The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters

This was a sobering look at where we are as a society. It’s easy to put the blame for all of this on the rise of the internet, but as Tom goes on to describe, there’s a lot more to it.

The breakdown of trust between the public, experts, and elected officials in a republic goes in all directions. The public, especially, needs to be able to trust leaders and their expert advisers. This relationship becomes impossible to sustain however, when laypeople have no idea what they’re talking about, or what they want. When that trust breaks down, public ignorance can be turned by cynical manipulation into a political weapon. Anti-intellectualism is itself a means of short circuiting democracy, because a stable democracy in any culture relies on the public actually understanding the implications of its own choices.

He goes through several of the problem areas, like the news media, the internet, higher education, and some of the other sources of some of the issues we face.

There is plenty of blame to go around for the perilous state of the role of expertise in American life. ... Experts themselves, as well as educators, journalists, corporate entertainment media, and others have all played their part. In the end however, there is only one group of people who must bear the ultimate responsibility for this current state of affairs, and only they can change any of it. The citizens of the United States of America.

It made me think about some of my own biases too and I can probably be guilty of thinking I know more than I actually do.

If laypeople refuse to take their duties as citizens seriously, and don’t educate themselves about issues important to them, democracy will mutate into technocracy. The rule of experts, so feared by laypeople will grow by default. For laypeople to use expert advice and to place professionals in their proper roles as servants, rather than masters, they must accept their own limitations as well. Democracy cannot function when every citizen is an expert. Yes it is unbridled ego for experts to believe they can run a democracy while ignoring its voters. It is also however, ignorant narcissism for laypeople to believe that they can maintain a large and advanced nation without listening to the voices of those more educated and experienced than themselves.

It’s worth a read.