#14 Expertise
Expertise without Authority
In the
aftermath of the last election there have been countless attempts to figure out
why people would believe anything a serial liar would say. The political parties, the media and the
schools have all been widely condemned for their role in bringing us to this
moment where ‘alternative facts’ rule the day.
It’s pretty easy to see that we face a crisis of cultural
synthesis. We no longer have a unified
story about what is real. What I think
is trickier is trying to find a way to talk about it without simply
reconstructing the bad old days on institutional control.
Modernity
pushed aside the authority of the church and the crown to create a new
authority in rational and scientific expertise.
In modernity, the answers were validated by the process used to develop
them and by the credentials of the people who executed the process. One of the great inventions of Modernity was
the intellectual who became an expert.
Experts were ‘objective’ and gained their authority by operating in
discourse communities that critiqued and reviewed their work. The problem we face is that those discourse
communities turned out not to always be so ‘objective.’ It drives scientists crazy when postmodernist
point out that science is just another word game. But as the feminist scientists have aptly
pointed out, it makes a difference who’s question is driving the research. There have been enough ethical red flags
about funding and research to make it hard to have complete faith in the way
science is ‘practiced.’
I think
it is important to try and sort out what is legitimate in this critique and
what is problematic. Science is a word
(or numbers) game, but that doesn’t mean it is necessarily illegitimate. The process that scientists use is generally
robust and valid. People who say, for
instance, that climate scientists or evolutionary biologists all just go along
with the crowd have never watched them in action or gone through the process of
trying to publish an article. The built
in incentive is to rebut and not to confirm the dominant paradigm. That doesn’t mean there isn’t occasional
fraud or that results aren’t sometimes interpreted to benefit a funding
source. While scientists are dismissive
of their critics, there are two ways that science is vulnerable to criticism.
The
first is that science is more provisional than it is usually presented to
be. Results have to be replicated and
methods are always being tweaked and challenged. I think the people who work in it everyday
take that for granted, and it gets communicated to the public as more absolute
than it should be. “Hot fudge cures the
common cold.” Perhaps Toulmin was on to
something in Cosmopolis when he pointed out that in the process of having
science replace the authority of religion it adopted some of its rhetorical
moves. It seems to me, that this
vulnerability could be addressed by better science education and more contact
between science and people instead of the isolation of labs funded by
companies.
The
second area of vulnerability is closer to the ruse of Modernity: not everything
that calls itself a science is a science.
Bruno Latour has been the most relentless proponent of this critique,
calling into question how the process of the physical science ‘travels’ to the
social domain. From a slightly different
angle, Stiegler has cast doubt on the model of ‘knowledge’ made by ‘experts’
without input or prox[BA1] imity
to the site and the people impacted by it.
Taken together, these critiques cast doubt on the Enlightenment ideals
of Modernity. It turns out that emotion
and ‘affect,’ in Massumi’s terms, are as least as important as ‘reason’ when it
comes to creating an expertise that helps us live well.
As the
looming impact of combining computers and automation with AI threatens to end
work as we’ve known it, this issue of expertise becomes more complex. There will always be the expertise that
youtube videos showing you how to fix your brakes contain, but how will the
larger sense of expertise survive the demise of the institutions of
Modernity? How will we educate people to
recognize and value expertise without the authority of institutions. Some critics have blamed postmodernism for
the demise of expertise and the rise of what one author calls
‘fantasyland.’ While I think most
postmodernists would just be happy that someone knows they exist, it seems to
me these critics have it backward.
Postmodernism is descriptive and not prescriptive. The unravelling of Modernity was going to
happen even if French theorists never emerged.
Besides, who wants to return to a ‘unified’ view of the world enforced
by torture and death?
We may
not have chosen this path, but it’s the path we’re on. Expertise will be vital to the way we handle
this transition. Flashing an Ivy League
degree or a government position won’t be enough to create it. We have a long project ahead of us that will
require completely reinventing our ideas about learning and schooling. It may be that wisdom will finally come to
the West, or it may just mean that we struggle through this long dark
transition without much direction.
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