Experts 1: Knowledge is power

It is not a novelty to observe that 'knowledge is power' - Sir Francis Bacon epigrammed it some time in the seventeenth century. But it is one of those truths that has become somehow more true since it was first uttered. In an age in which information is thought of as the one thing most worth having, knowledge - which implies being able to get something useful out of all that data - becomes a priceless commodity. Billions of dollars have changed hands for the right to own knowledge.

But this has become one of the most overwhelming aspects of contemporary life. The sheer volume of information that I can readily access is completely overwhelming. The internet has, it goes without saying, intensified this feeling many times over. How can you know anything when there is so much to know? And if knowledge is power, and the one thing I know is how much I don't know, then it is pretty disempowering, isn't it? The mystique of Google is in part due to the way in which they have mastered the organization, calibration and delivery of knowledge, and (perhaps most of all) made it saleable. 

And so, we turn to the experts. 

An expert is a person who we recognize as having a very high degree of knowledge or skill in a particular area. They would usually have both experience and learning combined. For example, an airline pilot is not only someone who knows how to fly an Airbus. He (it is most often a he) has also recorded several thousand flying hours at the helm of a commercial passenger jet. Usually, the expert pilot has the experience of being the co-pilot to a more experienced pilot, so that he can gain the experience he needs. 

What’s more, the airline pilot, like other experts, has a licence to fly that is given to him by the statutory authorities. A person may or may not be skilled and knowledgeable in some area, but if he or she is not recognized to be such, their expertise may be useless. An unlicensed pilot simply does not get to fly an Airbus 330, unless he is involved in some terrorist action. (And, by the way, airlines have made sure that it is never the case that they have to make an announcement to the passengers like ‘does anyone know how to fly a plane’?) The point is: recognition is vital, because it conveys the authority and status to the expert that is needed to operate as an expert. There is a social dimension to expertise, in other words. 

We have a number of social institutions that are set up in order to recognize expertise so that we ordinary folks can quickly and with confidence place our trust in the hands of the expert. The professional guild is a group of experts whose job is to recognize the expertise of others and admit them to their number. Governments have regulatory authorities which combine peer assessment with the development of bureaucratic criteria which help mediate to the public the expertise of the expert. These bodies can have the power to disendorse the expert by removing his or her credentials. 

Imagine that I need to see a brain surgeon because (heaven forbid) a tumour has been discovered growing in my brain and I am having terrible headaches. I turn up to my appointment at the right time only to discover that the surgery is a very seedy part of town, that the receptionist is grumpy and sits at her desk painting her toenails, and that the magazines in the waiting room are several years old. When I meet Dr Thanatos – an unpromising name for a surgeon since it means ‘death’ in Greek – I notice that he has very shaky hands, bloodshot eyes and the faint whiff of alcohol on his breath. But I do notice that on his wall he has qualifications from the best schools of brain surgery. And my GP, who I have been seeing for years, has warmly recommended Dr Thanatos as a fine brain surgeon. 

The concept of expert knowledge is functioning here on a number of levels. In the first place, I have no idea even about how I would go about measuring the expertise of a person who called themselves a brain surgeon for myself. My degrees in English and Theology just won’t stack up. I simply could not with any credibility stand in judgment over the various aspects of brain surgery – unless there are rather obvious facts on the table, such as a pattern of terrible deaths. Dr Thanatos does not make a favourable first impression, to be sure. He won’t make eye contact, and he constantly checks his emails while I am talking to him. But his qualifications and the recommendation of my doctor testify loudly that this man is a very good choice for me to make in determining which doctor I want to cut the top of my head off and poke around inside. In fact, as he is a brain surgeon in good standing with the relevant government authorities and ultimately accountable to them, most people would be inclined to trust him without too much reflection. The whole system of trust in expertise operates as a kind of social short-hand, meaning that the time-consuming and inaccessible research is done for us already. In the case of the airline pilot, we don’t think it strange that we never meet or even learn the name of the person in whose hands we happily place our lives. We just take it as a given that the person up the front wearing a peaked cap is expert enough to fly 12,000 metres high at several hundred kilometres an hour for several hours, possibly in the dark.

Uniforms are another way in which a social convention conveys authority and status on a particular person in such a way that it can be instantly recognized. We really only consider the way in which this happens when someone uses the convention to take advantage of us. But this is really evidence that, in the overwhelming majority of cases, the convention works very well. In a crowded railway station looking for the toilets, I instantly look for a person who is wearing a railway employee’s uniform. At a restaurant, a waiter will indicate his or her status to act as a waiter by carrying a white cloth – or even by subtle gestures and body language. Travelling on an overnight ferry recently I approached a lady who was wearing a lanyard around her neck and asked her what time the onboard cinema was showing its first film. It turned out that she was simply a member of the public – and the lanyard, had I inspected it more closely, contained nothing that would indicate that she was a steward at all.

What would we do without experts? We rely on them to fix our cars, to give us financial advice, to heal our bodies, to manage our diets, and to tell us that the computer is completely kaput because of the faulty motherboard - which I didn’t know I had until mine broke. Our dependence on the experts is endemic. We can’t begin to operate in any meaningful in our uber-urban high-tech environment without the assistance of those who really know what they are talking about. Do-it-yourself is dead: the idea that I might fix my own car, for example, is now passé. There’s far too much complex gadgetry beneath the bonnet for that.

The extraordinary exploits of Frank Abagnale, Jr. were made into the film Catch Me if You Can, directed by Stephen Spielberg in 2002. Before he was even 19 years old, Abagnale had manage to con his way onto over 250 Pan American flights and travelled to 26 countries. His method? He impersonated an airline pilot complete with uniform and ‘deadheaded’, which is when airline staff are ferried free of charge to meet flights that they subsequently work on. Abagnale claimed that pilots frequently offered him the controls of the plane, and that once he actually flew an aircraft for a brief period at 30,000 feet. He said later that he was ‘very much aware that I had been handed custody of 140 lives, my own included...because I couldn't fly a kite’. He also impersonated a doctor and served as a resident pediatrician in a Georgia hospital; and took the Louisiana bar exam so that he could work for the Attorney General’s office in that state. Abagnale’s confidence tricks relied on the huge faith that we place in experts and the readiness with which we trust them. We are practiced at believing them, and we know that life goes more smoothly when we just do. In performing his remarkable feats of impersonating experts, Abagnale of course earned himself the authority of an expert in security and fraud, and has made a very nice living since his release from prison as a security consultant. 

The spread of the cult of expertise is a feature of a highly specialized and high-tech economic system. This is in contrast to pre-industrialized societies in which most people would function as subsistence farmers; and even in contrast to many industrialized systems where a great number of people work in factories in which there may be specialized skills but not many of those regarded as ‘expert’. The post World War Two prosperity and the silicon revolution of the 1970s have combined to ensure that Western people aspire to career in which highly specialized skills and an in-depth education are necessary. Many of us spend years of our lives becoming experts – a process that takes hard work and focused study, but which is rewarded by the recognition of our society that we have authority in our area. The economic value of higher education is a measure of nothing less than the importance of knowledge in the psyche of Western individuals. Our expertise is a commodity we can sell in order to gain access to the advice of other experts. And one should not underestimate the importance of this factor: it helps us feel proud at dinner parties when people ask ‘what do you do’? 

The most observant if not the most lucid of social critics of expert knowledge was the French philosopher Michel Foucault (d. 1984). He created several wonderful neologisms in an effort to describe how knowledge and power mutually constitute one another in human societies and especially in the modern era. It was Discipline and Punish, his work on the practice of judicial punishment in the modern era, that led him to observe the way in which gathering, analyzing and ultimately knowing information about people could be an instrument in changing their behaviour. The prison systems that developed in Western nations during the nineteenth century employed a series of ‘professionals’ – psychologists, criminologists, medical officers and so on – who were given power over the prisoner which was exercised not by brute force but simply by observing and categorizing behaviours. This was what Foucault labelled ‘power/knowledge’. And as far as he was concerned, what occurs in prisons lies on a continuum with the rest of society. He noted resemblances between the various institutions of social control – schools, the military, psychiatric institutions and hospitals – and described the way in which a culture of behaviour is inculcated in these merely by the collecting and reporting of information by people who have formed themselves into professional guilds – each of which accrues to itself an aura of authority and status. 

Think of how difficult it is to resist the word of an expert. I recall myself once talking my small son, then about a year old, to the casualty ward of the local hospital with a persistent high temperature. When after several hours we were admitted to the hospital itself ‘for observation’ it was clear that whatever the ailment was, it was very minor. But the regime of the hospital demanded that he be kept in overnight. When we went up onto the ward, the scene of chaos which greeted us was very distressing: another small child had just emerged from an operation on his leg and was being attended to by at least ten relatives – some of them also upset, some of them simply talking very loudly to each other. It took all the will power at my disposal (as a person who normally conforms to social expectations) to demand of the hospital staff that we be allowed to take our son home to his own bed. The series of release forms I then had to sign were clearly designed to intimidate me as much as possible by reminding me of my own amateurism. And yet: I was certainly making the right decision.

But Foucault would say that the aura of expert knowledge even extends to the way in which I govern my own actions and habits. I am not always being watched and evaluated, but the things I do even in private are patterned by the feeling that somewhere someone is. The reporting of expert findings in newspapers, magazines and other popular media achieves this effect very well. Particularly this is the case in the area of what we physically consume. Our choices about what to purchase, cook and eat are frequently driven by the concern that we ought to conform to what the experts say about what we ought to eat, or by the feeling that a certain size of body is the healthy norm for a person of my age and gender. An expert dietician and an expert fashionista will probably say very different things about food; but both exert an influence on the non-professional world through their expertise.

Does it work?

Another condition which effects what we say we know and believe is the prevailing impact of utilitarianism on Western culture. That is, the criteria for evaluating whether a proposition is to be believed or not is not actually whether it is true but whether it works. Perhaps I have put the contrast too strongly: it would be hard to imagine that some element of ‘truth’ is irrelevant in most people’s thinking about what they believe. Pragmatism is a very powerful consideration, and increasingly so since we think we can measure what works in a public and objective way and thus have an actual discussion about it with others. 

This may seem surprising since we live in the age where our heroes and saints are scientists, who seem to have a grasp on tangible reality more than the rest of us and so can pronounce about the truth of the material with authority. But the real power of the scientific paradigm is that it appears to work so successfully in making our lives more pleasurable. It offers us a great deal on truth. ‘The Truth’ itself is, in any case, some distance off from the ordinary person, who cannot possibly hope to evaluate the claims and counter-claims of specialists. 

Now, at the same time, many Westerners have found this materialist pragmatism crass and disheartening – and unspiritual. Counting the bottom line is objective, but it isn’t pretty. And at that level, it doesn’t ‘work’ as it claims it should. It certainly doesn’t produce the kind of happy lives that it promises. And so, many Western people have found themselves attracted to Eastern religions and philosophies. The irony is that Westerners cannot even at this point rid themselves of their utilitarianism – because they find that Eastern religion ‘works’ for them. Adopting an Eastern religion isn’t for Westerners usually a matter of believing various metaphysical propositions, but rather of experiencing the benefits of religious practices: a better work-life balance, a more peaceful inner world, opportunities for doing good works and a healthier lifestyle. 

What matters for people is what will work in the living of life. In a sense this is indisputable: who doesn’t want a life that actually works? What I think needs challenging is the criteria by which we think we rightly evaluate whether things are ‘working’ for us. What are these criteria? How can we accurately measure whether they are working or not? Over what period of time should we consider whether something is working?

There’s two important things that religious beliefs introduce into the discussion here which make an evaluation by the simple criteria of ‘does it work’ even more complex. The first of these is that human suffering might be redemptive in some way. That is, something that might appear not to be ‘working’ might, through divine intervention or whatever means, turn out to be the epitome of human action. This is an alarming thought for relatively comfortable Westerners to confront. And I’d hasten to add that the religions have very different ways of accounting for suffering. Some in the Eastern traditions see suffering as a result of negative karma. Christianity, for its part, names suffering as evil in and of itself, but capable of being woven into the divine plan for extraordinary good. 

The second element of most traditional religious belief is that of the afterlife. Again, the religions differ massively on the details of the afterlife. But an afterlife of any kind offers a point of evaluation for human life that lies beyond this world. It speaks of a perspective on human events that is beyond our knowing at this point. It relativises our contemporary evaluations of the viability of the lives we are leading. We cannot yet see what it mean for life to ‘work’ and so we need a framework that gives us more than pragmatic answers to our most profound questions.

The Unchooseable Choice?

But we need to pause here and retrace our steps somewhat, because there’s a complication to the story – a complication I call the ‘unchooseable choice’ condition. It is true that people today speak of belief in God as something that one chooses for oneself. But there’s a contradiction here, too. People also characteristically speak of being religious or not as something about themselves that they can’t change and that just ‘is’ – like their eye-colour or race. They will say ‘I am not a religious person’. Philosopher Alain de Botton recently spoke of his unbelief as if it was inescapable fact about him that was not at all open to revision or question regardless of any choice he might make. Religious beliefs, or the lack of them, are something deeply ingrained in us from childhood to the degree that we can close off a conversation about religious matters by simply referring to this state of affairs. So, we have a choice that, ironically, many people feel they can’t choose. 

This condition is part of a deeper paradox at the heart of the culture of the west. It’s a paradox which reverberates right through western politics, science, economics and education, and which has no obvious philosophical solution. It’s this: one the one hand, we exalt the notion of human autonomous free will. It’s a fine idea, alright: liberty is an aspiration which lends the human individual dignity and enables us to talk about the rights and duties we owe each other regardless of skin colour or gender. The freedom to pursue happiness is the basis of our consumer economy, and of our system of justice, in which we hold individuals largely responsible for their actions as far as we can. We expect it from each other. And yet at the same time, various branches of human knowledge are offering powerful descriptions of the human condition as entirely and comprehensively determined by factors outside of our control – whether that be genes, natural selection, brain chemistry, our parents or whatever else. So, the whole idea of free choice may turn out to be a grand illusion. (see Sam Harris)

There’s a false dilemma here. True, the idea of picking through the various religious options, testing each as if you were evaluating the ripeness of an avocado in the supermarket, is an appealing myth, but nothing more. We’d love to think of ourselves as standing independently over all the possible choices and selecting one (or none) with a dispassionate logic and complete freedom.

But the reality is of course that we don’t do anything of the kind. We are a bundle of predispositions and preferences, marked by our experiences and relationships and shaped by our genetic makeup. When we choose, we make a decision in media res, in the middle of things, with time ticking away and with events swirling all around us. And yet, even if we can’t give a clear philosophical account of why the things we choose to do are real choices, we still have the felt experience of evaluating options and making decisions. It’s a felt experience of decision-making for which we feel (mostly) responsible – except in extreme circumstances, when someone’s drug addiction or abusive relationship with their father has distorted the choosing. In these cases it is up to the individual to explain how their experience of decision was inhibited or distorted. 

Which means: human beings are capable of evaluating their own decision-making processes – of engaging in self-reflection to the degree that people can give an account for their preferences and biases, and perhaps revising them. While our imagined ability to survey all our options from a neutral standpoint is false, to us is given the ability to reflect on ourselves as choosers and knowers. The gift of human self-consciousness bestows on us this perspective at least; and to that we should add that, as social and historical beings, we have the benefit of others to help us.

Of course, the decision for a particular faith or against it is felt by 21^st century people to be a highly personal one – as personal as one’s sexual preferences or taste in music. That is also a by-product of the Reformation period – the after-effect of a change in theological outlook. That’s not to say that the choice is simply a matter of personal preference, but that it is felt by many people to be a very private and internal matter. The old cliché about not mentioning religion, sex and politics as the three taboo subjects is very much in force – especially regarding religion. Even sex is talked about in public with less reticence. Public preachers and door knockers are the height of bad taste. It is also very much the case that the spectre of violent religious disagreement hangs over our culture. If we are to live at peace with one another, then it might be better if religion were held to be a purely private matter and not for public discussion. 

But I think  that we are greatly impoverished by this secretive and private attitude to matters of faith. While it protects us to a degree, it renders us inarticulate about some of the most profound experiences that are given to human beings. We are not challenged in the biggest questions of our lives to think more deeply because we prefer not to discuss them from fear of disagreement. We are crippled by this social convention. Personal need not mean entirely private.   

Difficulty breathing

Once upon a time, it was not so difficult to believe. 

Believing in God was like breathing – a second sense of which people were hardly aware. Even with a man as rational as the great English philosopher John Locke in the seventeenth century, lack of religious belief was an extraordinary and aberrant thing that wasn’t worth tolerating because it must surely lead to social chaos and even treasonable behaviour. Philosophers like the great medieval writers St Anselm and St Thomas Aquinas offered their famous arguments for the existence of God not because they imagined that they would convince an non-believer but because they saw them as confirming what believers (that is, everybody) knew to be already true. 

Not only was the world self-evidently the handiwork of the Creator, but it was also the case that it was shot through with his divinity. Divinity oozed from physicality. Reality was connected in a great chain of being which participated in the highest being – namely, God. Human beings were a part of this great connected whole in which they could actively participate through prayers and other religious acts, mediated through the agency of the Church. The ‘divine’ and the ‘natural’ were not separate explanations for the workings of the world. 

Today we like to think of believing - as we like to think of many things – as primarily a choice. We think of our religious views as a preference – not a trivial one, it should be granted, but a preference nonetheless. What’s more, believing in God has become a highly contested choice, vehemently challenged by some of the most prominent intellectuals of our times. 

How has this come about? It would be too easy to say that the rise of the scientific world-view is the culprit. That is a common way of telling the story: as science and technology have enabled us to grasp the world more successfully and efficiently, the less mysterious the world has seemed. Take medicine, for example: once we could talk about bacteria and viruses and their effects, we could start addressing illnesses without supposing that a priest is going to have a great deal to contribute. It is true that science has provided alternative explanations of the workings of the world which at many points make appeal to a divine power apparently unnecessary. But that would be to miss the story of the how the scientific world-view come to prominence in the first place; and how it depended for its emergence on certain changes in the way faith and belief were thought of in Western Europe. The scientific world-view did not cause the change in the nature of believing, since it arose at the same time as the changes themselves took place. 

That change had to do with the extraordinary movement within the Western church: the Reformation of the sixteenth century. The Reformation, bound up as it was with the intellectual movement sometimes called ‘humanism’, introduced the notion of ‘faith’ not merely as ‘believing certain propositions to be true and others to be false’ but as a giving of the whole of one’s self in deep trust to the promises of God. The big thing that connected you to the divine world was now an inward and individual matter, whereas before this the external work of baptism was held to be the ground of your religious life. And this believing, this faith, was part of your life’s story: it was possible to tell a story of not believing and then believing, of coming to know what trust in the promises of God was as the Spirit of God did its work on you and you changed. Though the Reformers were adamant that faith itself was a work of God in the human person, it was still the case that the human person’s will, reason and affections were involved in the getting of faith. Even if one ought retrospectively to speak of the illumination of God’s Holy Spirit working in your heart to bring faith to flame, the experience of coming to faith felt certainly as if it involved one’s hearing, understanding and a moment of decision. At this point, faith became an act of the will – a reality decided upon. Mine to choose, mine to reject. 

At the same time, Protestantism concentrated the sphere of divine action in the Word of God. Instead of seeing God’s presence rippling through nature, Protestantism warned of the danger of confusing the created things with the Creator himself. There were many possibly idolatrous distractions from the decisive place in which God was at work – in Christ revealed in Scripture. And it would not do to forgot the sheer transcendent otherness of God. If anything, the gospel of the cross of Jesus Christ revealed to humankind the radical alienation of humankind from the divine being. The significance of this separation of God from his creation was that the world’s natural processes became available for study on their own terms, without the confusion of a metaphysical explanation. This was the beginning of the scientific revolution, and a revolution in the way people in the West thought about faith.

But we need to pause here and retrace our steps somewhat, because there’s a complication to the story – a complication I call the ‘unchosen choice’ condition. It is true that people today speak of belief in God as something that one choses for oneself. But there’s a contradiction here, too. People also characteristically speak of being religious or not as something about themselves that they can’t change and that just ‘is’ – like their eye colour or race. They will say ‘I am not a religious person’. Philosopher Alain de Botton recently spoke of his unbelief as if it was inescapable fact about him that was not at all open to revision or question regardless of any choice he might make. Religious beliefs, or the lack of them, are something deeply ingrained in us from childhood to the degree that we can close off a conversation about religious matters by simply referring to this state of affairs. So, we have a choice that, ironically, many people feel they can’t choose. 

There is a kind of wistfulness expressed at this state of affairs, too. With the rise of an absolutist New Atheism, it would be easy to overlook the fact that a kind of longing for the ‘ability’ to believe is widespread. There is a wistful look over the back fence of religion. People frequently express admiration for aspects of the religious world view, and for the beneficial effects that religious belief brings to those who are so fortunate. Those who have moved on from a religious past will express feelings of grief and loss – even when the circumstances of their leaving are quite bitter.

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