It seems to be an increasingly popular political hobby to disparage experts and denigrate what they have to say on just about any subject. Michael Gove was the leading light in the UK on this during the EU referendum but it's a trend that is not just confined to Brits and seems to have struck a chord among many voters in various countries. I think there is a good reason for this and it is a cause for concern.
It seems to me that the term "expert" has been hijacked. People without any genuine depth of knowledge or special skills, apart from a great capacity for self-advertisement and an ability to trot out the ever-popular sound bite, have set themselves up as experts or been set up as so by the media. There was an old saying that anyone who could hold a pencil thought he could write a book. Nowadays, anyone with a computer keyboard thinks the same – and it's a lot easier than hand-writing. The massive growth of social media and the difficulty of filling up the time for 24-hour TV also pander to the self-proclaimed expert. Bad as this is, it has, I think, had a worse knock-on effect.
A little learning is indeed a dangerous thing and so too is an unquestioning faith in google searches. It has resulted in teachers inspecting children's lunch boxes for "unhealthy food" without having any real understanding of nutrition and, in fact, without any authority to do so. It has resulted in spurious and sometimes extremely dangerous "medical" advice presented as truth by people with no absolutely no medical training and quite possibly not even a biology CSE. It has produced the new UKIP leader challenging Mary Beard on the reasons for the fall of the Roman Empire, presented as a parallel to justify Brexit, citing school history lessons, I Claudius and Gladiator as his sources. And the trouble is that those who are equally ignorant believe this nonsense.
No wonder the expression "post-truth" is now being bandied around when people who have in-depth knowledge or special skills in a particular area are denigrated by those who do not. Their carefully considered conclusions are ignored and their reputations are tarnished because others, who don't know what they are talking about, are grouped in the same category as real experts.
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