One lingering effect of the 2020-2021 global pandemic is the entrenched skepticism of expert authority. Such skepticism was always there, certainly, but the inconsistencies in official dictates around masking, vaccinations, and social distancing seem to have exposed non-scientific fields of professional judgement, like journalism and politics, to the same kind of doubt. Whether you feel this development is good or bad, liberating or destabilizing, may depend on the issue. One man’s cover-up is another’s conspiracy theory. One man’s crisis is another’s panic.

Anti-Semitism, for example, used to be universally recognized as unacceptable in public discourse, yet the epithet has been leveled so often in contemporary arguments over the Middle East that it’s no longer the instant disqualification of opinion it used to be. Likewise, climate change, Native Canadian residential schools, sexism, transgenderism and racial prejudice are all serious matters, but their key tenets have been ossified into formal orthodoxies enforced by politicians and media outlets, to a point where heresies inevitably arise. The more something is held to be unquestionable, the more questions will be raised – especially in a culture as disputatious as ours, with so many avenues for dispute. For this we can thank, or blame, the lockdown mandates of several years ago.

Related to these debates is how expertise is actually determined. Supposedly impartial observers may just be people with axes to grind, while sanctioned campaigns on behalf of approved goals may succeed into irrelevance when the goals are realized. Full-time advocates, however, have a vested interest in not conceding success. To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To public health officers, everything looks like a potential public health emergency. To anyone whose C.V. cites their expertise in combating a specific offense, everything looks like that offense.

Thus the evil of racism, say, is something for which the demand far exceeds the supply: there aren’t many avowed white supremacists out there (and even fewer in positions of power), but there are plenty of individuals who’ve made careers out of blaming white supremacism for every perceived social inequity. In this sense, complaints of discrimination or injustice have become bargaining chips in civic transactions – we’ve suffered X, but we’ll let it go if we get compensation Y – rather than moral outrages. Charging anti-Semitism, similarly, may be the last remaining way for prosperous and integrated Jewish communities to distinguish themselves in societies long adjusted to a broad diversity of faith and ethnic origin. If the object of fighting bigotry is a functional multiculturalism, how do bigotry’s credentialed opponents adapt when the object is attained? Apparently, some don’t.

Such stubbornness occurs across the spectrum. There are progressive do-gooders quick to scold anyone who hasn’t got with the program on pronouns or land acknowledgements, but there are also MAGAnauts who’ll red-pill you for believing that the 2020 US election was fairly decided, and Israel apologists who’ll write off any denunciations of the carnage in Gaza as mere Jew-baiting. In each case, the claim is that the issues have already been settled by qualified scholarship, and only haters and dupes haven’t fallen in line. Yet the same parties who might call critics “denialists” for their heterodoxies will themselves earn the label for their own views on something else: Islamophobia is exaggerated, but anti-Semitism has exploded; mainstream western religions are ignorant superstition, but traditional Indigenous knowledge is scientifically valid; climate change is real, but gender is a construct; COVID restrictions did more harm than good, but Donald Trump got more votes than Joe Biden; et cetera. Over the course of the same conversation, you can both boast of your independent thinking, and appeal to your preferred experts.

How substantial, indeed, are any of these topics? Probably most of us go about our daily lives without encountering (or committing) racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, transphobia, or any form of denial. Scroll through news or social media or government directives, though, and it’s as if we’re being constantly battered by them. “This has no place in our society,” the elected official solemnly intones; “It’s time to declare a national emergency,” asserts the pundit; “Such forms of disinformation must be criminalized,” the professional partisan insists. It’s not that we have no collective problems, or that different groups can’t be protective of their own interests, or that concerned citizens should stop worrying so much. But the smug assurances that particular problems, interests, and worries are objective truths everyone should acknowledge – instead of subjective perceptions not everyone will agree on – aren’t solving anything. We learned that lesson back in 2020.