The problem with complaining that ‘everyone’s an Iran expert now’
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Version 0 of 1. Sure, Twitter has a lot of ill-informed blowhards. But don’t dismiss those who hold powerful pundits to account, says academic Tom Whyman On Friday, I woke up to the news that the third world war had started. In the Middle East, a man named Qassem Suleimani, the commander of Iran’s al-Quds force, had been killed in a US drone strike. What followed was one of those strange, fevered days in which the whole of existence seems on the brink of collapse, in which the victory of the stupidest and worst people alive becomes horribly, undeniably apparent, in which it becomes impossible to stop refreshing social media as you attempt to track the disaster in real time. For most people in the west, the experience was literally just: Donald Trump has decided to kill this guy who you have almost certainly never heard of (just look at this spike for “Qasem Soleimani” on Google Trends – it was biggest in the DC region, interestingly enough, so there’s every chance a lot of Washington insiders hadn’t even heard of Suleimani themselves), and now, apparently, this means that either you will die, or everyone in the Middle East will die, or both. But for some, the clumsy escalation of an already interminable conflict by an increasingly unpredictable imperial power wasn’t even the biggest problem. Now, thanks to this escalation, people on social media were talking about Iran – and (unsurprisingly, given the complexity of the conflict in the Middle East, and given Suleimani’s low profile in the west before his death) not all of them had expertise. “Ohhhh, everyone’s suddenly an expert on Iran, are they?” these people complained. “Can any of you even find it on a map?” Granted, it can be annoying to feel aggressively exposed to the views of various random blowhards, the majority of whom already seem to have decided what all this must be about, even before any of it happened. Increasingly, people rely on social media for their news, which is probably unavoidable, given that the US president is often inclined to govern from it. This news thus often comes from those with the ability to state whatever some given group of people most want to hear in the most provocative terms – and that’s a real problem. But that’s not to say that “expertise” is something we ought to huffily defend from the top down. After all, when it comes to something like the present conflict in the Middle East, who are the experts, really? Should some foreign policy journalists with access to Washington sources be trusted more than, for instance, the guy who used to tweet under the handle @PissPigGranddad who went to fight for the Kurdish leftist YPG militia in Rojava? Do ordinary Iranians, whose lives and families will be directly affected by this conflict, or dissenting US veterans count as experts or not? Are they really less well-informed than the former Bush administration officials being wheeled out as foreign policy “experts”? One begins to suspect that the insistence on “expertise” is only being used as a way of shutting down debate. There is a certain sort of Blair-nostalgist, for instance, who has never forgiven the general public for being right on Iraq. They would prefer, I suppose, that this time people simply accept things: that they accept, for instance, the US government’s nonsensical classification of a general in the army of a sovereign nation of over 80 million people as a “terrorist”. Although it might require a great deal of expertise to truly understand the complexities of the present conflict in the Middle East, seeing through the US government’s bullshit doesn’t. Understanding that this current escalation is probably a bad idea requires no more expertise than an understanding of basic causality: even a three-year-old must realise that it’s hard for someone to build a Lego model if you keep randomly kicking parts of it down. The philosopher Jürgen Habermas envisions rationality emerging through our successfully communicating with each other. Social media, of course, can be cited as evidence that this is unlikely to happen, even in the sort of “ideal speech situation” described by Habermas. It has made communication possible on a scale that is massive, global and instant. But what gets most talked about are often the bad opinions of no-marks, known online merely as people to be disagreed with. Social media is home to all sorts of bizarre excesses. However, it does at least help erode the pretensions of insider “experts”, directly exposing them to the public they ought, ideally, to be accountable to. Social media can also help compensate for the deficiencies of its mainstream equivalent: during last year’s general election campaign, leftwing shitposters often did much more work to hold the Tories to account than the BBC – with the Tories now threatening mainstream media outlets with loss of access, the work of these individuals will become a still more important democratic tool. One poster, a guy from Cumbria with no formal profile in the media whatsoever, did investigative work that led to two Liberal Democrat parliamentary candidates being deselected. The fact is that social media is the contemporary public sphere. For all its flaws, it remains one of the most vital tools we have for holding power to account. We could obviously use it better, but insisting that only the titled experts be allowed to speak is far more likely to make everything worse. • Tom Whyman is an academic philosopher and a writer |