The Experts Killed Expertise

The Manufacture of Ideology as Expertise – Including the Radicalization of Knowledge Systems.

In a 2014 article in The Federalist titled “The Death of Expertise,” Tom Nichols of the U.S. Naval War College wrote a piece decrying what he saw as the demise of respect for expertise (Nichols, 2014). The title can be misleading. He does not argue that experts no longer exist. On the contrary, he argues that their opinions are no longer respected.

How did this seeming democratization of expert opinion — the “Google-fueled, Wikipedia-based, blog-sodden collapse of any division between professionals and laymen, students and teachers, knowers and wonderers” — come about? (Nichols, 2014)

Part of the problem lies in the fast-tracking of non-experts as authorities in the mass media. Over the past few decades, we have witnessed journalists on television posturing as psychiatrists, psychotherapists, doctors, and scientists. We’ve seen media personalities deliver “expert opinions” as if they were sociologists or philosophers, engaging with academic material they barely understand. For-profit universities have churned out supposed “experts” with little to no rigorous training. Even within traditional universities, we have seen credentialed professors speak on topics outside their field and train students in subfields in which they themselves lack formal education.

The resulting discord of voices has made it nearly impossible to distinguish sound expertise from manufactured authority. Worse, real experts also make grave mistakes. Beyond the historic failures like thalidomide or the Challenger disaster (Nichols, 2014), experts continue to make costly, daily errors that affect ordinary lives. Yes, experts can be fallible — that is not new. But today, a new paradigm has emerged: a society where the public is expected to accept certain medical treatments and vaccines without question — even when doing so seems to conflict with common sense, bodily autonomy, or financial well-being (Levy et al., 2017; Pew Research Center, 2019).

The public, seeing the dangers of blind deference, has begun to push back against this dangerous radicalization of expertise. The idea of “expertise at any cost” no longer flies. Laymen now approach authority with warranted skepticism (Baghramian, 2022).

From Hippocrates to Wild Screams: The Radicalization of Expertise.

How did scientists, for example, arrive at a point where they dismiss mounting counter-evidence as mere exceptions? Take, for instance, back surgery: it does not work for everyone. Proper dieting and exercise benefit most people. Yet many experts continue to promote surgery with an air of finality, ignoring its holistic impact on people’s lives.

Laymen are not rejecting science or rationality. Rather, it is many experts who have rejected the scientific method, replacing inquiry with “appeals to authority” — even as evidence accumulates against their claims (Levy et al., 2017).

The elephant in the room is, of course, money. Experts are employees. They work for institutions driven, first and foremost, by profit. In this context, how can a layman resist suspecting that a doctor’s advice — sworn by the Hippocratic Oath or not — isn’t shaped by the profit motive of the medical-industrial complex? How can someone believe that a for-profit hospital has their best interest in mind when the advice conveniently aligns with billing codes and insurance reimbursements?

Furthermore, how can the layman, whose interests come last if at all, be expected to swallow, hook, line, and sinker, the expert dosage that “Western civilization,” with its racist and ethnocentric approach to knowledge and treatment, is exceptional and nowhere else on the planet to be matched? Laymen are right to question the presumption of Western exceptionalism in science and medicine — particularly when those same systems have long marginalized significant non-Western ways of knowing (Pew Research Center, 2019).

To disagree with an expert today is often to be labeled a “hater” — or even worse, an opponent of “Western civilization.” This same “civilization” continues to peddle diabetes in Coca-Cola bottles around the globe and selectively upholds or discards international law depending on which nation is committing genocide against the other (Baghramian, 2022). In this environment, it is no wonder that experts — once gatekeepers of public trust — are increasingly seen as tools of political and economic agendas (Gwynne, 2020).

Isn’t it grotesque irony that Nichols, puffing himself up as the high priest of reason and expertise, genuflects before a “paternalistic, racist, and ethnocentric” system—the very machine he crows can “land mammoth airliners in the dark” and draft “the Charter of the United Nations,” but which just as effortlessly coughs up the nuclear bomb and Coca-Cola? And we’re supposed to take him seriously—let alone as an “expert”—when his model of enlightenment amounts to mass annihilation through weapons of mass destruction on one hand, and a global plague of diabetes on the other, both shrink-wrapped and shipped worldwide as though they were triumphs of civilization worthy of emulation? (Nichols, 2014)

Worse, radicals cloaked in the garb of expertise have wormed their way into public discourse, often promoting narrow ideological aims. There have been U.S. presidents who have published peer-reviewed articles in medical journals — not to advance science, but to lend legitimacy to their political agendas. Academic journals and op-eds, once symbols of rigorous debate, now often function as marketing vehicles, propping up loyalists like Henry Kissinger, Samuel Huntington, and Zbigniew Brzezinski — individuals who moved seamlessly between the elite universities of Harvard and Columbia and powerful government posts (Moussaïd et al., 2013).

The experts, some of whom once invoked the ancient world’s Hippocratic Oath with solemnity, no longer follow any comparable code of honor. In their place, a vacuum has emerged — one now filled by dilettantes, impostors, and radicals representing various political, economic, and religious interests.

Flattening and Racism

When Professor Nichols insists that “Having equal rights does not mean having equal talents, equal abilities, or equal knowledge,” he is, on the surface, correct. But within the American context, such a statement often evokes racial undertones. Many European Americans continue to believe — even if not openly — that African Americans are undeserving of their place within elite institutions. Without affirmative laws, the assumption goes, Black people would naturally be elsewhere.

So, when a Black scholar attains a professorship at Harvard, his presence can provoke backlash — not because of his work, but because of what his success is perceived to represent: a disruption of an unspoken racial order. For instance, when a Harvard-educated lawyer like Bryan Stevenson feels the need to smile and defuse tension in courtrooms where his presence provokes discomfort, it reveals the underlying resistance to Black expertise. His credentials are not seen as the result of excellence but as the byproduct of an intrusive legal system that forced diversity.

In this view, Black expertise is not real expertise — it is a threat. The presence of Black professionals in elite institutions diminishes the perceived legitimacy of those institutions themselves. Nichols, in this light, is no longer seen as a pinnacle of knowledge but as a product of a system that includes — and therefore, in some eyes, is weakened by — the inclusion of people like Stevenson.

The Collapse of Trust: Race, Power, and the End of Expertise.

The imposition of radical neoliberal ideologies and the continued influence of racialized beliefs have together flattened our concept of expertise (Baghramian, 2022). It’s no wonder that, today, “any assertion of expertise produces an explosion of anger from certain quarters of the American public, who immediately complain that such claims are nothing more than fallacious ‘appeals to authority,’ sure signs of dreadful ‘elitism,’ and an obvious effort to use credentials to stifle the dialogue required by a ‘real’ democracy” (Nichols, 2014; Gwynne, 2020).

The translation is straightforward: if a Penn-educated doctor’s challenge to a vaccine can be dismissed at whim, and if a Harvard-educated Black expert can be seen as ordinary or undeserving, and if other experts — including those at Princeton — remain silent in defense of their peers, then the public concludes: everyone’s opinion about anything is as good as anyone else’s (Moussaïd et al., 2013).

And so, expertise — as a respected institution — dies.

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References:

• Baghramian, M. (2022). Scepticism and the value of distrust. Inquiry. https://doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2022.2135821
• Gwynne, N. (2020). Another view of The Death of Expertise. Medium. https://medium.com/@NicholasGwynne/another-view-of-the-death-of-expertise-38f3ec7fb437
• Levy, N., et al. (2017). Due deference to denialism. Public Understanding of Science, 26(5), 563–577. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6338713/
• Moussaïd, M., et al. (2013). Social influence and the collective dynamics of opinion formation. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/1311.3475
• Nichols, T. (2014). The death of expertise. The Federalist. https://thefederalist.com/2014/01/17/the-death-of-expertise/
• Pew Research Center. (2019). Trust and mistrust in Americans’ views of scientific experts. https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2019/08/02/trust-and-mistrust-in-americans-views-of-scientific-experts/