EXPERTISE OUGHT BE TESTED BY EMERGENCE.
The Wall Street Journal's online Best of the Web, which has long since vanished (behind a paywall?) used to introduce items with the question, "What Would We Ever Do Without Experts?" Generally that would introduce an "Experts Say" item that might have been staggeringly obvious or staggeringly wrong or simply look silly. That mind-set, though, has caught on in Popular Opinion, and in The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters, author Tom Nichols suggests we mock experts at our peril.
In Book Review No. 2 (so much for getting a fast start on a 50 Book Challenge this year), I argue that Mr Nichols conflates two kinds of expertise. In his preface, at page xv, he cautions the resentful, "Ordinary citizens may be disdainful of 'expertise,' but they benefit from it every day without even thinking of it. Each time we turn a tap and drink fresh, clean water, it is a triumph for a panoply of experts from chemists to city planners to, yes, even politicians and policymakers. We think of all this as the normal order of things."
That is, civilization advances by allowing helpful forms of expertise, trade-tested and subject to evaluation and selection, to emerge, and less helpful forms to vanish. It's not an "angry, resentful populism" when journalists' biases and special pleading by credentialed hired guns and data fetishes displace judgement, and that puts the notion of meritocracy in doubt.
Here, Mr Nichols misses a chance to make his argument, as he conflates what he concedes is the socially necessary irrelevance of self-dealing obscurantists in the academy and among the public intellectuals, with the disdain postmodern skepticisms foster for any sort of coherent beliefs. When he complains, page 15, about how "we cannot function without admitting the limits of our knowledge and trusting in the expertise of others," he had the opportunity to recognize the I, Pencil argument, and from there it would be straightforward to identify the value of expertise tested by emergence, as well as to adjudicate his claim that going along to get along, see pages 64-65, puts two desirable principles, cooperation and division of labor, at odds, and spell out the toxic consequences of consenting to the dictatorship of the sociable disguised as consensus.
That's not where we go, though: rather, we take a journey through expensive credentialing hothouses that teach their clients nothing, and participation trophies, and ... everything but recognizing the importance of testing ideas against reality whilst retaining the discipline of No Final Say. It is only in that way that the role of the expert as servant steward Mr Nichols favors, see page 208, can be sustained. But a servant steward must temper principle with practicality and not give the impression of participating in a deep state or some similar ruling cabal. Here's where things can get scary. Mr Nichols, at page 236, is so frustrated with the impertinence of the rubse that he expresses the fear, or is it gives voice to a wish, that a technocracy will "run out of patience" and dispense with "voting as anything other than a formality."
There are days when I have trouble thinking about the continued investigations of the Trump presidency, or the protracted withdrawal of Britain from the European Union, as anything other than that fear being a fact of life. Just another day in It's For Your Own Good.
(Cross-posted to Cold Spring Shops.)
In Book Review No. 2 (so much for getting a fast start on a 50 Book Challenge this year), I argue that Mr Nichols conflates two kinds of expertise. In his preface, at page xv, he cautions the resentful, "Ordinary citizens may be disdainful of 'expertise,' but they benefit from it every day without even thinking of it. Each time we turn a tap and drink fresh, clean water, it is a triumph for a panoply of experts from chemists to city planners to, yes, even politicians and policymakers. We think of all this as the normal order of things."
That is, civilization advances by allowing helpful forms of expertise, trade-tested and subject to evaluation and selection, to emerge, and less helpful forms to vanish. It's not an "angry, resentful populism" when journalists' biases and special pleading by credentialed hired guns and data fetishes displace judgement, and that puts the notion of meritocracy in doubt.
Here, Mr Nichols misses a chance to make his argument, as he conflates what he concedes is the socially necessary irrelevance of self-dealing obscurantists in the academy and among the public intellectuals, with the disdain postmodern skepticisms foster for any sort of coherent beliefs. When he complains, page 15, about how "we cannot function without admitting the limits of our knowledge and trusting in the expertise of others," he had the opportunity to recognize the I, Pencil argument, and from there it would be straightforward to identify the value of expertise tested by emergence, as well as to adjudicate his claim that going along to get along, see pages 64-65, puts two desirable principles, cooperation and division of labor, at odds, and spell out the toxic consequences of consenting to the dictatorship of the sociable disguised as consensus.
That's not where we go, though: rather, we take a journey through expensive credentialing hothouses that teach their clients nothing, and participation trophies, and ... everything but recognizing the importance of testing ideas against reality whilst retaining the discipline of No Final Say. It is only in that way that the role of the expert as servant steward Mr Nichols favors, see page 208, can be sustained. But a servant steward must temper principle with practicality and not give the impression of participating in a deep state or some similar ruling cabal. Here's where things can get scary. Mr Nichols, at page 236, is so frustrated with the impertinence of the rubse that he expresses the fear, or is it gives voice to a wish, that a technocracy will "run out of patience" and dispense with "voting as anything other than a formality."
There are days when I have trouble thinking about the continued investigations of the Trump presidency, or the protracted withdrawal of Britain from the European Union, as anything other than that fear being a fact of life. Just another day in It's For Your Own Good.
(Cross-posted to Cold Spring Shops.)