The book club's choice for September is Thomas M. Nichols' The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge (2017). He makes many of the same points I made in a post I wrote last month but then decided not to publish because it seemed to be too negative as well as too focused on nostalgic recollections of my own past. In that post I was remarking of the similarity I had discovered in the two books I'd just read. The first was Luis W. Alvarez's memoir, Alvarez: Adventures of a Physicist (1987), our July book club assignment (to the delight of our group's many physicists). The second was a book I had been interested in for several years, written by David Skinner, a former colleague: The Story of Ain't: America, Its Language, and the Most Controversial Dictionary Ever Published (2012). From physics to linguistics seemed a significant change of subject. What I would not have expected was to notice a startling similarity in some of the underlying intellectual and cultural circumstances that form the background for both books. It turns out that both are essentially academic histories set in a now almost vanished time when an older established intellectual order, stretching back to the middle ages and beyond, was beginning to give way to a new more egalitarian and meritocratic era. That transition was also experienced by Thomas Nichols and by myself and many others who have been famously labeled baby boomers, although Nichols, born in 1960, is on the trailing end of the generation while I, born in 1946, was in one of the earliest cohorts. Another thing we have in common with many of our baby boom peers: we were college-educated (or over educated) children of parents who were not college graduates.
Nichols laments the anti-intellectual turn in American culture and politics, and his focus on social media and the Internet might make his concerns appear a little more up to date than those noted by Alvarez and Skinner, but the Internet has only accelerated a trend that began with the expansion of post-secondary education that took hold in the post-war years. Gradually we've accepted that everyone should have a college degree, much as we once would have insisted everyone should graduate from high school. It's a complicated story, but the theme in all three of these books seems to be related to the unintended consequences of mass higher education. Nichols' book is fun and amusing to read, but I don't think he can offer any real hope for a way back to that earlier era when the world was more or less clearly stratified not only according to social class but also according to education and expertise. Our acceptance of universal suffrage, our abiding faith in democracy and peculiar notions of equality, and the formidable force of the Internet and social media have created conditions for a nearly perfect storm of intellectual mediocrity. There seems to be a lot of longing for some sort of return to what many perceive to have been a better more sensible time, but there is little prospect of bringing that about. Time never flows backward, and besides, everyone has a different version of the ideal past. In any case, the times described by Alvarez, Skinner, and Nichols are gone forever. Whatever is coming to replace them will be different, perhaps vastly different.
And that is why I did not publish that post I wrote last month. As I read over it I realized that I had succumbed to the lure of the good old days, which is typical for those at my time of life, but should be resisted and recognized for the will-o'-the-wisp that it is. The young look to the future, but the old tend to look back to the past, generally with longing for a golden age lovingly recalled as a time of order and meaning, and often associated with the years of our own becoming. Those bygone years of our youth are usually glorious in memory even when they may have been somewhat less so when we were living through them. And why should they not be? Most of us will remember that time of youthful energy, reasonably good health, and ambitious aspirations, when we looked to our own recent past for models and projected for ourselves a future that would bring to fulfillment many of the things we were longing for. Such attitudes are natural and probably essential to continuance of our species. The idea of progress has not been universal in human history, but it has been around for a long time now and has taken a firm hold of contemporary culture, especially during the 20th century.
But on reflection, and with more historical perspective, particularly that which comes with advancing years, we begin to observe the gap between what is, what we aspired to, and what we recall from our often distorted memories of the past. No one really wants to believe nor accept that the world we have lived in and called home will soon be gone forever except in our memories and the imperfect reconstructions of history. That's a hard truth, indeed, but even harder perhaps is accepting that future generations will likely be just fine with that. They will see their own time as the new normal and perhaps also the preferred normal. With few exceptions, and for good reasons, the majority of humans wish to live in their own present rather than someone else's past. And yet each generation clings to what it knows and hopes to enforce their wisdom on future generations, only to be disappointed when their children and grandchildren strike out on journeys to different futures they are imagining for themselves.
So what have I learned? Yes, colleges and universities are not what they were even as recently as my own matriculation. Bachelor degrees have become so common that post-graduate degrees and certificates have begun to beckon as the new minimum requirement for many forms of employment. But more concerning to some, as Nichols points out, colleges and universities have become commodities, students have become consumers, grade and degree inflation have leveled the value of a college education, while many courses of study have shifted away from intellectual engagement to instrumental training for the workplace. The humanities and what were formerly known as the liberal arts have given way to something called STEM education (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). The result has inevitably been a certain amount of slippage with regard to subjects once considered essential to higher education: history, literature, philosophy, foreign languages. Even the social sciences, so popular in the 20th century, are sliding toward irrelevance. When everyone has a degree in something, as Nichols suggests, then everyone considers themselves an expert and all opinions, especially on the Internet, are somehow rendered equally valid.
Many of us who were educated in the old schools are either alarmed or amused by what has come to pass. A significant minority of Americans, perhaps eventually even a majority, have come to doubt most forms of authority or expertise. Global warming or climate change, which has now gone from a prediction to a virtual documented reality to scientists, is to many Americans just a theory. Even medicine is no longer the province of physicians, since we can now go online and search for our symptoms and prescribe our own treatments and cures. Vaccinations, once thought to have eliminated diseases such as small pox, polio, and measles, are now suspect because a significant minority of Internet "experts" have determined that they are dangerous and a likely cause of autism. No amount of naysaying from the medical establishment can prevail over what has now been established on so many websites. But it really isn't the Internet that is to blame. The Internet has only made it easier for those who share beliefs, of whatever variety, to find one another and to reinforce their convictions of certitude and righteousness. There is no going back from any of this. In a world where everyone is a genius and an expert, it will be increasingly difficult to convince anyone to abandon opinions that they find appealing and see reinforced by many with similar convictions.
For example, there actually are reasons that scientists have come to accept that humans are responsible for much of our current global warming, based on data and analysis and hard won knowledge of weather and climate and historical records, as well as a firm understanding of disciplines such as chemistry and physics and biology. But that path is a difficult one and requires study and knowledge merely to participate effectively in discussions regarding how we reached this point and what might now be done, if anything, to mitigate the problem. On the other hand, there are many businessmen and politicians and assorted ordinary folks who see no reason to believe these dire predictions in the first place. The weather changes every day and there is absolutely nothing any of us can do about that. To believe otherwise seems foolish. By the time the evidence itself becomes convincing, such as rising tides and the disappearance of low lying islands and beach communities, or mass extinctions of essential pollinators and the resulting food shortages, or recurrent droughts and water shortages, well, by then it will be a little late for any sort of effective action, at least if our hope is to keep things the way they are.
But then that is precisely the point. We can never keep things the way they are. Things are not now, nor have they ever been, or will they be, the way they once were; they simply are as they are, changing with each passing moment and person and generation. We are the crown of creation, and we've got no place to go. But that's okay, because life is change (how it differs from the rocks); new worlds to gain. Or put another way, for every new generation, these are the good old days: make the most of them and never look back. Or as Ram Dass said: Be here now! I used to think that was really a cop out, but as I've grown older and more accustomed to the ways of the world and my fellow humans, I've begun to recognize the wisdom of living in the moment. After all, that's really all there is.
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