In modern America, there are a number of people who seem to turn their nose up at anyone they deem to be “elite”. These elites are generally seen as Ivory Tower types with a lot of education but somehow lacking in the sort of basic common sense that allows regular people to be just as smart and knowledgeable in a wide variety of fields with little if any formal training, possibly because Google exists. It’s not hard to find these people. They may believe in conspiracy theories or just have an instinctive distrust of academics. It doesn’t really matter. There are people who are experts, and then there are people ready to tear the experts down for a wide range of reasons.
Author Tom Nichols took a look at that in his 2017 book The Death of Expertise. I opted to give it a read because, well, as someone who works in education, I see a lot of ignorance out there on a routine basis, and sometimes, people don’t want to give up their preconceived notions, no matter how egregiously wrong they might be.
Nichols sets his book up to note that the real issue may not be decrying experts. That’s been going on forever. The problem is that many people believe that legal equality is the same as equality in opinion. Experts, he notes, are only human and can be wrong, especially when trying to predict the future, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t experts in their respective fields. Nichols sites examples of doctors being told what was medically wrong with a patient as if the patient knew the exact cause better than the physician or lawyers getting lectured on law by laypeople. It may be possible for the non-expert to be right, but the odds are not good.
To that end, Nichols looks at how various institutions are failing us, namely academia, the Internet, and journalism. To be clear, Nichols is neither some sort of apocalyptic doomsayer–there’s a gentleness to his tone–nor is he saying it is impossible for these institutions to be wrong. The problem comes more from people not critically thinking through whatever they are talking about and assuming a little bit of knowledge on a given subject, especially when that knowledge is incorrect, means we can disregard people who actually have spent years mastering that field of study. Sure, for someone like myself who has studied how to conduct research, I know generally what to check for when using the Internet to do research, and most of the time, I use it to check spelling. But the average person may not know much about things like confirmation bias that can lead a person astray.
Now, the book largely works, but I was left wondering about some of Nichols’s conclusions. For one, in his chapter on education, he talked about the rise of ‘safe spaces” and student demands for them. I’ve been working in higher education for over 20 years and have never encountered such a phenomena. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen or that I may not be guilty of making someone uncomfortable. I just know I have never witnessed it. But when I read that, it made me stop and wonder how much of the problems Nichols was discussing were not simply a really loud minority of people and how much of it represents what the majority of, say, college students actually feel like. That’s an inherently unanswerable question because the students (in this example) who don’t say anything cannot be measured the way their louder classmates can. Furthermore, this particular section came off as a little tone-deaf since Nichols used as an example an African American student complaining about a potentially racist comment made by a white administrator’s wife. After reading works like The Black Friend, I am inclined to think a student like that should not be told to simply suck it up because college isn’t meant to be like home.
Likewise, Nichols doesn’t really offer many solutions at first, He does have some tips and pointers near the end of the book, mostly by offering suggestions to readers on how to tell if an expert really is an expert and to hold everyone accountable for mistakes, especially since everyone makes them. Experts are not all-knowing sages, but they are generally more knowledgeable in their respective fields than, well, people who aren’t experts in those fields. There’s a distinctive difference between political equality and equality of opinion, and we cannot hold experts in fields to the same sort of democratic standards that we hold our elected officials to. That’s not really how it works. It could be that there simply is no better solution to a problem like this than simply listening to people and being circumspect with any information we might find. I don’t think Nichols told me anything here I didn’t on some level already know, but his analysis is worth a look…even if the people who most should give it a look are the least likely to actually do so.
Grade: B+
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