NOTE: This is an article to publish on Substack. Follow me here.I sit in a chair at home and read a lot. I then sit in a different chair at home and write a lot. Followed by sitting in yet another chair filming a lot.
Amongst all this sitting, a few years ago, I discovered a fondness for the Romantics. I felt - as Isiah Berlin taught me - that the romantic revolution was the most consequential but underappreciated revolution of the modern era.
The Romantic philosophers and poets focus on what we now might call ‘lived experience’ - on place, on emotion, community, on ordinary lives - set off a reformation of culture that is plausibly the start of our fascination with popular music, soap operas, inner psychology, democracy, and as Goethe put it ‘the universe within.’
William Wordsworth believed that science, rationalism, logic, and the nascent industrial revolution was distracting people from ‘the powerful overflowing of feeling’ that came from within and was embedded sense of place.
He wrote ‘The Man of Science seeks truth as a remote and unknown benefactor; he cherishes and loves it in his solitude: the Poet, singing a song in which all human beings join with him, rejoices in the presence of truth as our visible friend and hourly companion.’
As I read more about the Romantics, I realised there was a gap for a book that told the story of these radical figures in the form of a travelogue. In a project that has been (like so many projects) shelved, I travelled to the Lake District, to German towns and cities like Jena (the birthplace of Romanticism), and to the Swiss Alps that so many Romantic authors lauded.
I did this on the advice of the Romantics themselves, believing it would bring greater insight into the ideas and lives, but that it might also yield a compelling narrative anchored in the idea that history is not abstract and distant, but alive in real places.
I made several videos based on this premise, on Germany, Cumbria, and Switzerland (plus a few smaller videos here and there). The video on German Romanticism, in particular, still does very well - over a million have watched.
This is good proof that the idea holds water, but is it true that being in the place you’re thinking about produces any superior knowledge on the subject?
I think yes. I followed Wordsworth’s footsteps by his own words, looking at things he himself recommended gazing upon. I read the father of modern democracy, Jean-Jacques Rousseau on Genevan politics while in his own houses in Geneva and Chambéry (the closest thing to a pilgrimage I’ve experienced). I contemplated the ideas of the Grimm Brothers, Schiller, and Schlegel after visiting museums about them.
More than anything, doing this gives you a unique sense of geography, landscape, culture and people that you cannot get from books alone. It brings printed words alive, directs your senses to what they believed matter, and saturates you in a three-dimensional experience. It aids in what the German Romantics called bildung - that learning is about personal and deep enrichment as much as rote facts or linear narratives.
But it’s a method with diminishing returns. Ultimately, you are still getting most of what you know from books. You can learn about culture and landscape from videos in a quicker rate than you can by public transport. And the synthesis of information derived from quiet reflection is more powerful than what you absorb from walking around a medieval German town.
Both matter, but it’s a balance that is weighted towards the side of an education by books.
Recently, Douglas Murray was widely derided online for criticising the comedian Dave Smith for talking at length about Israel despite not being an expert and having not visited the region. ‘You haven’t been?’ he said to Smith, dripping with condescension and faux-incredulity. Of course, he knew Smith hadn’t been - you cannot go to Gaza unless you’re taken on a carefully tailored tour by the IDF.
In the opening moments of his Joe Rogan debate, he criticised Rogan and Smith for opening the door to conspiracists, Nazi apologists, and controversialists; most of whom could be roundly dismantled if they’d bring on the suitable experts to debunk them.
Initially, I was sympathetic to Murray’s point, and it was good to see someone call Rogan out rather sycophantically suck up to him in the way most of his guests do.
But as the podcast went on, I was reminded why Murray’s particular brand of pretentious snobbery was not only repellent, but factually wrong too. He then doubled-down on this terribly-made take in an equally bad article for the New York post.
In that article he wrote of Ian Caroll that ‘This is someone who, when he last went on Rogan’s podcast, very carefully tried to minimize the evil of Adolf Hitler. Outrageously and completely falsely, Carroll claimed that in the 1930s, Hitler had kept his antisemitism down.’
The problem? First, Murray is mistaking Caroll for Cooper here. He did the same on the podcast, admitted he hadn’t listened to either Second, Cooper - the non-expert - was technically right - Murray, the ‘intellectual’ trying to exhibit worldly expertise on the Nazis, was wrong.
As many have pointed out, for strategic reasons, Hitler did downplay his antisemitism, selectively in front of certain crowds or meetings, in the 1920s.
But fine, Murray is maybe not claiming expertise on Nazi Germany. He does seem to be on Israel/Palestine, though.
Of course, one of the biggest ironies here is that Murray is not an expert.
Murray has no degree in history, politics, philosophy, international relations, sociology, geography…. he has an undergraduate degree in English Literature. But that doesn’t stop him talking about Israeli/Palestinian history in a way so partisan that it would be laughed out of any serious history book. I seriously doubt Murray has read many books on historical method, for example. And I’d imagine from his extremely partisan politics that his reading on Israel/Palestine, and the world more broadly, has a certain bias. And that’s putting it generously.
Is Murray aware, to take one example, of Joan Scott’s influential 1991 essay on the privileging of ‘experience’ by historians? Scott argues that experience should not be treated as raw, transparent evidence of what happened. Instead, it is shaped by language, culture, wider knowledge, and power structures.
Take the sixteen-year-old soldier in the trenches during WWI. We can read as many frontline diaries and memoirs as we like – a young person’s narrow experience on the front will never tell us enough about the wider war, it’s causes, its trajectory, even why he’s there. It will be one small piece of a much broader puzzle.
In the same way, it’s unlikely you’ll find me reading Murray’s books because I know how partisan they are. I will waste by time. I’ll learn much more reading elsewhere, trying to get a bird’s eye view.
In other words, Murray is less an expert than they type of experienced layperson he’s criticising. There’s not much difference between Smith and Murray - just time spent studying a topic.
Does this mean expertise doesn’t matter? Of course not. Murray’s point about not visiting a place you’re talking about could have been better made had he described how being somewhere had changed his position on something. This is a perfectly defensible arguing. I’m desperate to visit Jerusalem, and imagine soaking in the culture of that city for a week, touring the historical sites, visiting Mosques, Synagogues, and museums will deepen and likely alter my knowledge of that history. But Murray did none of that. He had no case. No insight. Couldn’t point to a single thing he learned that you couldn’t have acquired from a video or a book.
So yes, visiting somewhere can clearly add to your expertise. But what of a degree?
I’ve thought a lot about credibility on Youtube. I always cite my sources, compile a bibliography, leave references and quotes on screen. I’m as transparent as I can be about what I’ve read and what I might need to in the future.
I studied for two history degrees in succession. While at university, I was incredulous that most of my younger fellow students did not make the most of lecturer’s offices hours as much as I did. I wanted to get the most for my time there. I annoyed professors, asked as many questions as I could, spoke as much as possible, discussed my essays and dissertations every chance I got, and eventually secured a short-lived position in the history department. I learned a lot about departmental politics, but more importantly, I learned a lot about how historians work.
A degree is valuable to the extent that you make the most of your time studying for it. But if you do, it’s hard to replace the kind of education you get over an intensive period directed by experts, reading lists, knowledge tuned over decades or centuries, debates in seminars, advice from professors, and so on.
A degree in history has helped me understanding evidential standards, literature reviews, historical method, and archival research in a way that I doubt very few do without a degree.
But the kicker is this: it is possible without that thin piece of paper. In the end, expertise is not found hidden within a qualification or jumping out at you from the streets of Jerusalem. Sure, it helps. But expertise really comes from one thing only - time spent studying, combined with a discerning head while doing it.
And anyone can do that.
I’ve realised there is no better credibility than slowly accrued trust from those that read or listen to you. People who are interested in a topic know things about that topic (surprise, surprise), and so mistakes get pointed out, videos get disliked, articles get ridiculed, and people switch off. Expertise is something that other people judge you to have, and is a trust is built up over time.
Where I agree with Murray is on this: ‘What the standards are in the new media — especially on podcasts — is still being worked out. But there must be some.’
Obviously, Rogan having the biggest platform in the world and giving almost no thought to the ethics of platforming cranks and conspiracists without giving requisite response by experts is, to put it lightly, a problem.
Recently, the Diary of a CEO host Steven Bartlett was the subject of a BBC article that pointed to questionable science platformed on his ten million listener strong podcast. As he stars on BBC’s Dragon’s Den, Bartlett was likely in some discussion with the BBC about this after, and may have been particularly sensitive to the criticism.
In response, he seems to have include quite extensive fact-checking post-production show notes in the description and extra information displays on screen if the guest says something controversial.
This is a laudable step. As someone who runs a multimillion-pound media company with plenty of resources (as, of course, Rogan does), this is the least someone with a hint of ethics should be doing.
The internet is changing our relationship to knowledge. We’re only seeing the beginning of this paradigm shift. Expertise will become more decentralised. But we need to foster and experiment with ways of having conversations that produce that thing that is actually historically quite hard to produce and protect - the truth.