Sponsored By:
Saturday, March
9:15 a.m. - 10:45 a.m.
Grand Ballroom 5
Tom Nichols
Professor, Naval War College and Author
Tom Nichols is a professor at the Naval War College with deep expertise on Russia and the role that warfare plays in international affairs. With his new book, however, he looks at expertise itself. In
The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and
Why It Matters, he argues that too many of people have embraced the idea that experts should have no more standing in government or society than they themselves do. He makes the case that experts do matter and that this kind of false egalitarianism is dangerous.
The Death of Expertise has been published in eleven foreign editions of the book, Tom’s new book,
Our Own Worst Enemy, challenges the current depictions of the rise of illiberal and anti-democratic movements in the United States and elsewhere as the result of the deprivations of globalization or the malign decisions of an undifferentiated “elite.”
What are we talking about? We are not talking about the democratization of knowledge or the expansion of public participation in the issues of our time. Rather, Nichols is pointing to the claim that everyone’s opinion should have equal weight, that nothing important distinguishes professionals from lay people or teachers from students. This “epidemic of narcissism,” the aggressive rejection of expertise, endangers the very foundations of our republic.
What are the causes? Changes in the role of higher education and media, and the internet. Colleges have become intellectual boutiques designed to satisfy the self-identified desires of students, rather than institutions that teach them what they need to know. The media has become a forest of echo-chamber silos in which you are told what you want to hear rather than what you need to know and even that information is mostly entertainment. The internet has put all this on steroids.
Why does it matter? Society doesn’t work without real knowledge. To run things well, you actually have to know what you’re doing. When ignorance and opinion shoulder expertise aside, the system collapses. Populist anti-expertise inevitably ends in disaster.
What’s the solution? Unfortunately, it usually takes a disaster to shock people back to their senses. A pandemic will send parents back to the doctor’s office for their kids’ vaccines. To avert disaster, we must take responsibility for being better informed as
citizens. And experts must defend themselves. They must make the case that experts are not the masters but the servants—the necessary and valuable servants—of real democracy.
Nichols is professor at the Naval War College and at the Harvard Extension School, as well as senior associate of the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs in New York City and a fellow of the International History Institute at Boston University. He is a contributing writer and has a regular newsletter “Peacefield” at
The Atlantic. He is on the USA Today Board of Contributors. Previously he was a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC and served on Senator John Heinz’s defense and security affairs staff. Nichols also is a five-time undefeated Jeopardy! champion who played in both the 1994 Tournament of Champions and the 2005 Ultimate Tournament of Champions.