Expert Versus Everybody: The Final Showdown
Never fear to participate in humanity’s grand dialogues. And you don’t need an ‘expert’ badge for that.
The death of ‘the expert’ is perhaps the saddest causality of the present pandemic. One can’t traipse the mediascape without treading on the tears of those mourning him. The expert had been moribund for a while, and then the virus came along and spawned into a million memes, shoddy analyses, fake news and fudged data, rushing his heartbeats toward one last.
In the expert’s place there now is this strange tribe of everybody. These thuggish minnows are here at all times but found lately their most lethal means in social media. They tweet satellites into orbits, they comment companies out of bankruptcy, they sign up virtually for events of revolutionary magnitude. In times of Brexit and other farces they played the social alchemists. With quixotic earnestness they strove to bring the spring to the monarchist Arab world. Most recently, when George Floyd died, they showed up again as civil right attorneys.
But it was the pandemic that forged for them a platform fusing a springboard with a battleaxe. It offered such a fancy combo of problems, testing of their ability to intervene. Up for grabs are the grand-sounding troubles ranging from existential to pedagogical, economic to cultural, medical to political, digital to legal. Anybody can take a shot at any of these, and that’s the norm and the innate beauty of the post-expert world.
But not everyone sees much beauty in this arrangement.
Paeans to the grand old authority
Why does the end of the expert seem so portentous to some? Let’s examine the most common arguments.
Misinformation can be dangerous
No prize for guessing the most sound-seeming contention. In times of this pandemic, you should wear a mask not if your once-afflicted neighbour tells you so, but you do it when WHO releases an edict. When WHO later retracts you aren’t allowed to sulk. You shouldn’t do so much as a saline gargle since it is not medically proven. You should try out nothing you find on alternate media, even if they are running a streak of effectiveness. You should thank your doctor for asking you to stay home swallowing paracetamol even if you might cough your lungs out that very night and start hearing the hinges of heaven’s doors creak.
Never compromise the truth
This truth, according to the certified experts’ definition, is whatever they say. Reserved here is the right to a change of mind at a time and place of the experts’ choosing. With a deadpan face they toss into the shredding bin the very emperical factors cited once as testimonies to the outgoing theory. In the spirit of science and sanity, the rest of us are supposed to keep silent.
Public opinion will negatively influence policy making
Your opinion and mine would influence the state’s policy, judiciary’s integrity, researchers’ morale. Disparate voices undermine objective evaluation. And never ask this: Doesn’t the establishment too have a bit of a moral obligation to sense the pulse of the public, the ultimate beneficiaries of it all?
Don’t dumb the world down
The classic philistine tendency has made a resurgence, you see, blamed often on post-modernism. The solution a non-expert comes up with doesn’t warrant merit or attention, as pinned to it perennially is this badge of dishonor called “questionable authority”. The moment you regard such ideas, no matter how elegant and pertinent, the dumbing-down kicks in — that of the academia, the sciences, the society, leading potentially to an impotent intellectual ecosystem.
Social media is stupid media
If you are an expert, blame twice daily the noxious clutter of clutters called social media, the great vitiating marketplace of ideas. Experts of the yesteryear were infinitely more protected, impervious and blissfully deaf to unsettling noises wafting from the lower strata. Before everyone was granted a voice, his glass facade had never to endure this precarious shiver of each pane and panel. To live here isn’t half as pleasant for the present expert, hugging one’s laurels and yet fearing impending insignificance.
Elitism and its discontents
Should one be so mean to those devoting their whole lives to a single field, digging ever deeper and driving its evolution and, in turn, human progress? Isn’t it reckless to compare such competence with sparse flashes of sense and serendipity in amateurish echo-chambers?
Fair enough. But first, who’s a non-expert? And at what stage one becomes an expert? What determines the credentials — a certificate, a college degree, a doctorate? Is human capacity so simple?
Remember that twenty-something clerk of a Swiss patent office, Einstein his name? Off work he formulated principles that run the universe. At that point he hadn’t secured any of those credentials that’d make him formally an authority — no professorship, no access to a research lab, no PhD. By today’s norm, had he posed a thought to a then prominent physicist like Arthur Eddington, he would be derided. One gets to see this often on YouTube — some poor earnest soul puts in a cogent comment on a lecture about, say, quantum field theory, and the stingy shaming begins: ‘Saddened to see the greatest mind of our generation is languishing here among us mere mortals.’
The attitude here isn’t merely mean; it’s plain wrong. You might want to ask an astronomer to know the weighty role the amateur star-gazers play in the field. Their collective input far outweighs those from the observatories stewarded by ordained specialists. Amateurs discover new stars, planets,comets. They forsake their sleep not to miss supernovae and such celestial events as rare as hen’s teeth. Or take those who freelance, drop-outs employing ivy-league PhDs, hackers and other secret masters of the digital universe. Yes, some of the best in their fields work on their own, unaccredited, even uncredited.
Why am I thinking of Sherlock Holmes? He is fictional but no more fictional than the authority attributed to the experts.
Correct and evolve, not bully and perish
Wikipedia, that grand citadel of crowd-sourced wisdom, teaches us how to stay effective and reliable without a central authority. Here’s an instance of an enormous, entropic, ever-shifting group of mutually accountable individuals guarding truth. There may be flaws, but they dissolve in the revolution it’s brought about. Here the anonymity, or minimal identity, needn’t translate into a ticket to bullying one’s way through. And more recently, the concept of Bitcoin has instilled still more structure to mutual accountability in cyberspace. It’s also hard not to spot that glaring analogy: experts in place of banks, currency in place of knowledge.
Wikipedia has also reimagined our idea of accuracy. Isn’t it that what’s taken for objective truth, save for the elemental facts, has in it an innate subjective aspect addressed often by tacit reconciliation? We weren’t allowed to think along these lines when, say, Encyclopedia Britannica was thought sacred. Each article in there is written by a proclaimed master of the field. You open to a random page where a Nobel laureate awaits you with great pomp.
This isn’t to say Wikipedia doesn’t have such contributors. But what sets it apart is its very principle and philosophy, the dynamism and democracy.
Know your car, not your world?
We are allowed to fastidiously love or hate what we own. You can hold an educated opinion on a commodity you consume. You base the judgements on whatever technical clues you have of a car or a smartphone, from the make of the engine to the speed of the CPU. Nobody would shame you for not being an automobile mavin but still comment on the car, for you’re the customer — the force that sustains it all.
Why, then, is it any different in matters that affect you so much more? How terribly naive it is that you can comment on a pack of tacked-up metal but not on your history, your rights, the climate of the planet you inhabit?
Reasons abound. Politicians would rather deal with a handful of experts than a nation full of jacks-of-all-trades. Experts can be bought and with them the authority of their voice — a handy medium to push agendas. Experts conceal the intellectual deficit of those running the state and society. If there’re too many voices with an air of learnedness to them it’ll be hard to forge them all in one’s favor. And so the political masters need experts to stay precious. It helps to always minimize the number of brains to be bought and maintained.
Here another truth comes to the fore. The feigned authenticity of non-experts are often accused of misleading the incredulous, but what about those corrupt honchos of knowledge-dispensation acting as agents of mass manipulation? Which is better — to have such a lot and let them sermon from time to time to a clueless populace? Or, to let disparate views emerge and reconcile without much formal arbitration?
It gets instantly evident where lies the greater risk. Also evident is the need to enhance and fortify the quality of human cognition and intellectual interaction at a scale larger than what exists now.
Expertise redefined
Experts’ disdain for collective wisdom, its shades ranging from mild apathy to animosity, has its origins in insecurity. For the past few decades there has been this reduced relevance of universities and a professor-centric model, which is blithely ignored. Digital libraries, ubiquity of information and altered paradigms of collaboration, a surge in available channels for publishing or broadcasting, a pervasive location-agnosticism — should all have helped build a smarter, nimbler academic climate. But they rarely did. Why?
The prime strategy the official experts adopt to stay afloat is to make it hard for all others to question them. So the whistle-blowers are conveniently branded as post-modernist dumbing-downers, the harbingers of mediocrity. Even if a scrupulous patron tries to change the status quo, she’d have to back away fearing a sure barrage of jargon bursting forth from the grand arches of the ordained citadels of higher education. The research yielding the best results these days is the research to establish one’s own relevance.
But this can’t stem the tide forever. Gone are the days when the best in a field depend solely on their own expertise. The tools that support and augment are just as, if more, important. No, I’m not talking about just automation. The very act of information synthesis has changed, both in terms of methods and philosophy. Empiricism still occupies the heart of scientific undertakings, but it consumes its power from agencies other than just the human brain.
Groundbreaking ideas now demand massive projects — remember the Large Hadron Collider. Modest labs flecked with those in coats and wrinkled foreheads will soon be a thing of past. Technology almost singly fuels the projects, tackling the enormity of data and the frequency of output needed. Such processing doesn’t so much care about what really is going on as about how much data it has at hand. Not only does the “expert” needn’t know what the hell is happening, but he cannot know what the hell has just happened. That’s why the likes of Noam Chomsky don’t agree that today’s Artificial Intelligence is really an intelligence at all.
Sure: human brain will never go out of demand. Knowledge is still the greatest power but its processing evolves in a certain direction, replacing accuracy with abundance, compromising extreme precision in favour of possibilities. If all the tenets of expertise — abilities to retain, analyse, synthesis, and deduce information — have enfeebled, what does it tell about the expert archetype? That’s why it is important not to ignore stray voices or the voices of the collective.
Here comes everybody. So?
There’s this brilliant concept to understand what’s denigrated as mob wisdom. It is called ‘meme’, a bio-cultural term that has surrendered the original gravity to its trendy semantics of an internet template for joking and mocking.
In sociological parlance, meme is a unit of practices and ideas exchanged by means of available platforms — written, spoken, artistic, ritualistic. Any imitable cultural element can be thought of as a meme. Some also equate its propagation, a tad too analogously, to the propagation of environmentally sensitive genes that can propagate and shape-shift.
When we predicate this discussion on memes, it isn’t hard to see why each opinion, each thought, each intervention, matters. And why it isn’t always necessary to have a central arbiter to judge and filter. In our very cultural ecosystem is implicit a way to choose or discard, embrace or erase, modify or fortify. Such a free, flexible system entertains novelty and novel directions of progress and propagation, more avenues for constructive social mutation. It is perhaps the most organic and optimal way for our collective consciousness to evolve, our shared beliefs and moral attitudes to refine. It’ll be interesting to juxtapose this process with the intensely interventional cultural engineering driven by designated experts.
There exists a strained consensus in that our collective issues demand, if not collective solutions, at least collective attention. Most would agree that life and reality are way bigger scholars than the accredited ones. When the Amazon rainforest burned burning a million hearts, not many would shame the protesters for not being scholarly enough in ecology. We know the more the voices, the more compelled the governments would be to take action. We can empathise with the Hong Kong protesters without being the authorities of Chinese constitutional amendments. The stark simple sight of the prone little Alan Kurdy’s shored-up body teaches you more about Syria than a hundred history books and any lecture on ethno-religious conflicts. To hold a strong view on George Floyd’s death, you needn’t be a historian of slave-trade and imperialism; it’s sufficient to possess a sharp enough eye and a clear enough voice.
And, of course, a heart.
Democracy runs on the corrective force of the collective. If democracy has been accepted as the best ever framework for governance and welfare and fearless thought, why look down on the voices it is composed of? ‘The people’ isn’t some giant horse with a lone rider but a highly intricate and powerful beast of myriad expressions, each forged in the heat of reality and lives lived right on the ground. It can gallop on its own.
