Grasping the World

The world seems to be too grand for any one mind to grasp. We have all kinds of experts, but they are just that: experts; they have special knowledge in a particular subject. No one could possibly be an expert in everything. So it's no surprise that problems are constantly popping in the world.

So we have people who have studied different things thinking about the world. Maybe one has studied ethics, another economics, the next one political theory, and the last one educational psychology. Is the case that the world must be run through each of them sticking to the issues pertinent to their studies? What if their are issues that cross disciplinary boundaries? Do we then just shove the four experts into a room and keep the door locked until they've come to a consensus? Let's say this is the case. Let's say they do come up with the right answer. That would then imply that everyone else should follow their recommendations. This world would be a technocracy. It would be a world where the masses are dependent on the elite of technical knowledge. We better hope our elite really are right then.

I struggle with figuring out what is worth knowing. On the one hand I see a world of practical challenges: creating and distributing food, information, entertainment, consumer goods, medicines. On the other hand I feel that humans can live in a fundamentally better way; that if we only took the time to really think about it we would decide and then move forward in changing the way we live our lives. But how far can the deepest of thinking take us? How different can things really be? Labor still has to be spent on the practical challenges. I cannot imagine the need for this ever going away. Furthermore, isn't a huge component of the good life in figuring out the best way of meeting life's practical challenges? So then what the heck does research into the philosophy of economics matter? (This is something I've been really wanting to study, by the way). I suppose those experts help the economics experts be better economics experts. I suppose the philosophy of economics experts devote a bunch of time to the philosophical issues of economics and then pass on the most significant discoveries to the economics experts. It's like research and development: A bunch of basic research gets done, but then only a small percentage of it leads to the development of something useful. That's just the way it has to be. It's a rational and progressive procedure.

But as individuals we need to know how to act optimally. This means we need a lot of information. But we can't delve deeply into everything. Further, if we seek out the expert opinion on all the issues we'll discover that the answers are not clear cut. Or are they? Most likely we're looking at a spectrum from expert consensus to significant disagreement. But let's make this concrete by thinking of specific examples. Economists? They disagree. Doctors? Less so. Pollution experts? I don't know what the heck they think; they've never communicated it to me. Ethicists? They don't get much media time either--though I doubt they have anything near a consensus. Psychiatrists? They definitely disagree; and again, we don't hear much from them unless we have a serious mental problem and seek their help (or if we watch Dr. Phil). So what I'm getting at is that most experts don't communicate much with the masses. So we're really on are own with a bunch of things we know little about. So either the experts need to step it up with the communication or we the masses need to step it up with our knowledge . . . or perhaps we need a mixture of both.

Indeed I believe the answer is the mixture of both, but this still leaves significant questions about desirability of a technocratic, specialized world. Due to the grandness of these questions, I cannot delve deeply into them here. Instead I'll leave it as an open issue to ponder over and continue on to a different matter: the role of this very blog and other media like it. I'm not an expert, yet my words are being read. My readers are learning something. Yet, what is that something if I have no real expert knowledge? I'm just a dude who thinks about things. There are lots like me out there. Some are less well read, some more so. And there are those who do this on a larger stage, such as Rachel Maddow and Bill O'Reilly. Why does anyone care what we think? We're just one perspective; a single learning process making sense of things. But if we're not experts on anything, what points of significance can we possibly make? Theoretically, for any possible topic there should be an expert available to provide a better judgment. So right now it would be better for you to be reading the work of the expert on experts. There should be a few sociologists out there who specialize in precisely this. But I guess it wouldn't be as entertaining to read a blog that's always on the same topic. But again, I will emphasize that point that experts on experts don't communicate much with the masses. So it seems that with all these cases we need intermediaries to facilitate that process. Perhaps this is what my role ought to be.