people from whom the government derives all of its legitimacy and who find the legal system to be deeply out of touch. The profession of law in Israel as in the United states attracts a certain type of personality and perhaps also forms a certain type of personality, which is perhaps risk averse, hyper-focused on technical details, and perhaps a bit amoral in the service of the law. Those aren’t necessarily bad traits. Perhaps they are necessary to do the job well. But are the people with those traits the ones we want making the decision about who should be a judge in addition to making up the pool from which those judges are taken? Is this not, at least, a conflict of interest where law-making becomes political power?
I don’t mean to pick on lawyers here. The truth is this problem applies to every profession. As with the military men mentioned above, and the lawyers, so too economists are a certain breed. They are highly educated, wealthy, and narrowly focused from within an academic discipline. In Israel they are also overwhelmingly Ashkenazi and left wing. They would have been opposed to any proposals by the current government to change the way the judiciary works no matter how mild, and I admit that the proposed legislation goes over the line from necessary and helpful to divisive and harmful in several particulars. But an economist’s priority is the economy, and the status quo of the liberal order which underpins it, not the fairness of the system or how well the judiciary works as part of a political and social polity, all of which is about more than just money and the legal standards which enable making as much of it as possible.
I don’t mean to say that you shouldn't trust experts because we most assuredly need to trust experts in their area of expertise. But when it comes to political decisions experts are advisors, just as your doctor gives you advice not orders, so too the legal association of Israel, a random assortment of defense officials, and a random assortment of economists, as accomplished as they all might be, give advice from the perspective of their area of expertise and of course their professional and personal interests. The Knesset is the closest thing to the individual in this analogy. They represent the will of the actual people who make up the majority of the country. There is no requirement for them to follow the advice of the doctors if they do not believe it is fitting for them. We all know we shouldn’t eat sugar but most of us do. Is it because we’re stupid? Are we objectively wrong to reject the advice of our wise and learned doctors? Or are we making judgments about what makes our lives enjoyable and balancing that with the reality of likely medical consequences?
For another example let's look at the way committed Orthodox Jews treat consultations with their rabbis. For the most part a rabbi is not just a legal authority but also a sort of counselor, who has to take into account the spiritual, financial, and other situational facts of your life in helping you come to a conclusion about what to do. Many laws involve juggling competing interests, and a dry understanding of the law, divorced from the reality of the person sitting across from you, would make a mockery of what Jewish law is supposed to do. But even with all that, you walk out of the discussion, think about whether what they said makes sense in the context of your life and whether you will follow it. You have to judge how much you trust that rabbi, how deep your need might be to go against his decision, how committed you are to the legal framework of Judaism?
In short, there are signposts but no easy answers. There is no authority whose opinion can be taken as holy writ when it comes to complicated political decisions. The people in charge have to weigh the opinions of various experts about what will happen, with the societies values, the desires of their voters, international diplomacy, and most importantly the overall wellbeing of the nation, to come to a decision. Ultimately experts in these technical fields can tell us how to get where we want to go, but the society must first have a direction. If we cannot agree on a direction, on the ends we are aiming for, then we will not agree about the valence of the advice given. These opinions need to come at the end of a process of clarifying values, not as given answers for the beginning of conversation, or worse as verdicts from on high which is how Israeli media often presents them.