Gideon Rose wrote a great post for the blog at the Economist, in which he criticized progressive bloggers for their constant criticism of (attacks towards) experts – whether those experts be Middle East experts, Social Security or Military experts.
Matt Yglesias responded to Gideon’s post, and makes some good points, but I find Gideon to be the more convincing of the two; especially because I speak out of personal experience. Let me, therefore, quote from Gideon’s article first:
The lefty blogosphere, meanwhile, has gotten itself all in a tizzy over the failings of the “foreign policy community.” The funny thing is…hell, I’ll just come out and say it: the netroots’ attitude toward professionals isn’t that different from the neocons’, both being convinced that the very concept of a foreign-policy clerisy is unjustified, anti-democratic and pernicious, and that the remedy is much tighter and more direct control by the principals over their supposed professional agents.
The charges the bloggers are making now are very similar to those that the neocons made a few years ago: mainstream foreign-policy experts are politicised careerists, biased hacks, and hide-bound traditionalists who have gotten everything wrong in the past and don’t deserve to be listened to in the future. (Take a look at pretty much any old Jim Hoagland column and you’ll see what I mean.) Back then, the neocons directed their fire primarily at the national security bureaucracies—freedom-hating mediocrities at the CIA, pin-striped wussies at the State Department, cowardly soldiers at the Pentagon. Now the bloggers’ attacks are generally aimed at the think-tank world.
He then links to and quotes from this post by Matt Yglesias in which Matt basically argues that all people working for think tanks are politicians – and if not know they will be so in the future: in other words partisan ideologues, not experts. Gideon:
This is the kind of thing that sounds smart and brave but actually isn’t. First, many of the people in the various national security bureaucracies are indeed Humphreys, and deserve to have their every move and utterance treated with great skepticism. Second, many of the people at Brookings or CSIS or other top think-tanks are fully as noble, disinterested, serious-minded, and knowledgeable as the best people inside the system, and the notion that they’re not is just cheap cynicism. Third, the idea that there is some Chinese wall separating the professionals inside the system from those outside it is just silly: the higher ranks of the bureaucracies are filled with political appointees, many outside experts have extensive experience inside the system, and the good people in all places tend to know and respect each other.
Gideon’s response:
Bottom line, there just isn’t a good clean answer to the question of how much deference foreign-policy professionals should get from other citizens in a democracy. The populist answer “none” might be appropriate in terms of democratic theory, but it would yield pretty crappy policies in practice. But obviously something like a Federal Reserve for foreign policy would also be absurd, given how nebulous, limited and fallible “professionalism” in this area actually is. Jefferson told us to pay a “due respect to the opinions of mankind”—that seems about right for people with specialized knowledge and experience in the policy arena as well.
As for me, I too think that those who criticize experts often have a point. I do believe that one needs not to have a master’s degree in any given subject in order to know (much) about it. In the end, and this is something we all need to remember, university is not so much about giving the student a lot of knowledge (which is part of if of course), as it is about teaching a student how to think (as in what processes, how to think logically, how to argue, etc). To me, I consider someone who has lived in any given area for 15 years, who thought things through, but who does not have a master’s degree in a study about that region, to be an expert about it – or at least not less of an expert than someone who lives in a completely different part of the world but who did study the area and its people through books and articles.
Now, the ‘real’ experts – of course – are both: they have both lived in a certain area and have studied it. These people are something like superexperts. These are the people who have the most knowledge and to whom we should listen carefully. However, we should always remember that they too can be wrong. Quite often, experts disagree with each other. It is then up to politicians to listen to both sides of the debate and, then, to decide what to do. It is not the responsibility of experts to decide what policies to implement, but to convince politicians that they are ‘right.’
As such, one could say that the best politician is the person who listens best to experts and who more often than not makes the right decisions based on the opinions of experts.
Of course, John Doe who really is not an expert at all, can weigh in, but John Doe’s opinion should not be sacred. This is, actually, one of the downsides of democracy: suddenly, the opinion of John Doe is declared holy. John Doe often does not know what he talks about, and the masses are John Does. This means, in short, that politicians should not listen to John Doe about what to do.
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