On John Rhys-Davies' Tantrum

Recently I chanced upon John Rhys-Davies' nasty behavior toward Green Party MP Caroline Lucas on the BBC's Question Time. In particular the bit where he responded to her questioning of Donald Trump's legitimacy through reference to his having lost the popular vote by a wide margin with "Oh woman! Have you not read Kenneth Arrow and the Arrow's theorem? Any system has its problems."

As far as I can tell the criticism of his behavior has generally focused on his rudeness and sexism. I do not dispute any of that, but am in this post more interested in the manner in which he argued, or appeared to argue. In not only citing Kenneth Arrow's "impossibility theorem," but presuming that his work was common knowledge which he could expect anyone he meets to know (it is not), he implied (unsubtly) that he is not only vastly more knowledgeable, but altogether on a higher intellectual plane than his opponent.

However, he also gave away his superficiality. Arrow's theorem is a piece of neoclassical economics, after all--the same neoclassical economics that for the last century and a half has been an exercise in physics envy, Scholasticism, and the dressing up of simple-minded but ideologically convenient (read: extreme-right wing) ideas in mathematical symbols and language (hence, "theorem") to lend them the illusion of having all the force and immutability of physical law (and of course, intimidate the callow). Its value has been virtually nil where understanding actual economic life (you know, an economists's job) is concerned--and naturally the approach in general, and Arrow's theorem (vulnerable to every one of the criticisms listed here) is, at the least, rather more open to question than Rhys-Davies implied (that reading it one could not but accept the matter as settled now and forever). It certainly is not a mike-dropping answer to a specific criticism of the outcome of a specific election.

The best that one could say for Rhys-Davies was that he answered Lucas' criticism with a platitude ("You can't have everything!" "You can't please everyone!") passed off as not being a platitude by its being dressed up with a famous name and the aforementioned mathematical language. The ungenerous would suggest that Rhys-Davies' answer was the non-sequitur of a bully who substitutes name-dropping for genuine thought and argument, and that brings me to something I have had much occasion to think about recently, how Internet trolls behave.

Bluntly put, how Rhys-Davies spoke is not how intelligent people speak but rather how stupid people imagine intelligent people speaking.