“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” – W.B. Yeats
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about uncertainty. I’m uncertain how much. I’ve thought about it so much my mind sometimes gets twisted in knots. Like the King in the famous musical, “In my head are many facts, that, as a student, I have studied to procure. In my head are many facts, of which I wish I was more certain I was sure.”
One thing I learned on the way to earning a doctorate was an appreciation for how much I didn’t and couldn’t ever know. To me, libraries have become like sacred places, treasure troves on the order of Pharos’ tombs, made of books instead of stone, containing facts and fictions, wisdom and opinions, most of which it would be impossible for any one man to know, much less understand. I used to tell my classes I believed we should kneel and say a prayer of thanks whenever we enter a library. Not for the building or those who administer it, although they deserve our respect, but for all the authors who cared enough to share a piece of their minds with us.
Generally, people who read a lot are thoughtful and at least somewhat circumspect. They know what they know and more importantly, what they don’t. However, this understanding tends to make them doubt themselves. While Mark Twain’s 1895 aphorism, “The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them,” makes sense, it seems to me having a lot of knowledge – book learnin’ – may put a person at a disadvantage in our time.
We live in an era in which many people think their knowledge, gleaned from YouTube videos and Facebook posts, is as good as the expertise of those with earned PhD’s and solid reputations in writing and research. Anyone can assert that they know as much as a lawyer, doctor, or scientist, or at least have as much “right” to their opinion. Some have called this phenomenon, “the death of expertise,” for good reason. All one must do is gather a few cherry-picked “facts,” put together a plausible theory, and they can “prove” a conspiracy. And if anyone challenges their evidence or their reasoning, well, that’s just further “proof.”
Those with earned PhDs and other advanced degrees must feel a little cheated. If only they had known it was a waste of time to spend all those years in school, post-doctoral research, fieldwork, and fellowships. If only they had known all they had to do was spend a few hours on YouTube watching unsourced videos and they too would become an expert. If only they had known YouTube “research” was just as good as any graduate school, university library, or lab, they could have skipped all the tedium and stress and simply recorded their opinion on an iPhone.
Experts with hard-earned credentials and solid reputations have seen their work mangled by the press, attacked by politicians, and critiqued by pundits. Celebrities have claimed to know as much as those who have spent a lifetime studying the field. And billionaires can easily buy any opinion that suits them, no matter how much of an outlier or conman the “expert” might be.
In a world where “my opinion is as good as anyone else’s,” expertise is rapidly losing its value. All the more so, because the misinformed and the uninformed tend to shout louder than the informed, but self-reflective. Pundits often confidently exude smug indignation over incomplete information, quotes taken out-of-context, or small errors in the data – “Gotcha!” The big picture is often hard to comprehend, because there is so much to know, and experts spend a lifetime attempting to understand it. Yet, in the words of one pundit, any armchair expert can “drive by” the issue, take some cheap shots, and move on, leaving the real expert to deal with the assault on their reputation over a bit of science their detractor did not even understand, much less articulate accurately.
So, we live in the world of Yeats. The “passionate intensity” of those who believe they know “the real story” seems to trump the “lack of conviction” of those who offer tentative answers – not because they aren’t passionate, but because they have learned that the search for truth requires us to take a long road, full of unexpected twists and turns. And that kind of search, my friends, demands the best we have to offer.
MurrayWorks 