Lessons for Studying History: Life is More Than the So-Called Experts

There are those days when I discover that a true wise person agrees with me--or, rather, I wrote something that agrees with ideas that a  truly wise person has been tackling for years--and I feel like a hundred bucks!

In my fourth Daughter of Time post, I wrote the following:

Whenever I'm sitting in a meeting where people start throwing their pet experts at each other to support their pet political positions, I think of Tey. "My expert is really smart," one political advocate yells at the other, "and everybody agrees with my expert--even the press says so--see these selective news reports that I got from my favorite radio or television pundit--and if don't believe me, the world will fall apart tomorrow--I'm the ultimate Chicken Little, and the sky is falling. Listen to me!!"

I am currently reading Thomas Sowell's Intellectuals and Society. In Chapter 2, he addresses this problem of experts, specifically the difference between special knowledge (held by experts) and mundane knowledge. His ultimate point (I am heavily paraphrasing) is that more people have mundane knowledge--on the ground, day-to-day, eyeball-to-eyeball information--than people have special knowledge.

Thomas Sowell argues that people in general know more (as a society) than experts or people with special knowledge, which is why democracy and capitalism are still better systems than tyranny and socialism, despite the prior systems' flaws. The business man in the local neighborhood is going to make a better decision about his needs than the intellectual experts sitting in Washington.

Sowell goes on to criticize so-called experts who stray out of their specialized areas and those who use their special knowledge to justify already determined political decisions (rather than to honestly critique them). These so-called experts often believe that lots of special knowledge (central planning) will give a society a clearer road than finding out what is going on in people's actual lives:

"Many major economic decisions are likewise crucially dependent on the kind of mundane knowledge that intellectuals might disdain to consider to be knowledge in the sense that they habitually use the word" (13). 

("Argue" and "criticize" are the wrong terms, by the way. Thomas Sowell's critique is utterly devastating; it is accomplished entirely by the writing equivalent of hushed tones. This is not an angry guy.)

Here's where I decided that I will love Thomas Sowell forever:

"The idea that what [intellectuals] don't know isn't knowledge may also be a factor in many references to 'earlier and simpler times' by people who have made no detailed study of those times, and who are unlikely even to suspect that it is their knowledge of the complexities of those times that is lacking, not the complexities themselves." 

In Daughter of Time, Detective Grant rejects More's superficial narrative of evil Richard III, despite More being (1) an intellectual; (2) the considered expert on Richard III. Grant's objection is that More was operating on hearsay (Grant is right--as a policeman with mundane knowledge about his job, he knows what he is talking about).

Sowell's additional reasons to be wary of intellectual "experts" also applies. Thomas More may have been smart. And principled. And big on utopias. And an okay writer. That didn't make him smart about politics. Or history. Or anything outside his narrow purview. Just because he could delineate complexities in one area didn't mean he could even comprehend them in another.

Especially since he was probably using his smarts to satisfy his Tudor masters. Oh, sure, no conflict of interest there!