Is there a starting point to the decline of the expert?

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One of the reasons I’m interested in studying the interactions between experts and non-experts is my own perception that the respect we have for experts has declined, even over the 40 years of my own lifetime. There are many potential factors that have contributed to this decline, from the internecine fighting of postmodernism to the triumphant march of the market through the lifeworld, but today I’m interested in trying to find an approximate time to date this change.

Howard Markel has an interesting review of Golden Holocaust: Origins of the cigarette catastrophe and the case for abolition at the New Republic. The author of the book, Robert Proctor, shows how scientists began to connect tars and cancer as early as the 1930s, and that this evidence even led to a campaign to reduce tobacco consumption in Nazi Germany. By the 1950s solid medical evidence was being collected that showed a definitive connection between tobacco smoking and cancer. The Surgeon General of the United States issued a report on the dangers in 1964. Tobacco companies worked diligently to prevent any regulation or constraints on their business for the next 40 years. The executives of the companies were still denying any dangers from tobacco as recently as 1994!

The causes of this recalcitrance to accept any expert or scientific evidence about the dangers of tobacco is not too hard to explain: the tobacco companies had a major economic incentive to continue expanding their market and protecting themselves from regulation. To accomplish this purpose they brought as many lobbyists and experts as they could afford to spread misinformation and create doubt about the evidence that tobacco was a public health danger. The result of this will be 1,000,000,000 more deaths over the course of the coming century if current consumption trends continue without change.

I consider this as yet another piece of evidence that the decline of the expert goes back quite a ways. There seems to be a relative peak of scientific and technological triumph for experts between WW1 and the 1960s. After that point various challenges, political and intellectual, strip the expert of his influence. Whether this will ultimately be for our collective good or not remains to be seen.

Theory and practices of the soul

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I’ve been reading some Habermas the last few days and am particularly struck by the appendix of Knowledge and Human Interests. The appendix is called “Knowledge and Human Interests: A General Perspective.”

Habermas begins with the purpose of theory. The study of theory is directly connected to action because theory provides action with energy and ethical significance. The Greeks believed that the study of theory, which was the contemplation of the cosmos, brought the external and internal parts of the world together. Contemplating the cosmos allowed one to reproduce the order of the universe internally, within the self. So life itself becomes an expression of theory.

Husserl published “The Crisis of the European Sciences” in 1937 and argued that science was failing because it was ignoring its true theoretical calling. The connection between theory and life practice has been broken.

Thus, although the sciences share the concept of theory with the major traditions of philosophy, they destroy its classical claim. They borrow two elements from the philosophical heritage: the methodological meaning of the theoretical attitude and the basic ontological assumption of a structure of the world independent of the knower. On the other hand, however, they have abandoned the connection of theoria and kosmos, of mimesis and the bios theoretikos that was assumed from Plato through Husserl…The conception of theory as a process of cultivation of the person has become apocryphal.

Documenting another era in time

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I just watched Harvard Beats Yale 29-29, a documentary about the 1968 football Game between Harvard and Yale. The game is one of the more infamous comeback stories from college football, with Harvard tying the score in the final seconds. Yale was heavily favored to win, and led for most of the game but then everything fell apart. “It was as if some spirit came into the stadium and turned everything around,” says one of the players interviewed in the film.

I enjoyed the film, which is very nicely done, but watching it felt very strange, as though a moment in time had been captured in celluloid amber. I think most of this feeling is due to the brilliance of the director who only uses interview footage, a kinescope of the game, and a few still photographs for the entire visual experience of the film. It creates an insulated feel to the whole experience, just these old men talking about a time in their lives when they were part of sporting history. Some of them talk about their brushes with celebrity, such as dating Meryl Streep or George W. Bush being arrested for tearing down the goalposts after the Princeton game. Tommie Lee Jones is a film celebrity today and he roomed with Al Gore during his years at Harvard. But none of the men talk about themselves, or about the later events of their lives. The material is focused completely on the game. Side comments come out through the course of the film about the changes happening during the 1960s: birth control, the Vietnam war, the riots in Chicago, riots on campuses, and more. Another filmmaker might have chosen to illustrate these moments with archival footage or even still photographs, but Kevin Rafferty just lasers in on the game footage and the men remembering that time in their lives. It is really well done.

I sometimes wished for a larger focus but in the end I think I understand why Rafferty chose to tell his story with such focus on the Game. He wanted to show how memory makes some events significant to our own consciousnesses and other events sort of fade into the background. Significance is not always under our control.

Weekly List Bookmarks (weekly)

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Weekly List Bookmarks (weekly)

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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Weekly List Bookmarks (weekly)

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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Weekly List Bookmarks (weekly)

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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Weekly List Bookmarks (weekly)

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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Weekly List Bookmarks (weekly)

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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Weekly List Bookmarks (weekly)

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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.