A 21st Century Priesthood

Frank Furedi has a very perceptive piece in The Australian, examining the role of experts. For Furedi, the problem is not the role of expertise or its dominant role in addressing technical problems. It is instead the politicization of expertise or the privileging of a particular type of knowledge and of individual over all others.

Key quote

The exhortation to defer to experts is underpinned by the premise that their specialist knowledge entitles them to a higher moral status to the rest of us. For example, Ken Macdonald, former director of public prosecutions in Britain, pushed for the right to use expert witnesses to help boost the low conviction rate in rape trials. Former Home Office minister Joan Ryan, a junior Home Office minister at the time, backed him, arguing that expert evidence in court could "address myths about rape and its victims". The assumption seems to be that ordinary jurors lack the intelligence to grasp how rapists and their victims behave, which is why courts need the expert psychologist to put them right.

In previous times, pronouncement about who was evil or who had sinned was the prerogative of the priest. With the end of deference to the church such mystical powers have become associated with the authority of the professional expert witness. The call for ordinary jurors to ignore their intuition and subjugate themselves to the superior insight of the expert is seldom characterised as what it really is, a new form of non-traditional deference. According to this perspective, the prejudices and myths of ordinary jurors need to be overcome through the intervention of the enlightened views of the expert.

It is necessary to state at the outset that any civilised 21st-century society is likely to take expertise seriously. The efficient functioning of such a society depends, to a significant extent, on the quality of contribution made by its experts. Anyone who is ill or confronted with a technical problem will turn to an expert.

The problem is not the status of the expert but its politicisation. All too often experts do not confine their involvement in public discussion to the provision of advice. Many insist that their expertise entitles them to have the last word on policy deliberation. Recent studies indicate that in public debates those whose views run counter to the sentiments of scientific experts find it difficult to voice their beliefs.

Interestingly, I have just finished reading Terry Eagleton's Faith, Reason and Revolution, which looks at the complex interplay between secularism and faith. It is impossible to to his argument justice in a short blog post, but his work certainly suggests that far from overturning the power of an established priesthood we have in so many ways merely replaced it with another.