"It
is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on
his not understanding it."
-----------Upton Sinclair
Whose Expertise Is Dead?
In The
Death of Expertise, national security expert Tom Nichols warns that
knowledge is under attack by an ill-informed public determined to replace it
with popular ignorance. Though this is not entirely possible - no society could
survive such a transition - the breakdown in trust between experts and
laypeople underlying this misguided ambition is making the U.S. ungovernable.
Experts are held in contempt, sometimes for their errors, but increasingly
simply because they are experts and
laypeople are not. Knowledge inequality is taken to be as contemptible as
wealth inequality, on the assumption that those in possession of it consider
themselves smarter and better than the less educated. Aspiring to acquire
knowledge and use it to enlighten others, once a noble ambition, now signals
elitist arrogance.
Furthermore, where once we were
entitled to our own opinions but not our own facts, today proliferating digital
tribes proudly circulate self-justifying"alternative facts" without
the inconvenience of being challenged. The Internet, though not the cause of
this phenomenon, does aggravate it, since the "information
superhighway" has degenerated into a galaxy of glittering websites eagerly
catering to popular delusions on a growing range of topics. What now passes for
"research" refers to scanning a few algorithm-curated lines that
confirm one's prejudices, then clicking away satisfied one's half-baked notions
have been proven right.
Easy access to vast troves of
information, the debasement of university education into a consumer experience
in which "the customer is always right," and the fusion of news and
entertainment into a 24-hour cycle of mind-killing spectacle, all have helped
produce this situation, writes Nichols, yielding a deeply ignorant public
nevertheless convinced it holds infallible judgment on a nearly limitless range
of topics.
Formal democratic governance based on
expert advice and popular ratification has therefore become nearly impossible,
because increasing numbers of laypeople not only lack basic knowledge, but
reject rules of evidence, effectively eliminating any possibility of logical debate.
Strength of conviction, not persuasiveness of logic, determines the
"winner" of disagreements, with more and more people succumbing to
narcissistic self-congratulation on the grounds that, "I'm passionately
convinced I'm right; therefore, how could I be wrong?"
In this emerging Dis-United States of
Self-Righteousness we risk discarding centuries of accumulated knowledge and
eroding the disciplines that allow us to acquire new knowledge. No democracy,
even the very partial democracy that has existed in the U.S. to date, can
survive such a trend.
The problem actually goes considerably
beyond mere ignorance, observes Nichols, because want of knowledge can be
remedied by study, whereas today's popular impulse is to reject study itself on
the grounds that ignorance trumps established knowledge. This is "the
outrage of an increasingly narcissistic culture" that cannot tolerate any
inequality, even that of knowledge. Equal rights has become equal validity of
all opinions, the more crackpot the better, a proposition whose
self-contradictory nature is rarely noted.
Furthermore, latter day know-nothings
want to kick away the intellectual ladder that has permitted us to ascend to an
age of at least semi-reason: "The death of expertise is not just a
rejection of existing knowledge," says Nichols. "It is fundamentally
a rejection of science and dispassionate rationality, which are the foundations
of modern civilization."
We need not look far to find evidence
supporting Nichols's thesis. In the Covid 19 era we have seen massive and painful
verification of it, with credentialed grifters and scientifically illiterate
trolls lecturing career virologists and immunologists about the complexities of
viruses and vaccines, all the while insisting on quack treatments as Covid deaths
soar. Nurses and doctors confirm that many Covid sufferers willed
themselves to unnecessary deaths clinging to medical delusions.
Though this is merely one example among many, the fact that people will die
rather than let go of their mistaken opinions hauntingly confirms the validity
of the author's main point.
Nichols's solution for this dismal
state of affairs is for laypeople to re-engage the effort to be responsible
citizens in a democracy, follow a variety of reputable news sources, at least
one of which takes an editorial line contrary to one's own views, and recognize
that the public has a need to collaborate with experts, not shout them down.
This all sounds eminently sensible, at least for the more literate half of the population, and
one can hardly argue with the conclusion that the U.S. public needs to be much
better informed. Unfortunately, however, Nichols nowhere takes note of the
impact of elite ideology, which relentlessly pumps a false world view into the
public mind, one that vastly exceeds in impact all the ravings of crackpot conspiracy
theorists put together.
Nevertheless, those who debunk the establishment's
self-justifying propaganda are given short shrift by Nichols. For example, he
dismisses Ward Churchill without examination because the former ethnic studies
professor was fired for plagiarism, a conclusion that is narrowly correct but
disingenuous in the extreme. Churchill's real offense was insulting the
national self-image by comparing "good Americans" working within a
murderous U.S. empire to "good Germans" working under the Nazis, amplifying
the provocation by drawing a parallel with Adolf Eichmann. This produced a
familiar tsunami of public hysteria that culminated in an
"examination" of Churchill's published works obviously designed to
find cause to fire him. In the event, four footnotes among thousands in his
published works were found to be objectionable. This horrifying
"plagiarism" largely consisted of Churchill re-using content from his
previously published books, written in activist settings, sometimes in
conjunction with others, where no money or reputational issues were at stake.
Ho hum. Such an offense, if it really qualifies as such, is far less serious
than Dr. King's lifting of whole passages without attribution in his doctoral
dissertation, but if we retroactively treat King the way we did Ward Churchill
we will have to make ourselves party to a second assassination. Nichols cares
about none of this, convinced that Churchill deserved what he got.
Here we see - once again - cancel
culture wreaking havoc, with Churchill's large body of work detailing centuries
of lawless U.S. governments breaking hundreds of treaties with American Indians
(among other important topics) shoved down Orwell's memory hole. Incidentally,
the very fact that Churchill taught in an Ethnic Studies Department rather than
an American History Department testifies to the fact that twenty-first century
history experts still cannot face the fact that dozens of indigenous peoples
did not fortuitously vanish or voluntarily disband to make way for the civilized master race,
but were deliberately eradicated. The
death of their expertise is long overdue.
Nichols also dismisses the work of
anti-nuclear activist Helen Caldicott, on the basis that her expertise is in
medicine, not arms control and disarmament, and she substitutes a psychological
examination of a presumed pathological arms race ("Missile Envy" is
the title of one of her anti-nuclear books) for an examination of the
topic by a relevant expert. She also once falsely claimed on a radio program that,
"If Ronald Reagan is re-elected, nuclear war is a mathematical
certainty."
Only on the second point is Nichols on
solid ground. Obviously, one cannot predict the future of anything on the basis
of mathematical certainty, and Caldicott's misuse of her social prestige as a
doctor to try to influence how her audience would vote was dishonest and
unprincipled. But that single instance hardly invalidates her entire
anti-nuclear career.
On Nichols's preference for
conventional arms control analysis instead of Caldicott's psychological
approach equating nuclear arms production to a form of madness ("Nuclear
Madness" is the title of another one of her books), there is no need to
choose one over the other. The two can fruitfully co-exist, if arms control experts
engage her critique instead of dismissing it. Slaveholders could not ultimately avoid the abolitionist debate, and establishment arms control experts should not be able to avoid such a debate today.
Caldicott regards the proliferation of
nuclear plants and weapons much like she does a cancer metastasizing in a human body, objecting to the radioactive contamination resulting from every aspect of the nuclear fuel cycle: mining, milling, waste storage, re-processing, plant decommissioning, etc. She
credits "psychic numbing" for our ability to complacently live
alongside what the late Daniel Ellsberg (an expert!) called the "Doomsday
Machine," a world wired up to explode in terminal war at a moment's
notice. Caldicott's abolitionist views regarding nuclear weapons largely overlap with Ellsberg's, as she
enthusiastically endorsed his book describing our descent to what Lewis Mumford called "the morals of extermination."
If it is quackery to see stockpiling
thousands of nuclear weapons (many on hair-trigger alert) among eight different
countries wracked with antagonistic tensions as a form of human madness, then
this needs to be demonstrated. But Nichols shirks the entire debate - quite unconvincingly - on the basis of
credentialism, which conflicts with his stated view that democracy requires cooperative discussion between laypeople and
experts.
In other words, if Caldicott's expertise is not relevant to the debate,
her interest and concerns surely are, and these cannot be dismissed as
the result of a few casual internet searches. In fact, they make far more sense
than the self-justifying assertions of arms control experts like Kenneth
Adelman (Nichols regards him favorably), who said at his Senate confirmation
hearings to be Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (for Ronald Reagan) that he that
he had never given any consideration to
the possibility of disarmament - the very purpose of the agency he sought
to direct. Whatever the deficiencies of
Caldicott's arguments may be, it remains a mystery why the death of such clueless
expertise ought to be mourned rather than celebrated.
Finally, Nichols also dismisses the views of
dissident intellectual Noam Chomsky, likewise on credentialist grounds, since Chomsky's doctorate is in linguistics rather than foreign policy. The upshot is that
Chomsky, lacking the specialized, technical national security expertise that
Nichols obtained by skill and training, cannot be expected to adequately
understand the deep knowledge of the field, and therefore his views are simply irrelevant.
But are national security affairs
really a science, impenetrable to laypeople, or can they be understood and insightfully
engaged using no more than common sense, skepticism, and ordinary analytical
ability? Chomsky argues the latter, pointing out that, in the social sciences
"the cult
of the expert is both self-serving for those who propound it, and fraudulent. Obviously
one must learn from social and behavioral science whatever one can . . . But it
will be quite unfortunate, and highly dangerous, if they are not accepted and
judged on their merits and according to their actual, not pretended
accomplishments. In particular, if there is a body of theory, well-tested and
verified, that applies to the conduct of foreign affairs . . . it's
existence has been kept a well-guarded secret. To anyone who has any
familiarity with the social and behavioral sciences . . . the claim that there
are certain considerations and principles too deep for the outsider to
comprehend is simply an absurdity, unworthy of comment.
Indeed. Where is the repeatedly tested
body of theoretical knowledge informing national security affairs that Nichols
allegedly possesses but laypeople do not? Obviously, none exists, which means
that Chomsky's supposed lack of foreign policy expertise is simply another dodge. If Nichols's is an expertise worth having, he needs to
drop the priesthood guise and engage debate, not just with colleagues, but with
all who are interested.
A good place for him to start would be
to examine Chomsky's review of a prominent part of the expert community that
has long held that laypeople are intellectually deficient by nature, and not merely as a consequence of having fallen into a
state of narcissism.
For example, the democratic rebellion
in 17th century Britain, Chomsky observes, was quickly condemned by experts of
the day as a monstrous affair of the "rascal multitude," "beasts
in men's shapes," inherently "depraved and corrupt." These
sentiments were handed down to succeeding generations of elite thinkers, so
that by the twentieth-century we have Walter Lippmann advising that the public
"must be put in its place," so that the "responsible men"
may live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd." The
"function" of these "ignorant and meddlesome outsiders," he
believed, was to be "interested spectators of action," not
participants, ratifying the decisions made on their behalf by experts and
policy-makers, then returning to their private concerns. This was said to be
inevitable because of the "ignorance and superstition of the masses"
(political scientist Harold Lasswell), the "stupidity of the average man"
(Rienhold Niebuhr), and the fact that "the common interests very largely
elude public opinion entirely, and can be managed only by a specialized class
whose personal interests reach beyond the locality" (Walter Lippmann). The
"specialized class" is drawn from the experts at articulating the
needs of the powerful, what the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci identified as
"experts in legitimation." These intellectual saviors were supposedly needed to
protect "us" from the majority, which is "ignorant and mentally
deficient," (Robert Lansing, Woodrow Wilson's Secretary of State) and has
to be kept in its place via a constant diet of "necessary illusion"
and "emotionally potent oversimplifications" (Rienhold Niebuhr).
Note that these are the sentiments of
the liberal intelligentsia; conservative theorists are even harsher in their
condemnation.
Given the alleged intellectual backwardness of ordinary people, the expert
policy prescription was to manipulate them, education being pointless with the
lower breeds. Edward Bernays, the Father of Spin, openly declared this:
"If we understand the mechanisms and motives of the group mind, it is now
possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their
knowing it." Minority rule was therefore inevitable: "In almost every
act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our
social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively
small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns
of the masses. It is they who pull the wires that control the public
mind." And this minority rule was not contradictory to democracy, as one
might think, but an expression of it: "The conscious and
intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is
an important element in a democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen
mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true
ruling power of our country."
So . . . . hallelujah?
Hardly. Given the obnoxiousness of
these longstanding views, it is difficult to believe that the widespread
rejection of experts by an ever increasing portion of the general public is
wholly unrelated to the open contempt with which ordinary people have been
treated by the "specialized class." Recall that in recent decades these experts have engineered the transfer of tens of trillions of dollars from the bottom and middle of the economic pyramid to the very top, while blaming the victims for not being educated enough to reverse the trend.
To be fair, not all experts share this
contempt for laypeople, and Nichols is at pains to emphasize that not all
experts are policy-making experts. True enough, but in a class-divided world
expertise of all kinds skews towards fulfilling the needs of the wealthy, not
those who work for them. At the height of the Covid crisis, for example, CDC
recommendations to "shelter-in-place" were meaningless to workers in
meat-packing plants, but highly valuable to the wealthy, who retreated to
second homes remote from areas of high contagion - with no loss of income. This is characteristic of social policy under capitalism, where social loss is private gain.
Which means that experts that have the wrong class loyalties,
such as those who advise labor unions on how to resist the continual blows
capital directs at workers, command little attention, respect, or resources. This is because the most prominent ideas do not arise by happenstance but are those that keep a certain class in power. To quote labor expert Karl Marx:
"The ruling ideas are
nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships,
the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the
relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of
their dominance."
Since public opinion necessarily
diverges from "the ruling ideas," especially on issues of wealth and power, experts perceive
it as a threat to be managed and controlled, not a democratic reality to be
intelligently cultivated. Their expertise consists as
much of rationalizing the needs of the powerful as it does of reasoning one's
way to a justified conclusion. And this, in turn, feeds popular mistrust of
experts, for as the great Chinese sage Lao-Tse said, “Those who justify
themselves do not convince.”
Finally, and most importantly, Nichols
fails to address the stunted moral intelligence of so many experts, who,
consumed by the intense demands of their specialized tasks, often end up morally
blinded.
A classic example concerns J. Robert
Oppenheimer. In the final stages of making the atomic bomb he was pressed by
his Manhattan Project colleagues as to the moral implications of their work.
Oppenheimer and his colleague Enrico Fermi replied that they were
"without special competence on the moral question."
Without special competence on the moral question. In other words, the ethical implications of unleashing atomic bombs on
an unsuspecting world fell outside Oppenheimer's occupational
specialty.
Is this not a perfect illustration of
the dilemma we face in relying on expertise? What good is knowledge divorced
from comprehension of its proper direction and use? Oppenheimer's answer to the
most important question humanity has ever faced suggests that the moral issue might best be engaged by a different class of
experts than the bomb-makers, a Department of Extermination Affairs perhaps. He could conceive of no way our common humanity might be the source of a judgment about what to do.
Seventy-eight years later, with no solution to this problem in sight, can we really rest easy with just reading more and trusting experts' hard work and good intentions? Such a modest prescription cannot hope to solve the grave problem of ideologically contaminated expertise.
For all that Nichols leaves
unaddressed, however, The Death of
Expertise remains a lucid and compelling description of rising popular
idiocy. Pity that the larger picture does not flatter the experts Nichols seeks
to defend.
Thus we continue to entrench a social structure of
highly specialized moral imbeciles governing narcissistic laypeople too mired in delusion to mount an intelligent rebellion.
Every
U.S. military intervention abroad, for example, is portrayed as necessary to
stop "another Hitler."
However,
her claim that in a brief meeting with President Reagan she was able to
"clinically" assess his IQ to be 100, is also suspect.
Ellsberg stresses that U.S. policy has always been a "first-strike" policy, that is, being ready and willing to initiate nuclear war to knock out Moscow's retaliatory capacity, then threatening annihilation with an overwhelming second strike if they refuse to capitulate. See Daniel
Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine - Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, (Bloomsbury, 2017)
." Chomsky
quoted in Raphael Salkie, The Chomsky
Update - Linguistics And Politics, (Unwin Hyman, 1990) p. 140]
Comments
taken from Chomsky's "Year 501," (South End Press, 1993) p. 18, and
"Deterring Democracy," (Hill and Wang, 1991) p. 253.
