That a recent opinion article in the Wall Street Journal advising Jill Biden, president-elect Joe Biden’s wife and the incoming First Lady, to stop using the “Dr” before her name, should have elicited so much opprobrium is actually rather baffling when one actually stops to consider what’s being discussed.
Of course, the censure was hardly unforeseeable: Here is a man telling a woman to stop doing something. A woman of success and achievement, not least, and who now has the power of the Democratic Party’s PR machine behind her. And the author doled out so much condescension it’s difficult to even detect the shaky argument he was making. Yet, here are the same critics who, if asked, will say that they would prefer a more egalitarian society, where people are judged by their character and not by some arbitrary first impression.
Strange, then, to so unquestionably defend the use of a title, the only purpose of which is to immediately signify a hierarchical relationship with another person. What other reason is there to lump “Dr” before your forename if not to indicate to a stranger that you have studied for many years and presumably are more intelligent than the average person? An intellectual title, like any other honorific, is a signifier, a way of telling another person straight away something about yourself that you want them to know and, in most cases, how they should act based upon this criteria.
The late journalist Christopher Hitchens liked to say that in the United States one “can get away with the most extraordinary offences to morality and truth in this country if you’ll just get yourself called Reverend.” If the religious honorific is meant to immediately establish a hierarchy of respect and wisdom between the ordained and the layman (and, in Hitchens’ views, to generate immediate credulity from the latter), then the royal honorific is intended as shorthand to inform another person straightaway that they are probably from a lower rank and must behave accordingly. The gradients of military titles may not be understood by all in the civilian world, but to insiders they establish rather quickly who is superior to whom in any given setting.
Credulity, indeed, is another demand of the honorific. One ought to immediately switch off any interview in which Henry Kissinger is referred to as “Dr Kissinger”, for the questions will commingle servility and bromide, for instance. One can predict almost exactly what someone will say if they begin to referring either intentionally or unknowingly to “Mahatma,” not Mohandas, Gandhi.
Joseph Epstein, the author of the Wall Street Journal opinion piece, has justifiably been admonished for his tone, more so than his argument. Yet this also warrants critique. In his view, Jill Biden shouldn’t be using “Dr” as she has “an Ed.D., a doctor of education, earned at the University of Delaware through a dissertation with the unpromising title ‘Student Retention at the Community College Level: Meeting Students’ Needs’. A wise man once said that no one should call himself ‘Dr.’ unless he has delivered a child.” Do note the viscid condensation I mentioned earlier, yet his apparent meaning was: Adding a “Dr” to your name is defensible if you are a surgeon or a holder of an actual PhD from a well-respected university. His argument, therefore, is not a critique of academic titles but only of some people who use them.
What might instead be worth discussing, if this minor furore is to be put to good use, is the issue of how we establish a hierarchy of intelligence more broadly, the purpose of an academic title after all. G.K. Chesterton is usually ascribed the quote, “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.” The claim being made today is that because we have stopped trusting experts, in our “post-truth”, social media-addled age, we now trust any lie or mistruth uttered by all manner of charlatans. Indeed, that there is no longer any perceived difference between the expert and the novice.
The assertion that we are now more willing to believe in conspiracy theories or false news than in the past warrants skepticism, but there has clearly been a fundamental change in our public spheres, wherein only a decade or so ago the only people allowed in our television stations, newspapers or radios at least had some level of competency in the topic they were discussing. And, in most part, audiences tended to trust the opinions of these experts more than those of the ordinary person on the street. Social media and the Internet has immeasurably re-altered that.
The question then, if one perceives this as a problem, is how do our public spheres revert to a hierarchy of intelligence, where experts are the trusted opinion-formers, but in a more equitable fashion? After all, I doubt Epstein’s critics are demanding the return to the public sphere of the 1960s or 1970s, although do note their subtle undertones of condescension that wouldn’t have been out of place in those decades: the incoming First Lady is middle-class and educated, whilst the outgoing First Lady is just an Eastern European bimbo who posed naked for magazines, some have asserted.
The issue of titles is relevant, here. One may argue that the intellectual honorific, like sticking a “Dr” before your forename, is not supposed to signify a social rank but cognitive achievement, a well-earned reward for years of study and discipline. Yet besides this apparent necessity for conspicuous achievement (can’t one be pleased about earning a PhD without having to immediately and always inform others about it?), it seeks to establish the necessary hierarchy of intelligence not by demonstration but via one’s CV.
Dear reader, you must have met one of those people who cannot help but speak with their résumés, who refuse to make an argument or statement without prepositioning it with, “as a professor” of this or “as a scholar” of that. As an academic layman, try debating with a “Dr” or “Professor” and see how long it takes them to stop rebutting your arguments and simply rebut your credentials in comparison to theirs.
If we are to construct a better public sphere, are we going to trust the expertise of a person because they have a grand CV and have been awarded a title, two things that do not necessarily indicate any great wisdom? Or do we build a hierarchy of intelligence through some other means, perhaps through demonstration of one’s intelligence rather than the mere signalling of it? I don’t pretend to know the answer to this question or its solutions, but at least this might be a better point of discussion from Joseph Epstein’s article than merely whether he is misogynistic or not.
