The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters

by Thomas M. Nichols

While expertise isn’t dead, however, it’s in trouble. Something is going terribly wrong. The United States is now a country obsessed with the worship of its own ignorance.

No, the bigger problem is that we’re proud of not knowing things. Americans have reached a point where ignorance, especially of anything related to public policy, is an actual virtue.

I’m used to people disagreeing with me; in fact, I encourage it. Principled, informed arguments are a sign of intellectual health and vitality in a democracy. Rather, I wrote this because I’m worried. We no longer have those principled and informed arguments.

People don’t just believe dumb things; they actively resist further learning rather than let go of those beliefs. I was not alive in the Middle Ages, so I cannot say it is unprecedented, but within my living memory I’ve never seen anything like

That’s not to say that this is the first time I’ve ever thought about this subject. Back in the late 1980s, when I was working in Washington, DC, I learned how quickly people in even casual conversation would immediately instruct me in what needed to be done in any number of areas, especially in my own areas of arms control and foreign policy.

you’re a policy expert, it goes with the job. In later years, however, I started hearing the same stories from doctors. And from lawyers. And from teachers. And, as it turns out, from many other professionals whose advice is usually not contradicted easily.

These stories astonished me: they were not about patients or clients asking sensible questions, but about those same patients and clients actively telling professionals why their advice was wrong. In every case, the idea that the expert knew what he or she was doing was dismissed almost out of hand.

Worse, what I find so striking today is not that people dismiss expertise, but that they do so with such frequency, on so...

Instead of arguing, experts today are supposed to accept such disagreements as, at worst, an honest difference of opinion.

And if we insist that not everything is a matter of opinion, that some things are right and others are wrong … well, then we’re just being jerks, apparently.

was not raised in an environment of utter obedience to authority, but in general, my family was typical in trusting that the people who worked in specialized fields, from podiatry to politics, knew what they were doing.

The public’s trust, both in experts and political leaders, was not only misplaced but abused.

Now, however, we’ve gone in the other direction. We do not have a healthy skepticism about experts: instead, we actively resent them, with many people assuming that experts are wrong simply by virtue of being experts.

Not only is everyone as smart as everyone else, but we all think we’re the smartest people ever.

And we couldn’t be more wrong.

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

Put another way, people who thought Ukraine was located in

Latin America or Australia were the most enthusiastic about the use of US military

Not only do increasing numbers of laypeople lack basic knowledge, they reject fundamental rules of evidence and refuse to learn how to make a logical argument.

When life and death are involved, however, it’s a lot less funny. The antics of clownish antivaccine crusaders

The growth of this kind of stubborn ignorance in the midst of the Information Age cannot be explained away as merely the result of rank ignorance. Many of the people who campaign against established knowledge are otherwise adept and

successful in their daily lives.

This, however, is a reliance on experts as technicians. It is not a dialogue between experts and the larger community, but the use of established knowledge as an off-the-shelf convenience as needed and only so far as desired. Stitch this cut in my leg, but don’t lecture me about my diet.

All of these choices, from a nutritious diet to national defense, require a conversation between citizens and experts. Increasingly, it seems, citizens don’t want to have that conversation. For their part, they’d rather believe they’ve gained enough information to make those decisions on their own, insofar as they care about making any of those decisions at all.

The death of expertise is not just a rejection of existing knowledge. It is fundamentally a rejection of science and dispassionate rationality, which are the foundations of modern civilization.

information-oriented world where all citizens believe themselves to be experts on everything.

This book, then, is about expertise. Or, more accurately, it is about the relationship between experts and citizens in a democracy, why that relationship is collapsing, and what all of us, citizens and experts, might do about

So why all the fuss? What exactly has changed so dramatically for me to have written this book and for you to be reading it? Is this really the “death of expertise,” or is this nothing more than the usual complaints from intellectuals that no one listens to them despite their self-anointed status as the smartest people in the room?

In the next chapter, I’ll discuss the notion of an “expert” and whether conflict between experts and laypeople is all that new. What does it even mean to be an expert? When faced with a tough decision on a subject outside of your own background or experience, whom would you ask for advice? (If you don’t think you need any advice but your own, you’re likely one of the people who inspired me to write this book.)

In chapter 3 I’ll discuss why the broad availability of a college education—paradoxically—is making many people think they’ve become smarter when in fact they’ve gained only an illusory intelligence bolstered by a degree of dubious worth.

Not only is the Internet making many of us dumber, it’s making us meaner: alone behind their keyboards, people argue rather than discuss, and insult rather than listen.

Professional journalists, however, face new challenges in the Information Age. Not only is there, by comparison even to a half century ago, almost unlimited airtime and pages for news, but consumers expect all of that space to fill instantaneously and be updated continuously.

Experts are not infallible. They have made terrible mistakes, with ghastly consequences. To defend the role of expertise in modern America is to invite a litany of these disasters and errors: thalidomide, Vietnam, the Challenger, the dire warnings about the dietary hazards of eggs. (Go ahead and enjoy them again. They’re off the list of things that are bad for you.)

Finally, in the conclusion I’ll raise the most dangerous aspect of the death of expertise: how it undermines American democracy.

Experts advise. Elected leaders decide.

And when voters lose control of these important decisions, they risk the hijacking of their democracy by ignorant demagogues, or the more quiet and gradual decay

their democratic institutions into authoritarian technocracy.

ordinary people who believe they are actually troves of knowledge.

We accept such people and put up with them not least because we know that deep down, they usually mean well. We even have a certain affection for them.

kind of intellectual Gresham’s Law is gathering momentum: where once the rule was “bad money drives out good,” we now live in an age where misinformation pushes aside knowledge.

This is a very bad thing. A modern society cannot function without a social division of labor and a reliance on experts, professionals, and intellectuals.

The fact of the matter is that we cannot function without admitting the limits of our

knowledge and trusting in the expertise of others.

mistrust between them. All societies, no

matter how advanced, have an undercurrent of resentment against educated elites,

Democracies, with their noisy public spaces, have always been especially prone to challenges to established knowledge.

more modern times, the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset in 1930 decried the “revolt of the masses” and the unfounded intellectual arrogance that characterized

Thus, in the intellectual life, which of its essence requires and presupposes qualification, one can note the progressive triumph of the pseudo-intellectual, unqualified, unqualifiable, and, by their very mental texture, disqualified.

In terms that would not sound out of place in our current era, Ortega y Gasset attributed the rise of an increasingly powerful but increasingly ignorant public to many factors, including material affluence, prosperity, and scientific achievements.

The death of expertise, however, is a different problem than the historical fact of low levels of information among laypeople. The issue is not indifference to established knowledge; it’s the emergence of a positive hostility to such knowledge.