Friday, March 28, 2008
More on experts. Wandering through the archive here, I notice that the problem of expertise has been on my mind much longer than I thought. Here is a 3/25/05 entry, near the end:
. . . See, for example, the anecdote about Albert Camus criticizing the Pope about the Holocaust, recounted in a recent Counterpunch article on torture by Andrew Wimmer and Mark Chmiel:
A few years after the end of World War II, the French writer Albert Camus met with a group of French Dominican priests. In the course of their dialogue about the still unnamed Holocaust that had taken place in Europe, Camus was troubled that the Pope had not really addressed what had happened to the Jews. Camus acknowledged that some people said the Pope did speak out, but, Camus claimed "it was in the language of the encyclicals." That is to say, dense, dry, without passion.
I don't quibble with that last sentence, but another way of looking at the story is to guess that the genres of expertise always risk being at a remove from the urgency of the world, or perhaps from speaking in the way (the genre) that will reach those who need to hear and think and provide them with materials they can work with. Encyclicals have sometimes changed the world of Catholicism, for example, but the genre moves people differently than other genres do.
They are a perfect example of the problem of expertise, aren't they, since they are written in Latin and therefore every word asserts an allegiance to tradition bound up in the control of experts. They have to be translated to reach the rest of us.
If that final bit is correct about translation, then the language styles of experts pretty much guarantee that they retain control of information and its use. So even when we practice our fields with the best of intentions and pay allegiance to the most neutral and objective methods we know, the reins of power are within our grasp.
If that's right, then our objectivity, precious as it is, is porbably corrupted by the circumstance in which we practice it. No wonder some doubt, some mistrust, some hate academics. [0 & P]
. . . See, for example, the anecdote about Albert Camus criticizing the Pope about the Holocaust, recounted in a recent Counterpunch article on torture by Andrew Wimmer and Mark Chmiel:
A few years after the end of World War II, the French writer Albert Camus met with a group of French Dominican priests. In the course of their dialogue about the still unnamed Holocaust that had taken place in Europe, Camus was troubled that the Pope had not really addressed what had happened to the Jews. Camus acknowledged that some people said the Pope did speak out, but, Camus claimed "it was in the language of the encyclicals." That is to say, dense, dry, without passion.
I don't quibble with that last sentence, but another way of looking at the story is to guess that the genres of expertise always risk being at a remove from the urgency of the world, or perhaps from speaking in the way (the genre) that will reach those who need to hear and think and provide them with materials they can work with. Encyclicals have sometimes changed the world of Catholicism, for example, but the genre moves people differently than other genres do.
They are a perfect example of the problem of expertise, aren't they, since they are written in Latin and therefore every word asserts an allegiance to tradition bound up in the control of experts. They have to be translated to reach the rest of us.
If that final bit is correct about translation, then the language styles of experts pretty much guarantee that they retain control of information and its use. So even when we practice our fields with the best of intentions and pay allegiance to the most neutral and objective methods we know, the reins of power are within our grasp.
If that's right, then our objectivity, precious as it is, is porbably corrupted by the circumstance in which we practice it. No wonder some doubt, some mistrust, some hate academics. [0 & P]
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