I have spoken about the limitations of
expert knowledge not to prompt a kind of endless suspicion against it but so
that we recognize it for what it is and what it gives us – and how dependent we
are on it even though it doesn’t always deliver the certainty we want. I by no
means would like to encourage faith in cranks and conspiracy theories.
But expert knowledge is limited in a
couple of other important ways that we often fail to recognize. Let’s return to
Dr Thanatos’ surgery, where we find the good doctor allowing me to consult him
about my brain tumour. Only, he’s not a ‘good’ doctor. I don’t mean that he is
a bad doctor. No, he is simply bad. Because
of some specialized research I have been doing, I instantly recognize him as a
wanted man: he was once a torturer for a dictatorial South American regime that
has been overturned. How do I feel now about putting my life in his hands? At
one level, neither his expertise nor his skill is necessarily compromised by
his grim track record. But there’s something profoundly disturbing about the
thought of allowing such a person access to the status and authority of one of
the expert professions.
Why is this so disturbing? Well, an
encounter with a former torturer will no doubt be disturbing, but that’s not
what I had in mind. It’s unsettling because there’s an underlying cultural
assumption that a member of one of the expert professions will be a generally
respectable person in possession not only of expert knowledge but also of a
number of virtues – honesty, integrity, compassion, not torturing people, and
so on. But why should we assume this? We can, granted, assume that the person
with his or her name on the metal plate next to the surgery is (or at least, was
at one time) in possession of self-discipline and capable of hard work. Yet
medical training is not a school for virtue; it is a school for medical
knowledge. Perhaps there were a couple of ethics classes along the way, but
that’s not the same thing as the cultivation of the kind of virtues of which I
imagine a medical specialist to be in possession.
This is a problem for two reasons. One
the one hand, expert knowledge is, as we have noted, a powerful weapon to wield
within a community. It accrues trust. An expert who lacks virtue is a very
dangerous individual indeed; and to the degree that any expert lacks virtue,
there is a danger of our trust being misplaced or misused. On the other, we often
give the expert in one field the right to speak about other fields, assuming
that success in one thing is the same as getting life generally right.
That is, we think that experts have wisdom when what they really have is knowledge. We can see it most crassly in
the cult of celebrity, which holds up successful musicians, sports stars and
actors as people whose life-skills are worth emulating. At the same time, we gawp
at their drug addictions, weight loss/gain issues and broken relationships. But
we also do allow ‘scientists’, for example, to pronounce on all manner of
subjects. Richard Dawkins is a classic case: he is undoubtedly expert in his
chosen field of evolutionary biology. But he is a rank amateur in the fields of
history and philosophy. He is certainly not a specialist in geology and in
astronomy. Nevertheless, his right to make pronouncements in these fields is
simply granted to him because of the aura of his expertise.
In a sense this is understandable,
because we need information and analysis from across different fields if we are
going to address some of life’s most pressing questions – such as the existence
of God and the meaning of right and wrong. The concept of the ‘university’ was
originally derived from the view that all knowledge was interlocking and overlapping;
and thus it was beneficial to have students and teachers from all fields of
knowledge working side by side in a single institution of learning. This ideal
has become very much degraded in the present time, with the opening of separate
schools for different disciplines and with economic forces ensuring that
inter-disciplinary work is harder and harder to undertake.
The integration of the disciplines of
knowledge is an ethical and indeed ultimately a theological issue. Expert
knowledge gained in a single area without reference to the other disciplines of
knowledge is an open door for human pride. It feeds the illusion of a human
omniscience. The other disciplines of knowledge can provide a proper balance to
the hubris of the expert. And this depends on a kind of faith – a faith which
can be understood in a secular way, although it has theological roots. This is
a faith that the universe is a meaningful and integrated whole and that we can
study it on the presumption that ultimately it makes sense, whether we can see
that sense at this point in time or not. This working hypothesis of the
universe’s coherence could never be grasped in its entirety, but human beings
are still justified in holding to it because of their experiences of coherence
and meaningfulness in the world. (tbc...)
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