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.