We Should Discount People’s Experience
“Experience” has become too respected as a source of authority in recent years. This is unwise.
After the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL on February 14 — which left 17 people dead and more than a dozen injured — the Boston Globe noted that
many survivors of the shooting have become public activists for nationwide changes on gun control.
The students have quickly risen to national fame, becoming the faces and voices for their community, and speaking out to local and national leaders about the changes they want. Together, they have formed the #NeverAgain movement to encourage Florida lawmakers to stop “choosing money from the NRA over our safety,” their Facebook page says.
If these teenagers spoke about any state or federal policy three weeks ago, no news organization would have paid them any attention. Why would you ask high school students their thoughts on complicated matters when there are dozens of experts on every side of every issue? Perhaps the only question a current high school student can answer that experts and policy makers cannot is what it is like to be a high school student or a teenager in 2018.
However, many students from Stoneman Douglas have become sought-after media figures, political commentators, and respected (or derided) activists on gun control. Primarily, this is because our society and culture treat personal experience as a source of authority in debate, discussion, and explanation.
Although there are many authorities people appeal to when making arguments, four major sources of authority recognized by philosophers and ethicists, like myself, are narrative, tradition, logic, and experience.
By narrative, we mean the way people make meaning of the world, usually through stories about “how things really are” or how they came to be, what it means to be human, and where we might be heading. These narratives can be religious, humanistic, materialistic — all that matters is that nearly every human being has a set of stories they use to make sense of the world.
By tradition, we mean the way a (religious, ethnic, cultural, political, philosophical) community has handed down, practiced, embodied, and taught the stories they use to make sense of the world. This includes the history of that community, the practices members participate in to manifest the community’s narratives, and the scripted or informal relationships and roles among members of the community (family, students, mentors, priests, professionals, etc).
By logic, we mean the basic tools of reasoning used by most traditions to validate or invalidate facets of their own or others’ narratives about how the world really is and what it means to be human. This could include investigations into the internal coherence, cogency, explanatory power, and practicality of a tradition and its narratives, or comparison of multiple traditions using the tools of rationality championed by philosophers ancient, medieval, modern, and postmodern.
In this context, experience means the individual or communal interpretation of lived, daily reality which may or may not derive from prescribed narratives of an established tradition. Experience, as broadly conceived, involves people relaying what has happened to them personally, and what those events mean from their own unique perspective. The key to experience is that it is not theoretical. Concrete things must happen to you, or you must participate in them yourself, for them to be deemed “experiences.”
Over the past several decades, first in philosophical circles and subsequently trickling down into most levels of Western (popular) culture, narratives and traditions lost some of their power as sources of authority. The usefulness and trustworthiness of institutions, those keepers of narratives and traditions, have increasingly come into question.
Individuals have become more and more detached from traditional narratives, communities, and practices, whether those be religious, humanistic, or materialist. Government, political parties, churches, businesses, educational organizations, and the media have all lost substantial ground in public opinion polls. Additionally, the logic and narratives of modernity have come under fire by postmodern philosophers and literary critics, as well as other scholars and cultural arbiters.
For many in our contemporary cultural landscape, feelings are more important than thoughts or propositions.
Narrative, tradition, and logic have eroded as sources of authority, leaving something of an explanatory vacuum into which experience has boldly stepped. An increasingly individual and emotional interpretation of reality has become the norm in public debates and disagreements, as the opinion of experts — with a distinctly different kind of “experience” under their belts — has come to mean less and less.
One problem, philosophically speaking, with placing increased emphasis on experience as a source of authority is that its explanatory power is often quite limited, and applies only to a narrow range of factors related to a given event or issue. For example, having or surviving cancer provides insight into the disease, how it might affect a person’s body and life, and what undergoing certain treatments is like, but it can’t tell us how to allocate cancer research funding, how cancer actually works, how to develop medications for curing or treating it, or what causes various kinds of cancer.
Another example: Going through a divorce may not make you an expert on how to cultivate a healthy marriage, though the experience may offer valuable lessons.
Similarly, watching friends or classmates become victims of a mass shooting might give insight into just how horrific the trauma of gun violence is, or what it feels like to lose a loved one, or what certain weapons look and sound like, but this experience does not necessarily translate to expertise on firearms, the Second Amendment, the NRA, gun owners, gun crime statistics, or law enforcement.
In other words, experiencing one facet of an issue, however personally and viscerally, doesn’t necessarily lead one to become any kind of authority on that issue or related issues.
Consider this example from the opposite side of the political and cultural aisle: Many women have experienced abortion in ways that are painful, both physically and emotionally. Some have been coerced into the procedure, and many regret their decision to have an abortion. A negative personal experience with abortion can lend someone the authority of accurately articulating just what it is like to undergo the procedure, to experience pain and regret because of it, and to feel the presence and then absence of life within one’s own body.
However, survivors of abortion who identify as pro-life are not, as a result of their experience, necessarily experts of the philosophy and science of what constitutes human life or personhood, what the societal concerns related to life, freedom, and women’s rights are, or to what extent abortion should be regulated, restricted, or outlawed. It is helpful to include the voices of women who have had (or chosen not to have) an abortion in these debates, but the value of personal experience in these kinds of conversations and arguments is more limited than what our popular cultural expressions might lead us to believe.
Ultimately, it matters what happens to you and how you interpret those events, but it doesn’t matter nearly as much as we have come to profess.
The decline of logic, tradition, and narrative as sources of authority and explanatory power has resulted in a more fragmented, more emotionalist, more divided, less civil, and less coherent society. We lack the linguistic, logical, and relational tools to forge consensus on a number of issues.
No matter how harrowing the stories of students from Stoneman Douglas, and no matter how emotionally powerful their appeal, real, effective change will be hard to come by through their efforts. I hope I’m wrong, because it would be a good thing if these students helped save lives through their activism. The personal experiences of high school students, however, are not a sufficient basis for wise and lasting policy reform.
