The Tryanny of Experts (part Ii) – Experts and Civil Society

opinions in ever increasing volume. Reporters and pundits are often widely informed by virtue of their interviews and reportage; they are also often very good rhetoriticians. Personally, I believe that open, honest, ideological expression by the press is much better than veiled or even unconscious bias contained in misleading headlines or buried ledes. But being published in print or being broadcast on cable does not make anyone an expert.

Pollsters – the ultimate non-experts. These are people who are paid to ask a representative sample of regular people what they think, then to use statistics and their analytical powers to discern what everyone thinks. Well, polls can be interesting; they might even in some cases be beneficial to policy makers or civil society. But how any of this makes pollsters experts is beyond me. Nevertheless, pollsters have become increasingly common media experts who provide journalists and pundits with a window into the mind of the common woman on the street. Where is the expert here? Wizard of Oz, we see you behind your curtain!

Finally, there is the all too common spectacle of the expert parading in public who establishes their credibility by lambasting their field of expertise – the expert insider critic or expert whistleblower. Have you seen the accredited psychologist who attacks the field of therapy or psychoanalysis right before lathering their audiences with a thick layer of relationship advice? What of the conservative scholar (tenured) who bravely eviscerates academia from within? Or the anti-medicine MD? How about the government civil servant whose civil rights (and political views) were so trampled that he had to give hundreds of media interviews to show how reactionary the government is? We could multiply examples. These experts are remarkable because they attack the root of their expertise, while all the time utilizing the same expertise to convince us we ought to trust and listen to them. Most remarkably, the slickest exploiters of the expert-insider-critic shtick actually manage to make us trust them more than other experts, even as they savage the root of their expertise.

Your Civil Society

One of the major critiques of new media on the Internet is that it accumulates much noise and little substance – too much riff raff and too few experts. Wouldn’t it be better to gather quietly at the feet of wise experts, rather than sift through all of the shouting, competing voices in new media echo chambers? Oh, I have heard elderly reporters wax lyrical as they recalled the days when everyone listened to Cronkite and read the New York Times, because back then we knew that was the way it was. This common, elite meme argues that we actually need fewer media broadcasters, fewer experts, fewer points of view, and a lot fewer people speaking. But to the contrary, our civil society needs more people to be more engaged, to speak more openly, to broadcast their voices further, to test and debate more ideas, new ideas.

If Ideology Forum is to succeed in helping strengthen our civil society, together we need to enable a very wide range of people to thoughtfully engage one another about as many ideas and principles and movements and causes as possible. Doubtless, some will criticize saying that regular people – common internet users – lack the expertise to make newsworthy, publishable, original contributions to the big issues and debates that shape our world. In other words, ‘Shut up and listen to the columnists, pundits, politicians, professors, scientists – the experts.’ But civil society must be broad and inclusive; it ought to be active and democratic; the Internet makes that increasingly possible; and Ideology Forum strives to make that civil society real. We need more people to throw off the tyranny of experts and speak.

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