[[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

‘THE DEATH OF EXPERTISE’ EXPLORES HOW IGNORANCE BECAME A VIRTUE
 
[[link removed]]


 

Michiko Kakutani
March 21, 2017
The New York Times
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ This book, now published in an updated second edition, and this
review, from eight years ago, are stark reminders of a major factor
behind both of Donald Trump's presidential victories. _

,

 

_The Death of Expertise
The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters_
By Tom Nichols
Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780197763834

Donald J. Trump’s taste for advisers with little or no government
experience; his selection of cabinet members like Scott Pruitt and
Rick Perry, who have expressed outright hostility to the agencies they
now oversee; and the slow pace of making senior-level appointments in
high-profile departments like State, Treasury and Homeland Security
— all speak to the new president’s disregard for policy expertise
and knowledge, just as his own election victory underscores many
voters’ scorn for experience.

This is part of a larger wave of anti-rationalism that has been
accelerating for years — manifested in the growing ascendance of
emotion over reason in public debates, the blurring of lines among
fact and opinion and lies, and denialism in the face of scientific
findings about climate change and vaccination.

“Americans have reached a point where ignorance, especially of
anything related to public policy, is an actual virtue,” the scholar
Tom Nichols writes in his timely new book, “The Death of
Expertise.” “To reject the advice of experts is to assert
autonomy, a way for Americans to insulate their increasingly fragile
egos from ever being told they’re wrong about anything. It is a new
Declaration of Independence: No longer do we hold _these_ truths to be
self-evident, we hold _all_ truths to be self-evident, even the ones
that aren’t true. All things are knowable and every opinion on any
subject is as good as any other.”

“The Death of Expertise” turns out to be an unexceptional book
about an important subject. The volume is useful in its way, providing
an overview of just how we arrived at this distressing state of
affairs. But it’s more of a flat-footed compendium than an original
work, pulling together examples from recent news stories while
iterating arguments explored in more depth in books like Al Gore’s
“The Assault on Reason
[[link removed]],” Susan
Jacoby’s “The Age of American Unreason
[[link removed]],” Robert
Hughes’s “Culture of Complaint
[[link removed]]”
and, of course, Richard Hofstadter’s 1963 classic,
“Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.” Nichols’s source notes
are one of the highlights of the volume, pointing the reader to more
illuminating books and articles.

Nichols reminds us how a “resistance to intellectual authority”
naturally took root in a country, dedicated to the principles of
liberty and egalitarianism, and how American culture tends to fuel
“romantic notions about the wisdom of the common person or the
gumption of the self-educated genius.” (Though the country, it
should also be remembered, was founded on the Enlightenment principles
of reason and an informed citizenry.)

Nichols argues that the “protective swaddling environment of the
modern university infantilizes students,” and suggests that
today’s populism has magnified disdain for elites and experts of all
sorts, be they in foreign policy, economics, even science.

Trump won the 2016 election, Nichols writes, because “he connected
with a particular kind of voter who believes that knowing about things
like America’s nuclear deterrent is just so much pointy-headed
claptrap.” Worse, he goes on, some of these voters “not only
didn’t care that Trump is ignorant or wrong, they likely were unable
to recognize his ignorance or errors,” thanks to their own lack of
knowledge.

 

While the internet has allowed more people more access to more
information than ever before, it has also given them the illusion of
knowledge when in fact they are drowning in data and cherry-picking
what they choose to read. Given an inexhaustible buffet of facts,
rumors, lies, serious analysis, crackpot speculation and outright
propaganda to browse online, it becomes easy for one to succumb to
“confirmation bias” — the tendency, as Nichols puts it, “to
look for information that only confirms what we believe, to accept
facts that only strengthen our preferred explanations, and to dismiss
data that challenge what we accept as truth.”

Citizens of all political persuasions (not to mention members of the
Trump administration) can increasingly live in their own news media
bubbles, consuming only views similar to their own. When confronted
with hard evidence that they are wrong, many will simply double down
on their original assertions. “This is the ‘backfire effect,’”
Nichols writes, “in which people redouble their efforts to keep
their own internal narrative consistent, no matter how clear the
indications that they’re wrong.” As a result, extreme views are
amplified online, just as fake news and propaganda easily go viral.

Today, all these factors have combined to create a maelstrom of
unreason that’s not just killing respect for expertise, but also
undermining institutions, thwarting rational debate and spreading an
epidemic of misinformation. These developments, in turn, threaten to
weaken the very foundations of our democracy. As Nichols observes near
the end of this book: “Laypeople complain about the rule of experts
and they demand greater involvement in complicated national questions,
but many of them only express their anger and make these demands after
abdicating their own important role in the process: namely, to stay
informed and politically literate enough to choose representatives who
can act on their behalf.”

 

* expertise
[[link removed]]
* knowledge
[[link removed]]
* Ignorance
[[link removed]]
* Politics
[[link removed]]
* mass media
[[link removed]]
* social media
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit portside.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 



########################################################################

[link removed]

To unsubscribe from the xxxxxx list, click the following link:
[link removed]