Look It Up

By Donald Morrison

THE EXPERTS SPEAK

by Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky; Pantheon; 352 pages; $19.95

This book is irreverent, unfair and subversive. What more could anyone ask for? It begins with the 16th century geological musings of Martin Luther: "Longer ago than 6,000 years the world did not exist." It hurtles downhill from there toward outright insolence. Did Abraham Lincoln really say in 1859, "Negro equality! Fudge! How long . . . shall there continue knaves to vend, and fools to quip, so low a piece of demagogism as this"? Did the U.S. Labor Department truly announce that 1930 would be "a splendid employment year"?

You can look it up. For those who still accept without question the hokum that too often issues from the mouths of eminent personages, Christopher Cerf, co-conspirator in such truly dangerous works of spoofery as Not the New York Times (1978), together with Victor Navasky, editor of that sobersided weekly, The Nation, has collected more than 2,000 of these gems of misplaced certitude. "We can say with some confidence," they say with supreme confidence, "that the experts are wrong without regard to race, creed, color, sex, discipline, specialty, country, culture or century."

The evidence is impressive. "Everything that can be invented has been invented," said the head of the U.S. Patent Office in 1899. Declared Wilbur Wright in 1901: "Man will not fly for 50 years." Thomas Edison, circa 1880: "The phonograph . . . is not of any commercial value." Albert Einstein, 1932: "There is not the slightest indication that [nuclear] energy will ever be obtainable." Richard Wooley, then Britain's Astronomer Royal, 1956: "Space travel is utter bilge."

One may quibble with the editors' rather broad definition of an expert. Richard Nixon is included ("When the President does it, that means it is not illegal," 1977). Also Jimmy Carter ("Because of the greatness of the Shah, Iran is an island of stability in the Middle East," 1977). Also Ronald Reagan, often. But so are laboratories full of more justly certified savants like Lord Kelvin, the respected British physicist ("X rays are a hoax," circa 1900), and Dr. Linard Williams, medical officer to the Insurance Institute of London, who said in 1932: "If your eyes are set wide apart you should be a vegetarian, because you inherit the digestive characteristics of bovine or equine ancestry."

After digesting a few dozen such nuggets of certified knowledge, one may feel a tendency to distrust experts of all sorts, and experience a nagging itch to start questioning authority. A reader may even suspect that his opinion is worth just as much as that of any horn-rimmed oracle in the land. Beware. Lest a layman become so emboldened that he or she starts holding forth at cocktail parties without having done the homework, Cerf and Navasky offer the last words of John B. Sedgwick, a Union Army general at the Battle of Spotsylvania in 1864: "They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist--" --By Donald Morrison