In today’s therapeutic culture, which seems designed to validate every opinion and feeling, there will rarely be disagreement without anger between thin-skinned people who cannot distinguish the phrase “you’re wrong” from “you’re stupid.” Equating “critical thinking” with “relentless criticism” results in worse than the indiscriminate rejection not merely of this or that expert. Nichols says this equation produces “a Google-fueled, Wikipedia-based, blog-sodden” disdain for even the ideal of expertise. This ideal becomes an affront in a culture that “cannot endure even the slightest hint of inequality of any kind.” Unfortunately, Nichols tartly notes, “specialization is necessarily exclusive.”
And aren’t we glad: “When you take an elevator to the top of a tall building, the certificate in the elevator does not say ‘good luck up there’; it says that a civic authority, relying on engineers educated and examined by other engineers, have looked at that box and know, with as much certainty as anyone can, that you’ll be safe.”
The “spreading epidemic of misinformation,” nowadays known as “alternative facts,” gives rise to a corollary to Gresham’s Law (“bad money drives out good”): “Misinformation pushes aside knowledge.” Everyone with a smartphone has in his or her pocket, Nichols says, more information “than ever existed in the entire Library of Alexandria,” which can produce a self-deluding veneer of erudition.
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