This is not a book on apologetics. The only apologist you will find referenced is the general wisdom of C.S. Lewis. Still, this is a book that is going to be very helpful for apologists. This is a book that addresses many of the issues that we experience in the field.
Nichols is sounding an alarm that expertise is no longer being heeded. There are many factors that contribute to this. Some of us will be quick to say "The internet" and be partially right. The internet is not the sole contributor to this, though it definitely plays a part in all that we're seeing.
The first chapter is on the relationship of citizens and experts. Citizens no longer seem to care about what experts say. They will say one thing that experts were wrong on and then take some medicine for a headache that is the result of expert analysis. Our society has become one that rightly decries elitism, but then sees any idea that someone knows more than someone else on a subject as elitism. We are a society where all truth claims are to be treated as equal. Even worse, to disagree with a truth claim is to attack the person.
When the people do not heed the words of experts, every man becomes an island unto himself. Each person is in it for their own good. This also works with the narcissism of our age. We have become so individualistic, that it is tempting to think that we're the center of the story.
This gets us into how it is hard to converse today. The #1 response to a question today has become something along the lines of "Let me Google that for you." If we used this properly, it wouldn't be a bad thing. There's nothing wrong with using Google to look up a basic fact that isn't controversial, such as when did the Battle of Bunker Hill take place? Just recently I was at an event where a speaker said that Moses Maimonides was forced to do a debate by King James of Aragon I. Okay. Why not look that up? I quickly saw that Maimonides was dead before King James was even born. This is a proper use of Google if we do it right.
The improper use is thinking that the first website you come across is the one that you should listen to. There will be more on this later, but in this case, it becomes harder and harder to talk to people. Everyone thinks they're an expert because they can look something up on Google. Having my chief area of expertise be in the New Testament, I can say at this two words come to mind immediately. Jesus Mythicism. I still remember someone on a news page discussing a story telling me that scholars aren't even sure that Jesus existed. This was news to me seeing as I actually do read the scholars in the field and know that this is a minority position. When I was on the Atheist Analysis show, there was a lot of shock in the crowd when I said how few of scholars are mythicists. I was offered the number of 8% and said to go lower. 3 wasn't enough either. I think I said somewhere around .0001%.
Of course, the solution to this is to get an education. Well, maybe not. Sadly, our educational institutions are often just participating in groupthink. Many students today just walk away thinking what their professors think. In my study of the Bible and New Testament, both major schools I have personally attended, I have fundamentally disagreed with on some issues of NT interpretation. When some people would tell me I'm just arguing what my professors taught me, I would reply that in many cases, I disagreed with some central claims. That's okay.
Sadly, many colleges have become day care facilities with students being shown what is the most entertaining aspect of their stay. Too many students are going to go to college and just party and sleep around and think they're getting the college life. At my own Bible College where I graduated from, I have often gone back and talked with the professors who always thoroughly enjoy the reunion. One told me about seeing a student on campus during the summer and asked, "What are you reading now?" Reply? "Nothing." I find this stunning as the kids are seeing learning as the punishment and fun as the goal.
This is not to bash entertainment of course. We all must have some leisure times. You can often find my wife and I watching one of our recorded programs and when we do, it's not uncommon for me to have a Nintendo 2DS out at the same time. Gaming has always been a part of my life, but it's not the reason why I live either.
One example of what's going wrong on our campuses is the concept of safe places. We have seen lately colleges wanting to ban someone of a more conservative leaning and having to have places where their views are not challenged. What are they thinking? College is about challenging your views. You come there to learn, not just stay entrenched in your own opinion.
The result is someone could leave college without being educated but instead being indoctrinated. They will get their degree and never do any more reading or serious work. For my part, I find this bizarre. Even with the degree I have, I have never stopped looking into the field I study so much so that when I have scholars on my own show, it's quite easy to converse with them.
Well, what about the internet? Here we come to a real kicker. The problem with the internet is while it was meant to share our knowledge, more often, we are sharing our ignorance. Anyone can set up a website and be seen as an authority. We also now with self-publishing have it that anyone can get a book out there. Of course, there's good material out there (I happen to think my own website and Ebooks are good material), but one has to learn to discern. The problem is anyone with a website can look like an expert.
This is especially prevalent with conspiracy theories. I have already mentioned Jesus Mythicism as a conspiracy theory for atheists. You can find rumors about the Illuminati and about Reptilians and everything else online. The problem is that many people don't possess the basic tools to know how to analyze this information and see if it stands up or not.
With our narcissism, someone who can Google thinks they can disprove easily someone who reads the scholarly material. They end up thinking they're brilliant arguers when anyone who reads the material is just shaking their head in disbelief. Those who are ignorant are able to find others who are just as ignorant and join together and build up one another. Getting a lot of likes on their posts doesn't really help matters out.
Search engines will also tend to go where you have gone before as well. In other words, you get in an echo chamber. They use your past history of looking in order to determine sites that will be relevant to you. Rarely do people look and see if these are really authoritative sites. Think for instance of the people who often diagnose themselves entirely based on the internet and then argue with their doctor about it. Sure, the layman can be right sometimes, but all things being equal, go with the doctor.
Also, Nichols has a long section on Wikipedia. He points out that most Wikipedia editors are also male which limits our perspective. Wikipedia will have plenty of information on the Kardashians, but not information on political strife in some African countries for instance. It is a fine example of our compound ignorance coming together.
At least we have the press to set matters straight, or do we? The press is nowadays often just as gullible and part of the problem is we have so much information coming out at once that everyone is in a rush to be the first to get the news out. This means a lack of fact-checking. From my own perspective, I am a conservative in politics, but I have seen many conservative news sites royally butcher claims and many of them I consider just outright unreliable.
I have reached the point of letting my own family know when they send me something false, and in the past that often involved having to send out a group email. Many of our media outlets are doing the same kind of thing with sharing something just because it agrees with them. Fact-checking is not going on as much as it could be.
But alas, sometimes experts are wrong. What do we do then? A layman can indeed demonstrate an expert is wrong, but an expert being wrong once doesn't mean all expert opinion is to be denied. Experts are humans like everyone else and they will make mistakes. Fortunately, other experts will often be there to help point out those mistakes.
It's also necessary to point out that expertise in one area doesn't equal expertise in all. Richard Dawkins is a fine source I'm sure to quote on evolution. He is not fine on New Testament or philosophy. Gary Habermas is just fine on history, but he is not fine on discussing evolution.
In the end, Nichols's book is a call to return to learning. Hopefully it will be heeded as our society has more access to knowledge than ever before, but we are quite likely dumber than ever before. All the learning in the world doesn't matter if it is not approached properly. An attitude of humility would go a long way towards helping people learn.
In Christ,
Nick Peters
Deeper Waters Apologetics
Loading your book clubs
There was a problem loading your book clubs. Please try again.
Not in a club? Learn more
Join or create book clubs
Choose books together
Track your books
Bring your club to Amazon Book Clubs, start a new book club and invite your friends to join, or find a club that’s right for you for free.
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required. Learn more
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Flip to back Flip to front
Follow the Author
Something went wrong. Please try your request again later.
| Price | New from | Used from |
|
Audible Audiobook, Unabridged
"Please retry" |
$0.00
| Free with your Audible trial | |
|
Spiral-bound
"Please retry" | $24.55 | — |
|
Audio CD, CD, Unabridged
"Please retry" | $20.98 | — |
|
Pocket Book
"Please retry" | $7.95 | $2.36 |
Customers who viewed this item also viewed
Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1
Popular Highlights in this book
These are dangerous times. Never have so many people had so much access to so much knowledge and yet have been so resistant to learning anything.Highlighted by 2,027 Kindle readers- Knowing things is not the same as understanding them. Comprehension is not the same thing as analysis. Expertise is a not a parlor game played with factoids.Highlighted by 2,016 Kindle readers
- Principled, informed arguments are a sign of intellectual health and vitality in a democracy.Highlighted by 1,624 Kindle readers
About the author
Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.
A book on an important subject, that gets most everything wrong.
Reviewed in the United States on June 8, 2020
In 2017 Tom Nichols, a professor of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and Adjunct Professor at the Harvard Extension School, published The Death of Expertise with Oxford University Press. This book is a call to action, a warning that “everyone is drowning in data,” which is a problem because, as Nichols argues, citizens lack the capacity to separate good data from bad, to evaluate truth versus fiction, or to even understand the depths of their own ignorance (Nichols, 143). This is a problem, because it is “ignorant narcissism for laypeople to believe that they can maintain a large and advanced nation without listening to the voices of those who are more educated and experienced than themselves” (Nichols, 208). Thus, Nichols points to a collapse in expertise among those who hold university degrees, while highlighting the much bigger problem of the widespread denigration of experts among the public that may lead to a collapse of society. As an expert in history–I have a Ph.D. from the University of Tennessee–with more than 20 years of experience teaching, I agree with Nichols on his fears about the lack of respect for expertise in our the U.S., but I’m saddened by his inability to recognize how we got here.To start with, I’ve tried to separate my personal feelings from my analysis of this book. I was eager to read The Death of Expertise because of my personal encounters with those who don’t understand or value expertise. I’ve also watched the problem play out in the public sphere with a great deal of trepidation. However, as I read Nichols’ book, I found myself increasingly alarmed, irritated, and at times outright offended by his elitism, his refusal to approach his subject critically, and his unwillingness to follow his own advice about how to understand the world. I found myself having to step back and ask myself if I was reacting to his book out of my feelings of anger and being personally affronted, or if it was because of anything wrong with the book. After careful consideration, I decided it’s genuinely because this is a bad book. That’s unfortunate, because Nichols makes some good points, but these are drowned out by his poor use of evidence–in most cases his lack of evidence–and the biases he wears on his sleave.So why is this book problematic? The first two chapters are on “Experts and Citizens” and “How Conversation Becomes Exhausting,” which I often found myself nodding along to. However, as an expert at critical analysis–I’ve written dozens or hundreds of critical reviews of books both in class and for academic journals, not to mention my decades of training and experience applying this skill–I found myself with “a sense that something ‘isn’t right,'” which Nichols points to as a hallmark of someone who combines expertise with experience (Nichols, 33). That led me to pause and think about why, and it immediately became clear. In a section on the “Rise of the Low-Information Voter” Nichols discusses the wildly inflated estimates citizens make for how much foreign aid the U.S. government supplies to other nations (Nichols, 25-28). The problem is in his assertion that this is anything new. I agree with Nichols that specific mistaken beliefs such as this one about foreign aid is a real problem, but he doesn’t even make an effort to provide any evidence that the problem is new. In fact, this section follows another with the subheading, “So it’s Not New. Is it Even a Problem?” But the assertion that there has been a “rise” of the “low-information voter” is an empirical claim that can be tested, yet Nichols provides no evidence that voters in the 21st century know less about foreign aid than those in the mid 20th century or the 19th.This problem of making empirical assertions lacking any evidence runs throughout the book, and frequently lapses into the realm of outright insult. Chapter 3 is devoted to “Higher Education,” with the subheading “The Customer is Always Right.” This chapter takes a multi-pronged approach of attacking students for their laziness, ignorance, and feelings of self entitlement, attacking institutions of higher learning for becoming corrupted by market forces, and attacking faculty for lack of proper expertise. The short version of what Nichols argues in this chapter is that too many students now attend universities, which compete for these students by offering water slides and climbing walls rather than quality education, as well as pressuring faculty to give good grades for limited effort. The faculty themselves are often unprepared to provide a quality education anyway, lacking the expertise necessary to do so even if they wanted to, since so many “generic universities” as Nichols calls them crank out individuals with graduate degrees without the necessary resources (Nichols, 88-95). This chapter is a perfect example of what’s wrong with The Death of Expertise. Nichols supports his assertions with 21 footnotes, and of those only three are from peer-reviewed sources. The rest are a mish-mash of online newspapers, blog posts, and magazine articles. Even those questionable sources provide not a single iota of evidence that any of the issues Nichols points to is new. Do students today learn less than those of the 1960s or 1860s? Are faculty in Nichols’ so-called “generic universities” less good at their jobs than those of elite institutions? Does grade inflation, which is at least a documented issue, indicate that students today are learning less than those of the past?My gut-instinct about that last question is a sold maybe, but as a scholar, I know the problem of working from gut instinct, and Nichols doesn’t bother to even try to provide evidence to support the various claims he makes that any of the issues he sees with modern higher education are in any way new. As Roger L. Geiger explores in American Higher Education Since World War II, the implementation of the G.I. Bill after World War II brought a much higher percentage of men to college than the U.S. had ever seen before. Furthermore, those students were older, more career-oriented than generations past, and this influx had ripple effects as increasing numbers of students were drawn to college. However, in recent decades funding for higher education has been slashed in most states, not only causing students to take on more debt but also to be more likely to have to work part or full time in order to attend college. Thus, students today are more interested in how they will pay off the increasing amount of debt they incur in college, and how the education they’re obtaining will help them in their careers, than students prior to World War II were. But those students were drawn from a much smaller pool of relatively affluent individuals who were less concerned about their futures because many of them could fall back on family wealth. There were certainly fewer of those students who came to college in need of remedial education in math or writing, fewer still with learning disabilities or in need of mental health care, not to mention that minorities had far fewer chances for higher education during what Nichols clearly thinks of as the “good old days” of higher education.Nichols mentions none of those issues. Perhaps he doesn’t because in spite of stating that he comes from a working-class background, he has always either attended or taught at elite institutions, which might mean that he just doesn’t know what students at non-elite schools are like, or what it’s like to teach at one of the “generic universities” he mocks. I guess it’s easier to depend on caricature and cling to elitism than it is to do even the minimal research necessary to learn about schools that aren’t Harvard, the history of education, and any of a number of other points Nichols makes authoritative statements about.Nichols elitism and fondness for the good old days regularly gets in the way of his understanding of the problem he writes about. For example, in chapter 4, “Let me Google that For You,” he spends considerable time discussing the information about quack cures and misinformation found on the internet. Those are real problems, but Nichols again fails to acknowledge that people have always had a weakness for quackery. From the use of magical talismans in the middle ages to the tonics and elixirs of the 19th and 20th century (or today for that matter), quack treatments have always been big sellers, as detailed by historians such as Roy Porter whose Quacks: Fakers and Charlatans in Medicine could have disabused Nichols of the notion that the modern penchant to turn to questionable medical “treatments” is in any way new.However, it’s chapter 5 on “The ‘New’ New Journalism” where Nichols really trips over his own elitism. He regularly tosses around empirical statements with no support, such as “not only do people know less about the world around them, they are less interested in it,” meaning less than people of some undefined past period I presume, but Nichols doesn’t tell us who he’s comparing people today to, or what evidence there is that modern people are any more ignorant than those of some undefined past (Nichols, 137). Far worse, though is when he complains about celebrity news crowding out more important stories. As with much of this book, there is a kernel of truth in Nichols’ complaint that the past presence of expert gatekeepers who decided what counted as news “wasn’t entirely a bad thing” (Nichols, 141). However, his nostalgia for a period when “the public saw the world as it was viewed by the corporations who ran the networks” is eye-popping (Nichols, 141). Take the “me too” movement as only one example of an issue ignored by these corporations of the past. It wasn’t that powerful men weren’t committing sexual assault and harassment in the past, it was just that news organization prior to the late 20th and early 21st century ignored this problem. Or what about the issue of police brutality against African Americans? For most of American history, this issue was most often ignored or seen as no problem at all. Maybe Nichols doesn’t think about these things, though, because he’s not a historian– and it shows. It’s hard not to snort when he waxes nostalgic about the good old days of the news if one knows anything at all about the history of yellow journalism.None of this is meant to indicate that Nichols isn’t pointing to a real problem in America today. Too often both citizens and policy makers ignore or outright attack expertise, and this problem is demonstrably worse today than it was in the past. Nichols sometimes gets the reasons right, such as when he discusses the rise of people such as Rush Limbaugh or organizations such as Fox News. However, he completely ignores the larger problem of corporations actively funding propaganda against climate change and the experts who do scientific work in this field, religious organizations that attack science relating to gay rights or birth control and the experts who work on related topics, or the right-wing politicians who promote these forms of propaganda. That last point gets to the heart of why this book fails on so many different levels to live up to its promise. Nichols doesn’t want to discuss the role of conservatives who attack expertise. Whether this is because of his personal political convictions or because Oxford University Press doesn’t want to alienate those readers, this is a regrettable oversight. Given the large number of empirical claims that lack any evidentiary base, it’s even more regrettable that this book passed the muster of peer review, and that Oxford chose to publish it.
Reviewed in the United States on June 8, 2020
Images in this review
Top reviews from other countries
AndyH2O
A clear, easy to read discussion of how we have ended up with celebrity blog posts having greater traction than expert analysis
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 5, 2018
Tony
Useful, Important, Over-long
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 18, 2022A. Bruce
Good reading of the current state but..
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on October 21, 2019Giuseppe E. Bignardi
you need to read this book before using Google
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on October 14, 2018Michael Orren
The importance of science
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 25, 2017
