Book: Death of Expertise
I just finished Tom Nichols’ book “The Death of Expertise”. I feel like Nichols is one of those old-school conservatives (he clearly despises the Trumpist version of conservatism) who is worth listening to. Despite many rough spots in the book in which he comes across as curmudgeonly and condescending, the book’s central message is solid, in my opinion.
And that message is: experts know more about their topic of expertise than the vast majority of people, therefore you should give their opinion on that topic more authority than the layperson’s. This assertion is plainly true, but is perceived as deeply insulting by most USians today;“my ignorance is as good as your knowledge” may well be the tenet many people today cling on to.
Nichols wrote this book in 2017 and eerily predicted what would happen if we continued in this trajectory: a takeover by politicians who coddle and promote the ignorance of the uninformed masses at the expense of the prestige of expertise.
Some pithy observations from the book:
And this, sadly, is the state of modern America. Citizens no longer understand democracy to mean a condition of political equality, in which one person gets one vote, and every individual is no more and no less equal in the eyes of the law. Rather, Americans now think of democracy as a state of actual equality, in which every opinion is as good as any other on almost any subject under the sun. Feelings are more important than facts: if people think vaccines are harmful, or if they believe that half of the US budget is going to foreign aid, then it is “undemocratic” and “elitist” to contradict them.
When resentful laypeople demand that all marks of achievement, including expertise, be leveled and equalized in the name of “democracy” and “fairness,” there is no hope for either democracy or fairness. Everything becomes a matter of opinion, with all views dragged to the lowest common denominator in the name of equality. An outbreak of whooping cough because an ignoramus would not vaccinate a child is a sign of tolerance; the collapse of a foreign alliance because a provincial isolationist can’t find other nations on an atlas is a triumph of egalitarianism.
And the most pithy quote:
Every single vote in a democracy is equal to every other, but every single opinion is not.
Ouch.
Nichols doesn’t really prescribe a way out of this predicament, so if I were to come up with one of my own it would be for all parties to develop a sense of humility about the whole thing.
Experts aren’t entirely free from fault in this story: they often get so frustrated by the ignorance of the layperson as to withdraw into their smaller circles and speak only with one another. This used to work when policymakes sought their advice, but breaks down when populism takes over. Experts need to educate and interact with the public to properly serve the need of a democracy.
But above all, the layperson must accept that they don’t know as much about every topic of conversation as the experts in those fields. The world is more complicated than anyone can imagine, and in the aggregate, one’s knowledge about a given topic is pathetically small. We must develop a humility to realize that any simple theories about any deep field of study is very likely wrong.
I don’t know if this humility is achievable without a massive effort of outreach and continual messaging, because messaging to effect the exact opposite is robust and ubiquitous. Thousands of talking heads and influencers continually tell us to disregard the experts and instead embrace simplistic, “natural”, comforting—and entirely wrong—solutions to impossibly complex problems.