All ages have their defining clichés, and the cliché of our age is this: ‘Never trust experts.’ I have heard it being said by Americans, Danes, Nigerians, and Indians; by the educated and the semi-literate; by people I consider vastly intelligent and people about whose intelligence I harbour serious doubts.
Like all such clichés, this one too is a gigantic lie built on a tiny grain of truth.
When your car breaks down, you go to a mechanic, who is an expert. You send your child to school, which is staffed by experts — teachers. When illness gets serious, we rush people to hospitals. We do not usually build our own furniture or stitch our own clothes. I am yet to see someone watching TV on a set manufactured at home.
We like to romanticise about a past when we were all self-sufficient and did not need experts. But such a past recedes into myth if we look closely at it. Take just human travel: there were locomotive and shipping experts in the 19th century; there were cobblers, saddlers and trainers in the centuries with horses; there were trackers who could read the landscape or guide by the stars before that. Perhaps, when we were living in caves, we did not have experts — though even then, I suspect, there might have been individuals who were expert at honing stone weapons or building a fire!
We use and have used experts all the time, but we abuse them all the time too these days.
Differences among experts
True, you might consult more than one mechanic about your car and more than one doctor about your illness. You might move your child to another school. You might employ this carpenter rather than that one.
This is not because you do not trust or use experts but because experts can differ among themselves, which forces you to use your own critical reasoning. In fact, some difference between experts is the precondition to any real expertise. This is because expertise is not innate or a miracle or God-given. It is a human achievement based on reasoned critical thinking.
Reasoned thinking is not the same as Cartesian Reason. For Descartes and Enlightenment thinkers influenced by him, Reason — best written with a capital R — was an unconscious or conscious substitute for God. That is why it was so easy for Christian evangelicals to combine Reason with Christianity in the 18th and 19th centuries: for many religious Christians, Reason was the voice of God in human beings, and hence ‘true’ religion. For them, it was the ‘superstitions’ of other faiths that denied both Reason and God. (The total opposition that current Christian fanatics in the U.S. make between their God and scientific reason was a less vocal position until recently.)
But this God-like Reason is not the same as reasoned critical thinking, though its instruments are similar. God-like Reason is unchanging, universal, all-seeing, absolute, singular. Reasoned thinking is situational, historical, dialogically objective, and it can offer more than one conclusion. It is not relativist, but it is always contextual.
Reasoned thinking
What reasoned thinking requires is an equal discourse in language, despite the slipperiness of language, about a world that is mutually experienced, despite the subjectivity of experience. This is why obdurate belief — in a God or an ideology (such as the trickle-down theory) — and purely personal emotions cannot lead to reasoned thinking. They are based on the demand that one individual’s perspective or belief be accepted per se by others. Religious heads of any kind, unless they open their belief to reasoned thinking with others, are not experts; they are quacks.
An expert talks to other experts in a language that can be understood in the field and about a reality that can be debated equally. An expert — unlike some political leaders, sants and pirs — can never claim infallibility, because true expertise demands reasoned agreements and critical differences. It is the mark of a superstitious, authoritarian age that it confuses expertise with infallibility, and dismisses experts if they are not infallible.
In short, it is one thing to employ reasoned, critical thinking to engage with experts, and it is another thing to dismiss experts, with all their agreements or disagreements. So, dear reader, the next time someone advises you ‘never to trust experts,’ at least give him the refit of his own doubt. Ask him: Why then should I trust a self-appointed expert on experts like you?
