Public Matters: The Death of Expertise and East City Bookshop

 

Cover image of The Death of Expertise,
with ECBS bookmark

WIR: The Death of Expertise by Tom Nichols

I sometimes imagine I might try to pitch a book to publishers, calling it The Surprising Origins of the New Science of the Untold Story. I'm not entirely sure what the content of the book would be, but I'm reasonably confident that I could get a contract with the title. My rate of visiting roughly 10 or 11 new bookshops a month has given me a certain sense of what phrases and framing appeal to book publishers. I think of this, in part, because it's pretty clear to me that Tom Nichols's The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters, was an easy sell to publishers. It's the kind of book that's going to appeal to people who consider themselves readers. 

I was first tempted to pick it up in September 2025 at Bluestocking Bookshop in Holland, Michigan, but the edition on sale at that used bookshop was the original one, which was published in 2017. I resisted the temptation to buy it then, in part because of a concern that it would be a little dated, so was happy to stumble upon the updated and expanded 2024 edition in paperback at East City Bookshop in Washington, DC (more about that below). 

Nichols's book describes a real phenomenon--a kind of "post-truth" society in which standards of argumentation and evidence have collapsed and political discourse has suffered. He puts it this way:

“the democratic stability that relies on a thoughtful and informed public is dissolving before our eyes; the dismissal of learning and expertise is now an ingrained habit of mind that is crippling the ability of millions of citizens in democratic nations to exercise even basic civic and social responsibilities in their communities.” (p. xv)

However right he is about the presence of an epistemic crisis, it is less clear to me that he provides an explanation for why it has happened that we can put to good use in changing things for the better.

Nichols asks the reader, at least implicitly, to accept that his status as an expert on international relations makes him enough of an expert on expertise as such to guide the conversation along. I'll grant the premise that he is a participant in the knowledge economy whose particular brand of currency is unfairly devalued. To his credit, he exhibits a droll self-awareness along the way about how he himself engages in or perpetuates some of the failings he catalogs.

Nichols defines the death of expertise as "not just a rejection of existing knowledge. It is fundamentally a rejection of science and dispassionate rationality, which are the foundations of modern civilization” (p. 5), and that the crisis is less of an epistemic one relating to facts and evidence, or standards of argumentation than something akin to a psychological allergy to the idea of expertise itself. He writes, "the death of expertise, however, is a different problem than the historical fact of low levels of information among laypeople. The issue is not indifference to established knowledge; it’s the emergence of a positive hostility to such knowledge” (p. 21).

In other words, Nichols's book is about (anti-)democratic social psychology. The principal beast of burden in this narrative is the Dunning-Krueger Effect--that less-competent people tend to be more confident of their correctness, and more-competent people tend to have greater awareness of their fallibility. This phenomenon is abetted, he argues, by a false egalitarian ethos that flattens distinctions of knowledge and authority in the service of facile notions of equality.

Nichols cites a few other psychological studies in the course of his argument, but there's a big part of his "diagnosis" that was more difficult for me to tie down to an evidentiary basis. The main term that appears across the book, in a ratio disproportionate to studies to back it up, is "narcissism," and its variants. "Solipsistic," "childish," "ignorant," "laziness," and a few other derogatory terms get subbed in along the way.

For example:

“...conspiracy theories are deeply attractive to people who have a hard time making sense of a complicated world and who have no patience for less dramatic explanations. Such theories also appeal to a strong streak of narcissism. Some people would choose to believe in complicated nonsense rather than accept that their own circumstances are the result of issues beyond their control, or beyond their intellectual capacity to understand, or even their own fault.” (p. 61)

Nichols may be correct that this broad social phenomenon is a consequence of the growth of individual psychological failings, but the appeal of his argument seems to go to the pre-existing biases of his intended audience of people who think expertise is a good thing. To a certain extent, it amounts in the end to a kind of punching down or a narrative of cultural decline with an implicit appeal to some version of "the good ol' days." It makes intuitive sense, but the drift of the book suggests the main way out of it is to shame people for that character failing.

Nichols's style is quite accessible, and the book is an engaging read. I do worry, at times, that his simplicity of expression leads him to gloss over some important distinctions. For instance, he tends to conflate the word "smart" with "educated" or "informed.":

“...and yet the result has not been a greater respect for knowledge, but the growth of an irrational conviction among Americans that everyone is as smart as everyone else. This is the opposite of education, which should aim to make people, no matter how smart or accomplished they are, learners for the rest of their lives. Rather, we now live in a society where the acquisition of even a little learning is the endpoint, rather than the beginning, of education. And this is a dangerous thing.” (p. 7)

I certainly give credit to Nichols for affirming that education is not something one can finish--something that is easily forgotten in discussions about it and related topics (including literacy).  I expect, though, that what we need to examine here is not the idea that everyone is as smart as everyone else, but something else. It may be equal access to American education. It may be systemic acknowledgments that something other than discourse and reason guides our policymaking to begin with.

Also to Nichols's credit, despite the pathological social psychology that informs his thesis, he acknowledges the challenges that low levels of various kinds of literacies play in the current challenge. (As a background point, currently about 54% of American adults read at or below the adult equivalent of a 6th-grade level; the average public health instructions for COVID-19 were written at a 10th-grade level.)

Although Nichols puts his finger on a real issue, I found myself not particularly helped by a vibe within the argument that felt a little like a rant about "kids these days." He is right on a good many things, and the world is not getting any less complex, so we need explorations of how to address these issues. I have not yet picked up and read his subsequent work, Our Own Worst Enemy, but the title and summary suggest it continues the narcissism hypothesis. Again, there is much Nichols is likely right about here, but like much of the discourse he criticizes, it's not likely to win anybody over who doesn't already agree with him.

For alternative takes on the current crisis in public discourse, I can propose a few other books taking approaches that are more empathetic, are more philosophically or psychologically rigorous, or a combination of all of these things--providing, perhaps, a more hopeful prospect for what's going on and how to fix it:

• Any recommendations I might make here for Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism or "Lying in Politics" are likely superfluous in light of the resurgence of interest in Arendt in the last three Presidential election cycles. Still, a rich array of insights here as to who benefits and how from collapsing commitments to a notion of truth.
• More recently, Anna Lembke's Dopamine Nation provides some crucial insights with regard to the social consequences of an information economy catalyzed by dopamine triggers. Interestingly, she points out that one of the consequences of pervasive lying in discourse is the creation of a "scarcity mindset." (NPR's Hidden Brain interviews here.)
• I found a tremendous amount of value in Dannagal Goldthwaite Young's Wrong: How Media, Politics, and Identity Drive Our Appetite for Misinformation. Young provides a more compassionate account of the psychological commitments connected to community and identity that drive some of this phenomenon. She doesn't believe the problem is symmetric across the political spectrum, but she understands what's happening from a perspective that accords more legitimacy and authenticity to the inner motivations. (Hidden Brain interview here.)
• For the more philosophically inclined, I think Danielle Allen's concept of "epistemic egalitarianism," articulated in her Justice by Means of Democracy, has some good room to grow. Importantly, she also identifies the way modern political theory has afforded public autonomy equitably.
• Similarly, Jonathan Rauch's The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth provides more of a conceptual apparatus to reclaim liberal epistemology, which embraces the deliberative tools for productive, pragmatic democratic advance. With some judicious dipping into folks like Charles Sanders Peirce, Rauch articulates a vision for healthier discourse and redeems some of the existing mechanisms for course-correcting. (Nichols also acknowledges that scholarly review is a hallmark of communities of expertise.)
• Finally, for a more popularly-oriented "how-to" manual of communicating across difference, you might want to give I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times by Mónica Guzmán a try. Guzmán approaches the conversations across difference with a personal, familial framework. While this is not exactly the question of expertise Nichols tackles, if Dannagal Goldthwaite Young is correct, it is not narcissism driving the problem as much as core anchors of identity. Guzmán gives some basic tactics for authentic engagement with the ranting uncle at the Thanksgiving table.

Yours truly and spouse at East City Bookshop

AWIGI: East City Bookshop, Washington, D.C.

In my fantasy life of starting a bookstore, I imagine my store's brand being something like "Civitas Books" or "Res Publica Books," in part because I'm drawn to the civilization-building, community-building force that local bookshops represent. Importantly, I fully believe a robust fiction section is key to such an offering because, as the above-mentioned Hannah Arendt affirmed, our ability to think politically requires the ability to see things from others' points of view--a capacity fiction cultivates.

East City Bookshop, a woman-owned book shop in the Eastern Market neighborhood of Washington, D.C. is just such a civilizing offering. Appropriately enough, it is a moderate walk along Pennsylvania Ave., SE from the U.S. Capitol building. I visited there last fall, when we were in DC for a friend's wedding, and had the opportunity to visit our son as well. East City is his "local." It's very close to Little District Books and Capitol Hill Books, which each have their own distinctive curation and offerings.

East City, at least at the time of my visit, put the "public matters" up front, with a robust non-fiction section adjacent to the cashiers at the upstairs, ground-level of the store, visible through the front-door entrance off the alley. When one ventures down the stairs, other worlds of imagination open up, with both the fiction and children's book section below. As I believe I mention elsewhere, the kids' book sections are not my wheelhouse, but I do a lot of evaluation of a shop on the curation of the "staff recommendations" sections. They are an index of the qualities of readers on staff, and their diversity, and an index of how the store falls along the continuum of "conservative," "progressive," and "radical" proposed by Josh Cook in The Art of Libromancy. The virtual version of these recommendations on their website provides a healthy sense of the diverse cadre of readers on the team and their interests and tastes.

To corroborate this, I recall a great conversation with the two booksellers at the cashier's station, which spoke to other vital qualities in booksellers (imho): curiosity. The one young man I spoke with the most, who appears to have since left the team, was interested in my poetry recommendations. His mother, I believe, was herself a poet and/or an English teacher, and had inspired his own interests in poetry. I may be getting the details a little off here, close to half a year later.

East City is coming up on its 10th anniversary of being in business, and founder Laurie Gillman's "About" story for the shop resonates for me in a number of ways. In some respects, the shop reflects a kind of "being the change" we want to see in communities, and fills a need within a community where the ranks of the "hyper-literate" are deep. As one indication of this, my anecdotal but reasonably extensive experience of street-level, pedestrian literacy finds that the Capitol Hill neighborhood just to the north of East City has one of the highest levels of Little Free Libraries per block I have ever seen. I say this as a resident of a major university neighborhood.

My recent conversation with Lisa Uhrik of Franklin Fixtures and PLENTY Downtown Bookshop in Cookeville, Tennessee has had me reflecting on the kind of narrative arc that bookshops draw their patrons into upon entering. I'm starting to pay attention to this a little more, but it makes sense to me that the "Public Affairs" matters in East City are at the ready for the person dashing in off Pennsylvania Avenue, and that those who descend into the roomier basement level will be rewarded for their "immersion."

That said, I recall being tempted by an Ada Limón poetry title in another "recommended reads" section adjacent to the cashiers. I can definitely see a way in which even this relatively small shop provides an easy way from going in for the book you want, and finding the one,... two, three, or more... books you didn't know you needed. Gillman implicitly nods to DC's largest indie in Northwest D.C. in her "About" narrative. East City doesn't have the available floorspace at the moment to match the stacks depth there, but they hold down their particular corner pretty well.

And, importantly, from the design, curation, and specific recommendations from the staff at East City, I can confirm that expertise is not dead.