Liner Note 8. Bonfire of the Knowledges (Part 3): Expert and Everyday Thinking during Trump

River Thames, London on December 24, 2015

U.S. culture has always been friendly to attacks on education as elitist.  

This hostility to education and to the educated was temporarily dampened by the economy after World War II. US dominance of world manufacturing meant that non-college people could find good and growing wages. The booming "technostructure" of white collar jobs rewarded college degrees with good and growing salaries. 

College was a ticket to the good life so it was hard for politicians to attack it. Republicans were partially disarmed because college grads voted Republican.   Meanwhile, non-college whites could also get into the middle class with a factory job, so resentment of college’s wage premium was harder to stoke.  

That anomalous period has been over for decades. Reaganism and then Clintonism imposed anti-egalitarian economic policies that withdrew affluence from the working classes—right as the white supermajority began to fade.  On their side, university managers oversold and in fact mis-sold learning as earning. 

Today, with college wages not assured even in exchange for high tuition and student debt, human capital theory reads as a long con on working people. Republicans have long redefined expertise—and university-style analysis and critique—as attacks on heartland values and equally on the entrepreneurial will, the sole source of progress and national wealth.

It’s not surprising that knowledge hatred is in full flower. It is driven by and supports the sultanistic oligarchy that Trump, Musk, Thiel, Andreessen, et al. are seeking to establish.  

Whether the subject is cryptocurrency, “AI,” decarbonization, taxes, or immigration, we regularly see a defiant refusal to think things through. This is in part in emulation of Trump himself.  He flamboyantly disdains the analytical part, jumps on the conclusion he wants, and then forces it to be the situation’s truth.  He talked nonsense all the way to the White House, twice.

Pride in thinking badly creates disasters large and small. One example comes from reporting by Eli Saslow and Erin Schaff about a Mexican-American named Jaime Cachua in Rome, Georgia.

He sat at his kitchen table in rural Georgia across from his father-in-law, Sky Atkins, the family patriarch. Jaime, 33, hadn’t seen his own father since he was 10 months old, when he left Mexico in a car seat bound for the United States. It was Sky, 45, who had stood by Jaime at his wedding, helped him move into his first house and stayed at the hospital overnight when one of Jaime’s children was sick with pneumonia.

“There’s nothing to stop them from rounding me up once he takes office,” Jaime said.

Sky had spent much of his adulthood preparing to protect his family in a crisis. He’d learned survival tactics in the Army and had trained in hand-to-hand combat as a Georgia corrections officer. In the last few years, as he sensed the country becoming more polarized and volatile, he’d built up a small collection of firearms and a cache of emergency supplies. He’d been anticipating a moment when the government might rise up against his family, but this particular crisis was one he’d helped to create.

“I’m going to be straight with you,” he told Jaime. “I voted for Trump. I believe in a lot of what he says.”

“I figured as much,” Jaime said. “You and just about everyone else around here.”

“It’s about protecting our rights as a sovereign country,” Sky said. “We need to shut down the infiltration on the border. It’s not about you.”

“It is about me,” Jaime said. “That’s the thing I don’t understand.”

Sky Atkins filled his brain with Trump's fake knowledge about liberals and the border and voted to deport his own son-in-law.  

I’ve cited Masha Gessen  de facto tag line for this set of posts, “Rejection of genuine expertise is both a precondition and a function of autocracy.” This rejection needs to be fought. It is damaging societies everywhere, very much including the United States.

However, this injunction to prevent the rejection of expertise stumbles on the many problems with expertise itself.  Expertise generated the forty-years war on race-based affirmative action. Expertise installed neoliberalism as a fact of economic nature.  Expertise helped create the political paralysis in most wealthy countries with its constitutive suspicion of popular intelligence and public demands.

I too have critiqued expertise at length—critiqued specific, dominant, incredibly powerful uses of expertise. Unmaking the Public University took on the war on affirmative action. This piece critiqued the professional war on equality. A chapter in The Limits of the Numerical attacked the Clintonite (and Obaman) use of economic modeling to undermine the non-college working class. Another chapter in that volume (with Aashish Mehta) explored expert quantification’s suppression of the non-pecuniary benefits of education that aim at intellectual capability for the whole population.  All the chapters in the collectively-authored Metrics that Matter critique the expert metrics (wages by major, selectivity) that the experts have used to miseducate the public about the benefits of education.  I’m unambivalently pro-university as such, pro-expertise as such, pro-thinking even when J.D. Vance is doing it, and yet my god the labor required to distinguish between good and bad modes of expertise.  At some point it starts to feel like protesting too much and washing blood off one’s hands.

So, yes, many forms of expertise have weakened society and wrongly helped disempower the wider population.  I’m sure Gessen would agree that the expertise we defend is an expertise we also rebuild. (See their piece on the battle between Supreme Court legal vs. medical expertise on healthcare for transgender people.) Expertise is often its own worst enemy, especially when it is an enemy of exactly the everyday standpoint knowledge on which our so-called democracy actually depends. 

Another example of the problem appears in an essay of Roderick Ferguson’s earlier this year.  It the course of a discussion of the State of Florida’s attack on the teaching of race and race in history, he invokes an essay on intellectuals by Edward Said: 

Said pointed to how professionalism pulls back the self at the very moment that it should be launched into critical thinking and ethical commitments. Professionalism is how we habituate ourselves to lines of thought that are organized to protect the status quo. It fosters a notion of responsibility that fixes people’s gaze on profession[alism] and its criteria for good behavior. Presuming its job is to deliver people to the mainstream, professionalism rarely brings them to alternative destinations, ones that try to achieve something other than the given order. As a result, professionalism promotes notions of responsibility that are antithetical to the forms of responsibility that Harding discussed and that are presumed in ancestral sources. Indeed, as professionalism lures people—especially minoritized individuals—from more critical routes, it reveals itself to be a terrain ripe for ethical, intellectual, political, and existential crises.

 Ferguson’s title is, “An Interruption of Our Cowardice,” and that is indeed the thing that experts must now seek.

My basic view is that the U.S. needs a revolution in its knowledge culture, from anti-knowledge to systematically pro. This must be a popular revolution in the sense that it transforms a key institution of knowledge –the university—while preserving and redirecting its resources, its base knowledges, its intensities, its collaborations, its spaces of actual thinking, bringing the full public into contact with these and learning much better than it currently does from that public. 

This talk of “actual thinking” is awkward in the liberal arts, since we are all constructivists now.  Who are we to say J.D Vance is anti-knowledge? He's a Yale law grad and he's pro knowledge-- pro his knowledge and Trump's knowledge.  If we can't wave around a simple picture of anti-knowledge how can we say he's part of a "rejection of genuine expertise"?

Well, in Vance's case we can wave around a picture of him refusing to admit that Joe Biden was elected president in 2020.  The same goes for Trump times 10,000. Also the broligarchs, et al. that surround them.  The more complicated cases of anti-knowledge knowledge just take more work to expose and replace.

Everyday people—“non-college” as we now call them—do serious thinking routinely: child care, car repair, shop-floor process flow, delivery routes, gardening, a friend’s alcoholism, you name it, serious thinking takes place or happiness and survival don't occur.

Take Sky Atkins' not linking Trump's deportation rhetoric to the deportation of his Dreamer son-in-law.  

In reality, Atkins is perfectly capable of enacting "genuine expertise.” He did this with his martial training. He can think, ok, my family member Jaime is undocumented and then study up on what to do. He can read official government documents about Jamie's legal limbo. He can read expert commentary on current Dreamer legal issues rather than rely on podcast, Facebook, and TV sources. He can steep himself in the details of the immigration process that Jaime has already undertaken and help him strategize about it.  He can think through the likely effects on Jamie of a Trump win. He can come to a judgment about likely Trump effects by weighing pros and cons.  

Atkins might ponder deeply and then decide that were America rid of 10 million undocumented people and his son-in-law is gone with them, then so be it. 

Or he might support mass deportation but assume that it will never affect Jaime—as he seems to do. But he can and should test such conclusions with friends and family, and take on board negative feedback. 

He can take this feedback or do further reading and rethinking and then plausibly and logically conclude that though he believes in “a lot of what Trump says,” he really shouldn’t actually vote for Trump. He could also tell his friends why he won’t vote Trump and why they shouldn’t either.

  

This general process is easy enough to explain to anyone.  It means investigating a claim to see if it holds up or not.  

The process isn’t peculiar to software engineering or literary criticism, but is part of everyone’s everyday life. Are eggs really cheaper at that other store today?  This needs looking into. People have procedures for doing that. Show me the mother who is not some kind of expert on comparative pricing. 

Note that thinking doesn’t deny or purge emotions (“The Democrats couldn’t care less when I can’t afford eggs”) but works with emotions and works them through. This should mean, in voting, studying enough in this field of interest, food prices, to create a few more sentences in one's head (“my town used to have 12 groceries stores and now they’re 8.  And they all seem to be owned by 2 or 3 chains”). 

Professional intellectuals have the same obligation to think, and we are as good at skipping thought as any other group. This skipped thinking gets into public discourse that pisses off tens of millions of people because they know it’s wrong.  

Exhibit A this year was “inflation is under control.” This came from price statistics whose model has flaws and which is also detached from the kind of standpoint experience that made voters not believe it.  We know how this worked out. 

Again, it takes work to understand things. Organized expertise offers short cuts, because you can figure things out faster and more accurately if you know the subject, the methods, the other people who know similar things, and previous successful solutions. This applies whether you’re in high energy physics or bulk food purchasing. 

Expertise is the result of labor, not of elite status. This needs to be pointed out all day long, especially during an administration that will be hostile both to labor as such and to labor that generates inconvenient truths.

For me the key is the collective stance toward knowledge coupled with the ethos of knowledge that the collective stance accrues.  Having a pro-knowledge stance is the life-and-death difference between pretty good knowledge and knowledge that gets a lot of people harmed or killed.  

Creating this stance and its rebuilt institutions is something that professionals and non-college people will have to do together.  We need each other to do this right.