I don’t know anything and have no perspective, but here is my comment… I feel better now.
Barnstorm in 2013 on the defunct website – Stoke Report
Introduction
The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters by Tom Nichols (first edition) from 2018 is a book about how experts no longer have the influence that they did in times past.
Americans have reached the point where ignorance, especially of anything related to public policy is an actual virtue. To reject the advise of experts is a assert autonomy, a way for Americans to insulate their increasingly fragile egos from ever being told they are wrong about anything.
I am not an expert or professional book reviewer but I cannot help writing these reviews. They are a way for me to ponder the meaning and ideas of a book. It is simply an exercise in critical thinking.
One thing that you realize from his long resume that besides being a university professor, Tom Nichols is a military expert. I got to know his writing through his many Atlantic articles. His take on the Trump administration and the Commander in Chief is always spot on. It is truly unfortunate that before the current U.S. wars no one consulted Tom Nichols. He surely would have given some sage advise. He is a throwback Republican. A thinking, well-read Republican. I know not whether he is still registered as a Republican but thinking Republicans seem to be in short supply.
Overall the book is a quick-read and in many ways is but a vehicle for Nichols to cathartically gripe about the state of the world. Much of these gripes are things that have arisen since the advent of the internet. Chapter 3: Higher Education: The Customer Is Always Right – Examines how universities treat students as consumers, lowering educational standards definitely is full of antidotes (often funny, sometimes depressing) about how college has changed. Learning and scholarly pursuits seem to have taken a back seat.
College as a client-centered experience caters to adolescents instead of escorting them away from adolescence. Rather than disabusing students of their intellectual solipsism, the modern university ends up reinforcing it.
Indeed, if you have ever seen a college brochure these days, you get the feeling that the prospective students are but customers and of course “the customer is always right.” Fancy dorms. Extra dining options. State-of-the-art gyms. Nichols has been teaching at the university level for decades and has an inside view of this phenomenon.
With these rants and others The Death of Expertise is but a topical book. It is a book that in fifty years will be but a time-capsule of the first part of the twenty-first century and nothing more.
What is not in the book or skimmed over
While Nichols does a great job of explaining many of the current trends such as “confirmation bias” and the demise of the journalism profession, what Nichols does not dig into is why. The monopolization of the media business. The death of small news organizations and reporters. The dismal state of online journalism. This is but briefly mentioned. So called mainstream online journalism will couple articles about pet food next to genocide, weight loss drugs next to serial killers, the latest eyeliner trends next a war in Africa. We seem to have have become accustom to this “expert” editorial style. I find it simply strange and dystopian. These are the “expert” editors? Perhaps it is what Steve Bannon calls “flood the zone.” In actuality he said “flood the zone with shit” but that is a minor detail.
Capitalism and Politics
But what seems to perplex Nichols the most is that the reason experts are in decline is simply because of capitalism. Experts have been in decline for a long time. Fifty years ago oil companies had their own scientists and experts assess the the effect of fossil fuels on the climate. They were overwhelmingly in agreement that fossil fuels would warm the planet and be a problem for humanity. The oil companies ignored their expert advise. Al Gore’s The Inconvenient Truth was truly inconvenient so it was ignored. Greed and the all-important dollar won out.
You see this sort of phenomenon more recently whereby experts are ignored in many fields. Recently, in Trump Contagion by Brandy X. Lee you learn that medical organizations such as the American Psychological Association (APA) along with the New York Times put the kabash on a large group of experts in the fields of psychiatry, law and others. In 2018 they determined that Donald Trump was seriously mentally ill, unfit to serve as president and an existential treat to humanity. Even though her earlier book The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President was a best-seller the APA killed her next book Trump Contagion because the pharmaceutical industry did not want the book to gain momentum and be taken seriously. The last thing the APA wanted was to be in the crosshairs of Donald Trump. What this means is that you have professional organizations ignoring and at times killing the advise of their very own experts. Capitalism and our messed up, mendacious politics is one of the big reason for the death of expertise. People believe what they want to believe and ignore the rest.
That is my review and thoughts about The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters but “I don’t know anything and have no perspective, but here is my comment… I feel better now.” I do know one thing. If I was thinking about starting a war in say Iran, I would definitely want Tom Nichols in the room. He is an expert.