The vanishing of expertise
There are certain things you’re not allowed to say in polite society. One of them is that you don’t believe in experts. I happen to embrace a more radical version of this: I believe that expertise is no longer worth striving for.
In school, everything you learn seems to coalesce around a central framework. The underlying claim is that human knowledge must be organized in a certain way for progress to be made. You can’t talk about literature without analyzing the literary techniques being used. You can’t talk about philosophy without citing certain schools of thought. You can’t talk about politics without relying on history and statistics. There is very little room for individual thought. Everything is a simulation of other people’s thoughts masquerading as original content. The scientific method has so deeply penetrated every aspect of life that individual assertions are deemed radical. One feels the need to qualify every statement made that doesn’t subscribe to acceptable theories and frameworks. Who needs massive computing power to create the matrix when human beings have already made the mere act of thinking its own kind of orthodoxy?
The intellectual class who used to enjoy unchallenged power by virtue of its exclusive access to knowledge will soon be made obsolete. Our whole education system also stands on the precipice of disaster if it cannot evolve with the times. The old ways of learning are becoming increasingly unnecessary, and the very definition of intelligence is at stake. Perhaps the only truism of history is that eventually, every form of orthodoxy will be challenged. So long as rationalism is positioned as the opposite of faith, society will continue to struggle in the wake of massive technological change. So long as the classes are divided on the basis of knowledge, the human race will surely meet its demise, sooner than later.
There has to be a new frontier, one where ideology, whether political or academic, has no bearing on the pursuit of the truth. We cannot allow the search for meaning to become a corporate retreat. The search for meaning is neither purely individual nor purely collective. To aim for one particular direction amounts to nothing less than the practice of ideology. Have we not learned our lessons from being enslaved by schools of thought? Has history not provided enough instances of destruction for us to make a change and imagine something new?
The vanishing of expertise is a good thing. While experts will continue to exist, expertise no longer needs to sit on the pedestal of human achievement. Holding expertise alone is not sufficiently human. The pursuit of meaning is not just for people with certain degrees and certain professional ranking—it is the unifying goal for all of mankind. Let conversations happen without boundaries. Let new alliances take shape outside of political parties. Let’s value the pursuit of meaning alongside the pursuit of knowledge. No school of thought has to “win.” No theory has to explain everything. No party has monopoly over the truth.
If the defining mantra of the Enlightenment is “I think, therefore I am,” it is about time we live up to its full potential.
