Under Attack. The Demotion of the Common Man

Every scientist and every lawyer was once a human child. In addition to this for 50 hours per week spent in the laboratory, the solicitor’s office or court, 118 will be spent sleeping with his wife/her husband, cooking meals and looking after the children. In biological terms the reason such professionals bring to bear on their work is sited in and dependent on a lump of grey matter fed by a blood supply pumped from a human heart nourished by the food they took the time to buy and cook. Which is simply to say that we are, temporally, ontologically and biologically, humans first and scientists and lawyers second. Indeed, it is very easy to argue that one can be a human without being a scientist or a lawyer but one cannot be a scientist or a lawyer without the underpinning of being a human. 

As is evidenced the first time a four year-old squeals ‘It’s not fair!’ when another four year old steals his apple in the playground a moral sense is implanted in all humans as a factory setting and as part of his or her social participation in the life of a very social creature. This innate sense of morality and justice is later more fully discovered, explained and developed into the full and necessary panoply of legal systems. However, once again, the child’s moral sense preceded the legal panoply. You could have the former without the latter, you cannot have the reverse. 

What does this mean for the common man or woman (by which I mean the man or woman who is not a lawyer or a scientist) who shares a common humanity and a common  moral sense with the most celebrated QCs and Nobel Prize-winning Physicists? Very often even the simple right to make an observation or to offer a moral opinion is shouldered aside by expertises that claim a form of hegemony based on having, in some sense, annexed the field of opinion. This is seen in those scientists (certainly not all scientists) who seek to scientise all knowledge, wresting it away from the ‘humanities’ or in those lawyers (certainly not all lawyers) who claim sole right to comment authoritatively on human moral behaviour. It is very tempting to use a professional qualification as the basis of epistemological power or to arrogate to oneself the right to have the last word in areas which don’t lend themselves to simple factual knowledge.

There have been some very admirable scientists, lawyers and judges in human history who have greatly benefited their communities but there have also been plenty of reprobates who have used their professions for sinister ends or purely to enrich themselves in immoral ways. Such judgments are not solely for the legal experts to make. The common man or woman is perfectly capable of looking at such people and drawing their own conclusions. This is to say that the moral sense of any intelligent and perceptive man or woman cannot be gainsaid by professional qualifications and it is perfectly possible for a common man or woman to make moral assessments of professionals without sharing their professional qualifications. We are humans first and even the most elevated professions take place within the compass of our humanity.