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

by Thomas M. Nichols

Distance and anonymity remove patience and presumptions of goodwill. Rapid access to information and the ability to speak without having to listen, combined with the “keyboard courage” that allows people to say things to each other electronically they would never say in person, kill conversation. As the writer Andrew Sullivan has noted, this is in part because nothing on the Internet is dispositive, and so every participant in a debate demands to be taken as seriously as every other. And what mainly fuels this is precisely what the Founders feared about democratic culture: feeling, emotion, and narcissism, rather than reason, empiricism, and public-spiritedness. Online debates become personal, emotional, and irresolvable almost as soon as they begin. Yes, occasional rational points still fly back and forth, but there are dramatically fewer elite arbiters to establish which of those points is actually true or valid or relevant.20 Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and other online sites can be outlets for intelligent discussion, but too often these and other venues become nothing more than a fusillade of assertions, certainties, poor information, and insults rather than actual exchanges.