Tom Nichols.
The Death of Expertise: the campaign against established knowledge and why it matters.
OUP. 2017
Technology and increasing levels of education expose people to more information than ever before.
These gains, however, also fuel a surge in narcissistic and misguided intellectual egalitarianism
that derails debates on numerous issues.
With only a quick trip through WebMD or Wikipedia,
average citizens believe themselves to be as informed as doctors and diplomats.
All voices demand to be taken with equal seriousness, and any claim to the contrary is dismissed as elitism.
The Death of Expertise shows how this rejection of experts developed:
the openness of the internet, the emergence of a customer satisfaction model in higher education,
and the transformation of the news industry into a 24-hour entertainment machine.
Paradoxically, greater democratic dissemination of information, rather than producing an educated public,
has instead created an army of ill-informed, angry citizens who denounce intellectual achievement.
Now updated with a new foreword that explains how all of these related issues came to a head in the wake of Donald Trump’s election.