I don't make much reference here at the blog to the standard pundits: Will, Hitchens, Friedman, and so on. Certainly not to Coulter, Malkin and the rest of the screeching class. The latter just don't count much to me. The former count, given their influence in shaping mainstream public discourse.
I've often wondered, however, why we sustain their position at all - especially academics who study security issues, politics, environmental problems, etc. in much more scholarly and learned terms. Doesn't engaging the pundit class legitimize their positions as America's "public intellectuals"?
One way to see this is that the public discourse needs more diverse voices and ideas and one way to gain entry to the more high-profile dialogue is to engage the going assertions. Another way to view it is that many of their ideas and assertions need refutation or nuancing or outright rejection, again given their influence in the public political discourse.
Is there any other point? I mean, when doing scholarly work on the same issues, one doesn't make reference to these pundits unless one wants to demonstrate some of the common high-profile ideas and claims operative in American society. A putative scholarly book dealing with Thomas Friedman's claims wouldn't get too far as a scholarly work since his claims aren't terribly well-developed and are often mostly based on anecdotal and rather exclusive evidence.
Furthermore, as I mentioned, engaging their ideas often gives the appearance of legitimizing them as serious ideas. Sometimes they really are, but the majority of the time they aren't. They're certainly not in any particular position of authority other than that endowed by their public profiles.
So, what's the point?
UPDATE:
This was in the back of my mind while writing the above.
12 comments:
Why should I trust a college professor? History and theory are valuable, but if I'm so stupid as to be deciding policy on one expert perspective I'll take a veteran foreign bureau chief for the Times. The opinion of a random professor carries its own set of liabilities.
It's not even for certain the random college prof knows more history and theory than the hypothetical bureau chief.
That may be true. I'm not necessarily saying that the world ought to listen to the professors. But if you want to know more about, say, cell biology, you go to a cell biologist. If you want to know the latest in astronomy, you go to an astronomer. Medicine, a doctor. Carburetors, a mechanic. Etc.
I'm a democrat. I'll always grant that ethical and political issues of importance are always best decided if they include the largest number of voices possible to the debate. That's the only way they can ultimately be wise, knowledgable, and equitable. But that should never exclude expertise in some role.
But we don't do that either when it comesw to politics. We listen to pundits who are basically media stars and don't have any particular claim to authority over an issue. They're not the random journalist. But neither are they experts on anything (except punditry). Wouldn't you rather get your information about, say, the political situation in Lebanon, from an expert on Middle East Studies, a political scientist, a just war theorist, etc? Someone who actually studies the stuff, rather than someone who pontificates about the shifting issues of the day as if they were an expert on everything?
Frankly, if I want to be deciding policy, I'll almost never take the sole perspective of a veteran foreign bureau chief for the NY Times.
You say that the Foreign Affairs Iraq roundtable was the kind of thing you had in mind when you wrote this. Why, I wonder? It featured one of the world's foremost academic experts on democratization, Larry Diamond (who also served with the CPA in Iraq); a top-flight academic Arabist, Marc Lynch; a top academic security studies expert, Stephen Biddle; and a top national security reporter with a Ph.D., Fred Kaplan. Hitchens is a journalist, sure, and Drum a blogger, but in general the panel had more qualifications than practically any such endeavor one can point to. So why was this an example of know-nothing punditry?
Yeah, okay, bad example, Anon. I suppose I was set off by the presence of Hitchens and Drum and glossed over the others. My bad.
"Someone who actually studies the stuff,"
What is this "stuff?" I don't think there is any agreed on stuff. I don't think of "Middle East Studies" as a profession or even as a well-defined major, if it even is an undergraduate major at most schools. Am I wrong? I imagine you could be a scholar of Egyption oud making during the late Ottoman and hold a title "Professor of Middle Eastern Studies." Plus you could have done your undergrad in architecture and spent ten years in a band. Not that I wouldn't love a class from such a person, but he or she is liable to be low on my list of my go-to people on Iraq policy.
There's a book out by Philip E. Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment, that addresses this issue. I haven't read it and am depending on the review in Science, so this is a review of a review.
Tetlock studied predictions by "284 experts with advanced educational and professional training in international relations, political science, law, economics, business, public policy, and journalism" between 1988 and 2003, 80,000 in all.
They didn't do very well.
He also uses Isaiah Berlin's fox and hedgehog distinction. The foxes did better than the hedgehogs most, but not all of the time. The hedgehogs did better in their areas of expertise.
I question overall the usefulness of predictions, particularly for the longer term. I'd go for questions and analysis, but they can't be tested in the same way predictions can. And, if I'm honest, we're looking to see what will happen, and the questions and analysis are means to that.
CKR
I don't think this is necessarily exclusive hedgehog-vs-fox territory. I would go to both. Nor do I think that one would turn to a prof who knows the Middle East through studying the oud. That would be simply to make a bad choice of who you're going to as an authority.
Clearly, if you want to know what's up, what is truly happening on the ground, what possible solutions there are at both micro and macro levels, historical political obstacles, ethical considerations, what people in general are thinking/believing on the ground, etc. it's not often the case that you'll get the best answers from pundits (re this "stuff"). They might have access to leaders and serve as a conduit on this count, but public info from leaders in a crisis usually isn't terribly helpful either since it's packaged for maximum political effect and self/national-interest.
I suppose living in DC riles me a bit when it comes to pundits pontificating about foreign affairs. There are a lot of "experts" in DC who almost never touch the ground of issues. There is a fairly standard DC line that coheres cleanly with standard economic and political assumptions (which may, in fact, be wrong), prosaic ethical judgments, and party lines. At least if I go to a number of different scholars, I can find the state of the art on a range of issues, technologies, strategies, etc. They might have their own interests too - thus the merit of seeking out a number of different voices.
I tend to hear only one general voice - variations on a theme - from the pundits.
On reflection, I think what we want in our expert on X and what underlies our urge to go to a "professor of X" is a person who has a reputation among peers from whom she solicits and responds to criticism, and that these people are not dabblers or neophytes but deeply engaged in the matter. "Professor" and "PhD" and "Harvard" are merely standard assurances and surrogates for a personal reputation. They give us the confidence to put a microphone to Joe Blow live on national TV without knowing more than his job title. But they don't guarantee Joe Blow won't say something very skewed and misguided, and they're clearly not essential to a good and well informed opinion. My "oud" example was to illustrate how much was being assumed. How about we take a historian and chair of the Middle East Studies from Bob Jones University? Or how about the equivalent official at an unaccredited "university" you've never heard of? How about from the most prestigious university in Myanmar? I think your original implicit claim or assertion helmut is that a random non-emeritus tenured professor of X from a snob-quality American University with a department in X is very likely going to be better than a random snob-quality newspaper journalist who is a veteran of beat X. Tough argument to make. I'm betting on the journalist.
Actually, I didn't originally mention going to the professors as experts.
I also have little respect for those who flaunt their cvredentials as if the creds alone endow them with expertise and/or authority. They can serve as a shortcut, as you mention, MT, but that's also sometimes a dangerous shortcut.
Anyone - whether an academic or a high-profile pundit - can have slept their way to the top, so to speak, by being politically savvy and engaging in heavy self-promotion. This still doesn't mean that they're the top expert on a given issue or problem.
So, we agree on that, I think. The difference, however, is that a number of media figures have become high-profile and shape public opinion/discourse in ways that are completely disproportional to their intellectual and scholarly authority. Academic profs aren't usually in that position (apart from exs. like Krugman, Cole, etc.).
I think also that some journalists are pretty good at getting into an issue, understanding it, and turning that understanding into very useful information for policy making.
But what I really dislike are those pundits who portray themselves as experts on everything, so that their daily pronouncements ought to be followed as law. This leads to very distorted public views of political problems, policies, etc. precisely because that pundit(s) has a high public profile. That high profile is helped along by others who constantly respond to the pundit's claims as authoritative.
I'm not talking about philosopher-kings here. That runs contrary to my view of policy and politics, which ought to be as publicly deliberative as possible. A philosopher-king narrows ideas and deliberation to a pinpoint. But I then also dislike the philosopher-king role that many pundits seem to believe they play in American society. That's what troubles me, especially since there's often no good reason to view them as an expert anyway.
Oh, right! Like George Will! Gotcha. Never mind. Buttheaded bozos, the lot of them. Except maybe Robert Wright.
What? Have you razzed me all damn day just so I'd respond? Evil, MT, evil.
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