Book Review: "The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters"

Tom Nichols' 2017 book is a bracing reminder of why expertise matters in today's complex world.

A few years ago, I was chatting with my friend about the state of the election. Given that he is from West Virginia, he asserted something to the effect that Hillary wouldn’t be good for coal miners and, since my father happened to be a miner at the time, he clearly thought this should sway me to vote against her. When I responded that I viewed coal as a necessary evil and that it contributed to climate change, he shot back with the witty rejoinder, “Climate change is propaganda,” before going on to state: “We haven't even recorded weather long enough to remotely prove it.” I was so astounded by both the egregious stupidity of the statement and the absolute assurance with which he uttered it that I could think of nothing useful to say in response. 

Still, I was deeply troubled, and I had this conversation in the back of my mind as I read Tom Nichols’ 2017 book The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters. It’s a searing indictment of the culture of ignorance that seems to have swept over America, and while I don’t agree with every one of his points, on the whole I think that Nichols’ level of concern is quite appropriate. Now, more than ever, we must all do our part to fight back against the increasingly ubiquitous hostility to expertise in all of its forms.

Though it’s a relatively slim book, Nichols still manages to cover quite a lot of territory, and he identifies several sources of Americans’ distrust of experts and their specialized knowledge. A significant contributor, he argues, is the growth of the internet and, just as importantly, a belief among many laypeople that reading about something on their favorite website is equivalent to the years of study that experts put into their work. Confirmation bias, the desire of people to have their own beliefs reinforced rather than challenged is, it must be said, a helluva drug. 

Few people would challenge that aspect of Nichols’ diagnosis, but when he ventures into other areas things get a little dicier. For example, he spends quite a lot of time going after higher education, and while some of his points hold up, others...not so much. He’s right to argue that far too many small colleges have sprinted after university status, despite not being able to truly compete with their larger counterparts. Likewise, he’s also right to point out the toxic influence of grade inflation (which leads to students being unable to handle failure of any kind and blaming others for their shortcomings) and the desire of university administrators to provide an “experience” rather than an “education.” 

However, where he goes awry is in his oversimplification of the power dynamics at play in student protests. Yes, there are some egregious examples of students trying to become teachers and failing to recognize that their instructors know more than they do about the subject matter. At the same time, it’s also true that many of these students have lived experience at the nexus of various systems of power that need to be recognized. Dismissing it as just so many crybabies, as Nichols tends to do, is neither helpful nor accurate.

Unfortunately, this tendency to throw blame indiscriminately is a flaw in several later chapters of the book. Nichols, like many other conservatives, tends to think that both-sidesing every issue is a mark of intellectual honesty, when in fact it’s the exact opposite. Thus, though he rightly criticizes the way that entertainment and journalism have blurred together, he equates the likes of Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN, despite the fact that the first of those is notably more egregious when it comes to their skewing toward the right. Or take his commentary on Rush Limbaugh. “There is a reasonable argument that talk radio in the 1980s and 1990s was a necessary antidote to television and print outlets that had become politically complacent, ideologically monotonous, and too self-regarding,” he writes. “Limbaugh and his talk-radio imitators did not create middle America’s resentment and distrust of the media.” I find it truly risible that someone with Nichols’ obvious erudition could write that there’s a “reasonable argument” to be made about the necessity of Limbaugh and his ilk, but that’s exactly the problem with this sort of both-sides mentality. 

The book also suffers from a surfeit of information. This might seem like a strange claim to make from someone who believes, as Nichols does, in the value of rigor and substantive research. However, there comes a time in every scholar’s life when they have to determine what to leave out and what to include, and Nichols doesn’t always seem to know when to do either. One can’t help but think that a little more editorial intervention would have helped him to nail his points without quote stuffing. 

Despite its flaws, The Death of Expertise is a timely reminder of why expertise is an absolute necessity in a democracy. Over the past year, we’ve seen how an allergy to the experts can have grave political and life-and-death consequences. Even as I write this, animosity toward Anthony Fauci continues to boil among the right, many of whom see him as everything wrong with “expertise.” He’s been accused by quite a few on the right--particularly those right-wing folks that lurk on Twitter and pontificate about every single issue that arises--of being politically motivated and using his scientific authority to undercut the Trump administration. This, despite the fact that he has always been one of the few willing to tell the American people the truth about the pandemic.

For better and worse, we live in a republic and, as everyone knows, the health and longevity of a republic relies in large measure on the ability of its populace to make educated and reasoned decisions about how best to govern themselves. As Nichols rightly points out, it’s up to each and every one of us to do our part to develop and sustain an informed citizenry. It remains to be seen whether we are up to the challenge.