How to Listen to the Real Experts

The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters by Tom Nichols, professor at the U.S. Naval War College and foreign policy analyst, available in various formats.

I try to keep politics off of this blog (but you can head over to Intentional Conservative or my personal Facebook page to read what I have to say on the current state of affairs). I will just explain here that I got acquainted with Tom Nichols when I first started reading about the upcoming election in the spring/summer of 2016. He showed up in this article on The Federalist Blog (which is not the same as The Federalist Society, btw). Wow, I thought, What clarity, and what courage. I’ve been following him ever since. He suspended his blog about a year ago and he writes very few articles these days, but man! Whenever he does so I am so on it. I also periodically go onto his Twitter account when I feel the need for a blast of fresh air and common sense. He’s one of those people who gets attacked from all sides, so he must be doing something right—right?

Anyway, he has this book out, and I can’t encourage you enough to read it. Whether he’s lambasting Gwyneth Paltrow for her absurd, ridiculous, sometimes downright dangerous “health” advice, or excoriating higher education for its new “the customer is always right” emergent philosophy, or performing an autopsy on our collective political mind, he’s just spot on as far as I’m concerned. You can get somewhat depressed when reading material such as this, but in the end you should come away feeling armed to get back into the fight yourself. We are being inundated with false information, and while lots of it is coming from the internet the problem really is our own lack of critical, logical thinking. When everyone is an expert, then no one is.

You will recognize some of the issues Nichols raises, such as the whole craziness around the anti-vaccination movement, but don’t let that stop you from reading the whole book. (Although I will say that if your time is really limited his introduction alone is worth the price.) You get the image of a man goaded into action by equal parts frustration about his fellow Americans and love for the country of America. We have something so very valuable, so rare in our free and open society, and yet we take it for granted and squander it instead of doing everything we can to preserve it.

I won’t try to summarize Nichols’ arguments but will instead urge you, strongly and insistently, to read his own words. Then, if you haven’t done so already, you should read Jonah Goldberg’s new book Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy that I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. Man, if everyone would just thoroughly internalize these two great offerings by two of the great conservative thinkers of our day (although Goldberg and Nichols disagree on a number of political/strategic points), we’d all be much better off.

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