Rejection of Expertise
As the June 2016 vote on Brexit approached, UK Justice Secretary Michael Gove urged voters to oppose staying in the European Union, saying, “I think people in this country have had enough of experts,” when most economists were arguing against the UK leaving the EU.
Tom Nichols, a professor of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval War College, lamented this mindset in his 2017 book, The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters. In Nichols’ view, “The death of expertise is not just a rejection of existing knowledge. It is fundamentally a rejection of science and dispassionate rationality, which are foundations of modern civilization.” And a 2015 study found that “when exposed to scientific research that challenged their views, both liberals and conservatives reacted by doubting the science rather than themselves.”
Nichols sees this as not simply an indifference to established knowledge, but a positive hostility to it. He cites opposition to vaccinations of small children and the preference for raw milk as examples of movements by people denying the validity of expert judgement. He also cites creation of conspiracy theories as “a way for people to give context and meaning to events that frighten them” when there is no coherent explanation. Once in place, such positions are solidified by confirmation bias, the tendency to accept only information that confirms already-held beliefs.
How did rejection of expertise come to be? Nichols finds four significant contributing causes. He finds higher education itself as contributing to the notion that expertise is no longer attained only by an elite population. The notion that every young person should go to college has created such demand for degrees that colleges are caught in “a spiral of credential inflation.” What is lost is the capability for critical thinking, accepting competing ideas without preconceptions. Eager to satisfy their “clients,” colleges and universities award grades unrepresentative of their students’ intellectual achievements.
Not surprisingly, Nichols identifies a second cause of rejection of expertise as the Internet. He writes, “Why rely on people with more education and experience that you – or, worse, have to make appointments with them – when you can just get the information yourself [by Googling]?” Information is expected instantly, and no filter separates bad information from good, leaving it to the reader to decide what is true and accurate. The operational filter is usually confirmation bias.
Nichols sees the proliferation of news sources as leading people to believe they are informed. Too often he finds news presented as entertainment, with presenters reaching celebrity status. He cites Rush Limbaugh, who “set himself up as a source of truth in opposition to the rest of the American media.” Fox News is “the ultimate expression of the partisan division in how people seek out sources of news.” Viewers choose from among this overabundance of sources and celebrities, in accordance with their biases, and believe they are informed.
Finally, Nichols faults a lack of rigor in scientific research for contributing to skepticism toward claimed expertise. He documents that “a non-negligible amount of published scientific research is shaky at best and falsified at worse.” Enough cases of fraud or misconduct in scientific research have been documented to have led laypeople to question whether studies in any field can be trusted.
In politics, it is the responsibility of the governed to be informed on issues being decided by their elected representatives and make those representatives aware of their positions when representatives vote. Nichols’ gloomily concludes that “to defeat the campaign against established knowledge or to reverse its effects on American democracy … a possible resolution will lie in a disaster as yet unforeseen.” Among such possible disasters, he lists a major war, a real depression, the emergence of an ignorant demagoguery, “or the rise to power of a technocracy that finally runs out of patience and thus dispenses with voting as anything other than a formality.”