A Nation of Experts
By Duff McDonald
Earlier this year, a week before my wife and I held our annual summer solstice party at our house in upstate New York, disaster struck. Rather, it struck in several stages. First, the dishwasher started overflowing. Then, the upstairs shower started leaking and water was coming through the kitchen ceiling. Finally, the toilets wouldn’t flush. Clearly, we had problems.
At first, I took each disaster as a separate occurrence. The dishwasher is old, so I checked the drainage hose. We caulked around the edges of the shower. And when the toilets wouldn’t flush, we plunged them until they did. It wasn’t until all three were happening at once that I finally realized that we had a septic tank issue. At that point, it was clear what I needed to do: I called my friend Billy.
Billy calls himself a contractor, but he’s actually a magician. Give him a problem, and he conjures a solution. At first, we figured the septic tank might just need pumping out, so he called a guy he knew who owns a septic company. The only problem was that I had no idea where the septic tank was. I’ve lived in my house since 2014, and, until last year, I had mistakenly thought we were on a sewer line. (We don’t need to dwell on why that was so; suffice it to say that I was wrong.) The point being, I hadn’t had the tank pumped out in seven years.
I called the previous owner of my house. She’d lived here for almost a decade. But she hadn’t pumped it out, either. The tank hadn’t been pumped out in almost twenty years. Where was all that…crap…going? But that wasn’t our most pressing problem: We still didn’t even know where it was. The septic guys, after looking for a few hours, threw in the towel and left. Billy then decided that we should dig out beside the house and follow the pipe.
After a few hours with a backhoe that he managed to get his hands on, we discovered that the tank wasn’t even close to the house but across the street, down the hill and in the woods. It also turned out that one junction on the route the pipe took to that tank had been rusted away for years. Where all that sewage was going, God only knows. I was more concerned about the party. We couldn’t invite 50 people over without a working septic tank. We couldn’t even stay there ourselves.
But I should get to the point: When we realized that the solution was that we needed to install new pipes to the septic tank, Billy, who can do almost anything, snapped into gear and was off buying new PVC pipes before I even knew he’d left the property. He and his buddy Chris, another man who knows his way around a Sawzall, had everything fixed by the end of the day. Everything was going to be okay. We could use the toilets again! Hallelujah.
Billy is a specialist. He does things. You come to him with your problem, he figures out what needs to be done, and he does it. He’s the kind of guy you want to have around when you find yourself in a crisis.
As a nation, we are in the grip of one of the most destabilizing crises that this country has ever known. Covid has so unsettled people that we’ve become petrified of our own shadows. Not only that, instead of just taking care of ourselves, we’ve made it our business to evaluate whether other people are doing their part to stop the spread, and we have cast sweeping judgments about other people’s understanding of civic responsibility. When we’re not doing that, we’re opining on all manner of things we don’t really understand, including the science of vaccines, “herd immunity,” viral variants, and more. We have all become experts about Covid. Or at least we think we have.
In my new book, TICKLED: A Commonsense Guide to the Present Moment, I argue that we have, to our collective detriment, become a nation of experts. Experts are immersed in ego. They know stuff, and they want you to know that they know that stuff. That’s their calling card. They also tend to be inclined to predict the future. Using data, “analysis”, and simple extrapolation. What passes for prediction these days typically isn’t much more than plotting out a dotted line and assuming that it will continue in the same direction at the same pace. It barely even qualifies as a guess, but we have chosen, instead, to label it expertise.
But I digress: How many epidemiologists does it take to predict the path of a viral disease? Apparently, all of them and more, because from where I sit, not a single epidemiologist has successfully predicted what would happen with Covid. But that hasn’t dissuaded them from continuing to engage in the largest collection of data the world has ever known. What have all those millions of data points told us — the positivity ratios, the vaccination rates, and more? They haven’t told us much. The only numbers that are anywhere close to being meaningful, in the sense that they tell us something real, are the numbers of the dead. But even those aren’t actually accurate. The Counting of Covid has taken our attention away from the more important questions, like why it’s even happening in the first place — are we not healthy enough? — and what we can do to prevent it from happening again.
Before you go thinking I am an anti-vaxxer on a rant, I should tell you that I got both doses in April of this year. And yes, given where we are in the course of this pandemic, vaccines are obviously the way to go. But that doesn’t mean they are the answer. They are simply an answer. Setting aside those at particular risk, including the elderly or immunocompromised, the solution to preventing this type of thing from happening again is not endless vaccines; it is to live healthier lives in greater harmony with the rest of the planet. The solution is to do what needs to be done to stay healthy, each and every one of us.
All of which brings me to the topic of specialists. Specialists are people who know how to do stuff. In the context of Covid, the specialists are the infectious disease doctors who treat patients in the hospital. And the nurses. As well as everyone else who actually does something in response to the virus, as opposed to simply looking at numbers, “analyzing” them, and then telling the rest of us what’s going to happen.
Specialists don’t make predictions. They don’t need to guess about the future. They do something in the present, altering the trajectory of events, and the future comes to them. They install the new septic tank the day you need one. You will note that I did not call a professor of plumbing when I needed help. I called Billy, who gets shit done.
Why do we have so many experts in this country? One obvious reason is that too many of us learned too much in the classroom. We’ve bought into the idea that we can understand by analysis, rather than by doing. I’ve written two books about the domination of the expert class in our national affairs. The first was The Firm, about the rise of management consulting — specifically, the industry’s powerhouse, McKinsey & Co. The second was The Golden Passport, about the rise of Harvard Business School and the MBA Industrial Complex.
While both of those institutions employ well-meaning people, they are likewise avatars of a worldview that thinks we can grasp reality using quantification. They are wrong. As we have become an increasingly quantified society, we have placed our faith in those who deal with data and statistics — the stuff of analysis — ahead of those who actually do things. As we count everything we can think of counting, using the assembled data to build models of reality that we hope will show us the future, we let the present moment — and the opportunity for creative freedom — slip away.
We don’t need numbers to contemplate the best course of action in a tough situation. But numbers make it seem easy. So easy, in fact, that we have become a nation of experts who are constantly trying to predict things, and almost always getting it wrong. Do you think I’m exaggerating? I think you will be surprised just how many experts there are out there. Go search the New York Times website for the phrase “experts predict.” I predict that the results will shock you. When I checked in December 2020, the word expert had shown up more than 9,000 times in the newspaper in 2020 alone. That’s almost 30 times a day, up from just 17 times a day in 2019. How many experts can one paper cite?
Do you see what happened there? I started using numbers, and my sentences suddenly started to seem as if I was telling you something real. But was I? I would have communicated much more meaning if I said that we are watching a great irony play out in front of us.
Do you think we can predict the future? If so, you trust experts. But why did the pandemic throw the world into chaos? Because almost no one saw it coming. So…in the wake of a wrenching societal experience that no one saw coming, the Times has done the unexpected itself: Instead of reducing their reliance on an “expert” class of fortune-tellers that didn’t warn us about a plague, they have turned to them with even more frequency, including on matters about the plague they didn’t even see coming in the first place. Note the lack of numbers in what I just said.
Every single one of us is part expert, part specialist. The expert part of us thinks it knows stuff. It relies on the intellect and is very happy to explain those things to anyone who wants to listen. The specialist part of us just does stuff. That part of us relies less on intellect and more on intuition. It’s easy to tell which part of us is on the scene at any given time, too. If you find yourself talking a lot, explaining things, and guessing about the future, that’s the expert in you. If you find that you’re simply doing what needs to be done, the specialist has arrived.
We have become a nation of experts. We are relying on the wrong part of our selves. It’s time we started listening to our inner specialists again. If we can pull that off, we might just stop hating on other people so much. Because it’s only the expert in you that cares what other people are doing or thinking. Your inner specialist doesn’t have time for that, because they’re too busy getting the job done.
Duff McDonald is a New York-based journalist and author. His latest book, TICKLED: A Commonsense Guide to the Present Moment, was published by Harper in October 2021. He is the co-host, with Matt McButter, of How to Tickle Yourself, a podcast about the glory of existence, available on all the major platforms. For all this and more, check out www.TheDuffProject.com.
