August 27, 2006
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change
One of the greatest illusions I had when I was younger was the belief that the world was run on the basis of specialized expertise. I really believed that everything worked like science and math where people dedicate their lives to finding the truth and then acted on their best guess as to what the truth is. I thought it was all a big collaborative where each person builds upon the knowledge of those who come before them well aware that they might be wrong but willing to push the world just a little bit closer to the truth. Humanity was always moving forward. I thought things were better than they’d ever been in the past and kept getting better. And I attributed it to the development of expertise upon expertise, truths building upon truths. Like math and science.
I believed that everyone with power was an expert. I believed journalists were scholars of journalism. I believed educators were scholars of education. I believed politicians were scholars of public policy. And worst of all I thought businesses were run by scholars of business.
In a way I was right. The world does run on specialization. But the specialization in some walks of life is not equivalent to anything remotely resembling science.
The truth is a lot of things aren’t as complicated and specialized as the world makes it appear. How hard is to understand politics and government and history? How difficult is it really to grasp how the idea of going out finding the truth and sharing it to people? How much expertise must a teacher have in order to share their knowledge with the next generation? The answer to all of these things and much more is “not very”. The truth is people don’t devote their lives to these tasks because it takes a lifetime to obtain expertise. Those who devote their lives to these things do so because they enjoy them or because they think it is an important valuable thing to do.
Oh there are specialized aspects of all these jobs but they are surficial They aren’t prerequisites in order to engage in the activity at all. For example, the ability to tell the news well in an entrtaining way and a way that gets good ratings isn’t a requirement for being a reporter. They are requirements for getting on a popular network news program but they aren’t reqirements for journalism.
On one level I’ve always known this but I kept waiting for the point when I would study things and find that they were so much deeper and more complicated then they seem on the surface. I thought that if I studied any particular thing close enough I’d find out that even though it seems simple that it’s really intensely complex and beyond the grasp of anyone who doesn’t make it their life’s work to learn it. And as a result the further I went in my education the more and more disappointed I became at the simplicity of it all. You learn what has no substance so you can engage in a more acceptable manner in things that you didn’t need to study in order to know how to do.
My old perspective is not uncommon I think and it’s a huge problem. If individuals think that engaging in the world around them requires them to develop a lifetime of expertise why would they ever do it? If they think they have to know everything about something in order to engage in it they won’t engage in it. They’ll just leave it to the “experts” who have time to learn it and they’ll trust in their decisions.
But what is really needed is the opposite. People need to make decisions for themselves whenever and whereever possible. We can’t wait for “experts” to do and say things for us. We need to engage in learning and teaching and telling and debating all the things that matter. The fact that we will sometimes be wrong does not invalidate our engagement. It is important for us to be wrong in fact as through being wrong we learn what is needed in order be right in the future. And truth be told most of us won’t be as wrong as often or as badly as the experts who are caught up in the illusionary importance of their own expertise.
