On the difficulty and importance of protecting the public square from the cult of expertise.
Yet another problem for our experts is that the source, nature, and relevance of their expertise is often ill-defined. A degreed professional like former First Lady Jill Biden might want to be called “Doctor,” but even those who accede will struggle to articulate just what kind of knowledge she has that the rest of us lack. What is the knowledge-how or knowledge-that accompanying a doctorate degree in educational leadership? Or take the world’s most famous diversity consultant, Robin DiAngelo, Ph.D., whose degree is in “Multicultural Education” and whose “area of research” is “Whiteness Studies and Critical Discourse Analysis.” On what field of propositions would we expect her to be an authoritative source and ask the typical non-expert to defer, setting aside his own judgment for hers? Even when expertise is genuine, disciplines and professions, along with their practitioners, seem determined to overextend its breadth for purposes of laundering their personal, non-expert opinions under their expert brand.
Historically it's been the privilege of the professional class to determine its members; lawyers decide who get to be lawyers, academics decide who get to be academics, but of course the implicit compact with society is that they can be trusted with that privilege
It was quite striking, and he's very insightful to point out that cartoon, the extent to which the 2016 election kind of revealed that for many people there is simply a certain class of people who are allowed to rule. All that "most qualified candidate in history" stuff was a stark demonstration and unwitting (?) admission that some people simply deserve power.
Still, though I have deep contempt for the laptop class in many ways, one thing that has never sat very well with me any time someone plies an argument like this is the implicit assumption that our society has managed to organize itself such that almost exactly 50% is completely vehemently utterly and fundamentally wrong about every thing that matters, and the other almost exactly 50% is pretty much reliable. It just seems so unlikely as to be impossible on its face.
Nevertheless I do agree and have observed, as have the rest of us, that would-be elites desperately want "elite" status (meaning credentials) to mean that their values and opinions should be given deference, not only within their own fields of so-called expertise but on pretty much any social question
