Expertise or Excellence?
According to Socrates
We live in the age of experts. They are the cultural gatekeepers. If something doesn’t have the stamp of the experts, it’s probably not true. Who they are, I don’t know. But they seem to have the insider knowledge on just about everything. You know what I’m talking about. Every other news article today includes it in the title.
“The Experts say…” or, “According to experts…”
Experts existed in the ancient world, too. When Socrates heard from one of his friends that the Oracle of Delphi said he was the wisest man in Athens, he went straight to the experts to prove the Oracle wrong. To his surprise, he didn’t succeed. He quickly discovered that most experts claimed to know things they actually knew very little about. Expertise seemed to Socrates to be nothing more than a masking of ignorance. Whether by means of their title, pedigree, or experience, men were too quickly claiming expertise within their fields, stunting further growth and ignoring opposing perspectives.
Sound familiar?
Socrates began to realize that expertise probably wasn’t synonymous with wisdom. Most of the experts he encountered cared more about maintaining their reputation or wealth than they did the goodness and justness of their souls. While Socrates didn’t think the former things were bad in themselves, he knew they would corrupt people if they weren’t subordinated to more important values.
During his defense against his accusers, many of whom were experts in their fields, he said: “Wealth does not bring about excellence, but excellence makes wealth and everything else good for men, both individually and collectively.”
In other words, expertise doesn’t make men excellent, but being excellent can surely make expertise a powerful tool.
But what is excellence anyway?
For Socrates, excellence is simply care for one’s own soul. It is the habitual examination of one’s own limits and faults, with the intention of becoming more honest and more just. Only an excellent man can prudently wield the weapon of expertise — a weapon that can indeed be used to perform immense goodness.
But without a formation in excellence, expertise can be a weapon of great evil, used to condemn others and build exclusive environments of totalitarian authority.
The experts killed Socrates because he claimed something even more important than expertise existed: excellence. But a life in pursuit of excellence will almost always disclose the dark and dishonest parts one keeps buried deep in his soul. Because of this, excellence is a dangerous goal, and one that many choose not to pursue. But I tend to agree with Socrates that a life in pursuit of excellence is the only life worth living.
And, hey, if I can gain a little expertise along the way that wouldn’t be so bad, too.
