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Friday
My faculty book group is currently discussing Middlemarch, and one of our members pointed out a passage highlighting just how relevant the novel is to present day America. George Eliot has her own version of how Trump and Musk are firing experts and replacing them with toadies.
What results is incompetent governance. Everyone suffers except for, well, the incompetents and also those vultures who know how to take advantage of the resulting chaos.
The expert in Middlemarch is Lydgate, an accomplished doctor who wishes to reform the county’s outdated medical practices and to build a hospital. Unfortunately, he doesn’t understand how local politics is played. His naiveté, which leads him to think he will be rewarded if he does a good job, reminds me somewhat of Joe Biden. Here’s the sentence that caught our attention:
This was one of the difficulties of moving in good Middlemarch society: it was dangerous to insist on knowledge as a qualification for any salaried office.
The observation comes in a scene where Lydgate is observing that he believes that the old boys’ system should be replaced by a meritocracy. “In general,” he says, “appointments
are apt to be made too much a question of personal liking. The fittest man for a particular post is not always the best fellow or the most agreeable. Sometimes, if you wanted to get a reform, your only way would be to pension off the good fellows whom everybody is fond of, and put them out of the question.
Unfortunately for him, he voices his opinion to some of these good old boys. There’s Dr. Sprague, who thirty years previously published a treatise on Meningitis and who is suspicious of what he regards as Lydgate’s “showiness as to foreign ideas, and a disposition to unsettle what had been settled and forgotten by his elders.” And then there’s the coroner, who doesn’t see it as his business to conduct post-mortems.
Shortly after our discussion I encountered a news story about an Iowa senate subcommittee advancing a bill that would charge doctors with a $500 misdemeanor for administering the Covid vaccine. Apparently Republican state senator Dennis Guth voted to advance the bill “after reading an email from a constituent who claims she was injured from an mRNA vaccine.”
The vaccine, of course, has saved tens of thousands of lives and medical experts find it to be safe. But what’s that to politicians who are sure they know better?
Guth would feel right at home in Middlemarch society.
