Experts and elites

Everyone is precious. Every life is of value and worth, whether it's lived by old or young, male or female, black or white, broken or whole. This is similar, but not the same as everyone's knowledge, skills or opinions being of equal worth.

The frieze of clay faces on the school playground wall is cheerful, touching, and was no doubt an empowering and exciting experience for the kids involved. Possibly it also built a bit of local community. These are precious things. But is it of equal aesthetic value to a Rodin sculpture? Obviously not.

We're glad to be able to google the diagnosis our doctor gave us and read up: it gives us a sense of control and helps us manage changes in our lives. But we also recognise that they offer an expertise that isn't google-able, an expertise about what else to look out for, to recognise the unexpected, the apparently unconnected, to know what is worrying and what isn't.

We still need experts and skillful people. I want people with a deep knowledge of the history and culture of other nations to be doing the international diplomacy - perhaps not only those who've trod the traditional rather privileged pathways, but certainly not someone like me, who's never been in charge of more than a handful of people.

The problem is that it's not easy to separate respect for the skill from respect for the person. Expertise worth the name is not detachable into expert systems and certainly not into online searches. It's an integral understanding, an awareness of context. Expertise is when knowledge becomes tacit knowledge. 

But the fact that it's so bound up with the experts who embody it, means that it's very hard to see how to give equal value to the non-expert. Maybe everyone is an expert at something, but this requires the summoning up of some rather specious expertises - an expert in their own experience? A baby can be nothing else, no matter how precious.

Possibly we need to relearn how to value the path to expertise, which is full of highly unfashionable virtues like attention, respect for mastery, patient practice, and perseverance over many years. The current tendency to default to an interactive approach, and the both-sides-of-any-question media promote the idea that every point of view is somehow equal. We reject the making of judgements. The trouble is that we make them anyhow. Just in a less well-informed way.

Towards and away

There's no such place as 'away'. 'Away' from somewhere is always towards another place, whether intended or not. And a little thought can always name that other place which, once named, is no longer 'away'.

'Away' means 'I've stopped paying attention'; it doesn't mean 'gone'. We speak of 'paying' attention, because it costs us. There are so many demands on our attention.

We budget. And we have to: the world is unmanageably big these days. To reach round news, social media and our daily lives in the real world, we stretch our attention: it gets thinner and more gappy. It creates a lot of away. Nobody can attend to everything, or even to every aspect of something. What goes into your away?

I bought my son some ethically questionable trainers the other day. He loved them, they fit well, he needed new sports footwear, the shop is run responsibly from the point of view of its local employees. It didn't show pictures of child labour. I knew about it anyway, but chose to prioritise the immediate meeting of our need. My son doesn't know what the logo means. If there had been photos and information, I expect he would have been shocked, and possibly not wanted to buy the trainers. Then we would have trailed around town, all subsequent pairs blighted by comparison with the hugely comfortable, favourite coloured trainers that we hadn't bought. We might well have come home frustrated, empty handed and instead of cheerful, with new shoes and with most of the day left to get out into the sunshine.

I put the manufacture of those trainers into away. I consciously and deliberately refused it my attention, so that we could have a lovely day. Lucky us.

When we throw things away, they don't cease to exist. The people and processes we put into away, people suffering in far off nations, recyclable or organic waste going into landfill, it's all really there. It happens, and it has and will have consequences.

I know that we can't attend to everything. I know that I would rather have bought different trainers, but it's not easy to know where to draw the line. I don't always manage to meet my own minimum standards. It takes a great deal of attention, and emotional effort, and sometimes I'm tired. It doesn't seem something that can be fixed by individual effort - only something that can be made much worse if we don't make as much effort as we can.