“It is my conviction that culture works very effectively to make invisible and even “impossible” the actual affiliations that exist between the world of ideas and scholarship, on the one hand, and the world of brute politics, corporate and state power, and military force, on the other. The cult of expertise and professionalism, for example, has so restricted our scope of vision that a positive (as opposed to an implicit or passive) doctrine of noninterference among the fields has set in. This doctrine has it that the general public is best left ignorant, and that the most crucial policy questions affecting human existence are best left to ‘experts,’ specialist who talk about their specialty only, and–to use the word first given wide social approbation by Walter Lippmann in Public Opinion and The Phantom Public–‘insiders,’ people (usually men) who are endowed with the special privilege of knowing how things really work and, more important, of being close to power.”
–Edward Said, “Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community” in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays.
W….wa….wait a minute, here:
While I agree that the people rarely have a true idea about what is going on, if this guy says that it is “impossible” or “invisible”….. then how does he know the connections are there?
He’s sounding a bit like a conspiracy theorist. Often the people in power have no idea how stuff works out either. The CIA is constantly wrong, you know, and a lot of the rich people in the economy don’t really know what others are doing.
You say that there’s a doctrine to keep people ignorant…. yet the info is mostly there. If it’s not, then how does he know it? If it’s really kept so secret and hidden, how come he’s talking about all these “connections!” that are supposedly invisible and impossible to grasp? To me this looks like a case of “Since there’s no evidence of the conspiracy, that must mean the conspiracy is vaster and deeper than we ever imagined!”, which is an argument constantly used by the UFO crowd, who aren’t exactly the most stable folks ya know.
And about this “culture of expertise”… well, sorry, but science is complex. Really complex. Super complex. Even scientists don’t really understand science all that well (although they doing as good a job as they can). You want people who don’t know much about Genetic Engineering making decisions or comments about Genetic Engineering? How is that wise? Ignorance is not wisdom. Now, to be fair, education in no way implies wisdom, but if someone is ignorant on a topic, that doesn’t make their opinions worth more by any means!
The info is there. Libraries exist. I have a book on Bacterial Genomics sitting on my shelf right now – I got it second hand, it cost only 30 dollars. Libraries give out textbooks for free! The info to become an expert is there, it isn’t hidden. Any student from any university can access PubMed and look at Nature and Science Journals themselves, and read up on the debates. Just because the information is obscure does not imply that it’s being “hidden” from you. If you REALLY wanted to know, you could! I mean, how do these experts learn the info if the info is being with-held? You’re not going to argue that all experts come from some sort of super class of people who all belong to a club are you? Most Scientists are left leaning or centrist and I have met very few professional biologists who vote Conservative. They aren’t in a conspiracy to “hide” the info.
If you’re talking about economic info, then yes, it can be harder to obtain that information. But again, you could educate yourself on the topic.
Now, you can make the fair point, the EXTREMELY fair point that educational resources are not widely available to the poor and that is one of the leading causes of poverty in the world, and I would fully agree with you. But that’s not a deliberate attempt to hide the info. That’s just the fact that the current system sucks and those in charge don’t want to change it. And besides, you complain that the “culture” of expertise makes it difficult to know, but I would argue that Americans and, indeed, MOST people don’t even want to know.
And about the doctrine of “non-interference”. While there are polymaths and scientists who specialize in more than one field (biophysicists come to mind), they are VERY rare. Science is….. incredibly complex. The more we learn, the deeper the ocean of science appears to be. You have scientists, at least in my field, who have dedicated THEIR WHOLE LIVES, to studying ONE SET OF PROTEIN in ONE TYPE OF CELL, in ONE ORGANISM. How many organisms, how many cell types, how many proteins are there? I’m sorry, we don’t want to be super specialists, but we have no choice. There’s a limit to what most humans can learn. There are only so many hours in a day. It’s not a deliberate attempt to separate the fields, it’s because scientists are human and CAN’T know everything. I know virtually nothing about Particle Physics! Well, I know the basic particles, but you start talking about Muons or Upside-down Taus or Anti-neutrinos and my mind’s gonna blank on you. I don’t have the time to learn that stuff, all my learning time is taken up by learning about genetic mechanisms, and indeed, only one type of mechanism (how alternative splicing influences expression and RNA trafficking). And that’s just one genetic mechanism. ONE. The whole subject of epigenetics? I’m not an expert in that – if I want to know something, I’ll talk to an epigenetics researcher. Protein Matrices? I don’t know anything about that, but if I wanted to learn, I’d talk to a developmental biologist.
Specialization is a necessity. The world is too complex, FAR too complex, for any one person or even a group of people to fully understand all the connections and all the parts. That’s why the global economy is such a mess – it wasn’t planned, it was just due to the fact that often the right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing. Except that in our world, we’ve billions upon billions of hands, and no one can keep track of it all!
Never mistake complexity for a conspiracy.
EDIT: Oh, and I know how DNA works, and I’m no where CLOSE to power.
I think that there are some big concepts hinted at in this quote that don’t really come across out of context. And I’m not sure I’ll get this right because it’s been awhile since I read any of Said’s work. If anyone is more fresh on this subject than I am, please feel free to correct me.
The “affiliations” he points to are, I believe, potential connections that could allow disparate fields and/or spheres of influence to inform each other. His complaint is that those potential connections are not leveraged to their best advantaged because we impose artificial divisions between areas of knowledge: We force someone to be expert in one thing and not consider other ways of looking at that one thing.
I think this is what he means when he says that a “positive (as opposed to an implicit or passive) doctrine of noninterference among the fields has set in.” In other words, there is an active cultural force that has academics focused on the life of the mind, politicians focused on managing our society on a grand scale, and the general population having the actual experiences that underlie all the theory that the academics and politicians use to make their decisions. I don’t think he’s claiming there’s a conspiracy; it’s really just a matter of a social attitude that’s so ingrained that most people take it for granted. Not only do decision makers not think to consult supposed “non-experts,” but the “non-experts” don’t think they have anything to offer the decision makers. The truth is that everyone is expert in something (at the very least, zhir own experiences).
I’m guessing that Said would advocate that there be more exchange of ideas among various segments of society: let academics advise politicians, let the general population have more input into what’s going on in the unversities’ ivory towers, and so on.
His critique of specialization is not against leaving big decisions to informed people. It’s that our definition of an “informed person” on any given decision is unnecessarily limited. I think he’d agree that, say, molecular biology requires a lot of specialized knowledge to understand, and that such experts need to be involved in decisions about how to treat a particular disease. But other people could bring their own expertise to bear on these decisions. Why shouldn’t patients be considered “experts” in medicine in their own way? After all, they’re the ones who have the illness that needs treating; they’re the ones who have to navigate the health care system and insurance companies. Wouldn’t it make sense that they be able to tell the decision-makers what’s working for them and what isn’t? Why shouldn’t a hospital consult with a professor of political science to try to find creative solutions to the challenge of balancing the benefits of individual patients against all patients collectively?
Why shouldn’t a philosopher like Said challenge every politician, doctor, scientist, historian, religious leader, and every other specialist to seek out other methods of thought rather than limiting zirself to the methodology of the one discipline ze has mastered?