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To: dtletters@telegraph.co.uk |
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Dear Sir/Madam, After reading Tom Utley's excellent contribution to today's Daily Telegraph, "How could an expert like Roy Meadow get it so terribly wrong?", I wonder whether there is not perhaps a very important lesson to be learned from this whole affair. Instead of putting the monstrous travesty of justice that has occurred down to the "intense stupidity" of just one individual and moving on, perhaps we should take a self-critical look at the wider social context. How was it possible for a man of such eminence and authority get away for so long with being so stupid within his own field of competence? Why do he and others (e.g. the editor or the Lancet) continue to defend his stupidity? Could it be that other "experts" within their own fields of expertise - without anyone, including themselves, realising it - are just as stupid and incompetent as Prof. Meadow? The answer to the last question, I believe, is yes. Most urgently it is true of politicians and economists (Noble Prize winners among them) who insist that our growth-dependent economy and grossly materialistic way of life are sustainable, when in fact they are fundamentally non-sustainable on a planet with limited resources and a finite carrying capacity. The 18th Century Swedish biologist and taxonomist, Karl Linnaeus, made a grave mistake in naming us "Homo sapiens" (wise man), since it conveys entirely the wrong impression. What we should be called is "Homo stupidus economicus", since that is what we are, and although it would not automatically change anything, it would at least remind us that there is something that needs changing.
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