Put not your trust in experts.(The War on Wisdom: Wisdom Versus Expertise in Facing Life's Problems)(Book Review)

The War on Wisdom: Wisdom versus Expertise in Facing Life's Problems, edited by Digby Anderson; Social Affairs Unit, 2003, about $50.

THE WAR ON WISDOM is the latest collection in Digby Anderson's explorations of civilised order. Anderson seeks to show what makes civilisation flourish or decay. I do not know any university department of sociology whose academic production is so consistently worthwhile in this regard as the publications of his Social Affairs Unit.

The new book is excellently referenced from sources past and present. The specific target is pseudo-expertise. "Experts", often combining ineffectualness with insufferable vanity, have displaced wisdom from its central role. Much the same trends are apparent in all English-speaking countries. Anderson has, accordingly, brought together nine Britons, three Americans and two Australians, one of them, psychologist Graeme Newman, now teaching in America.

The group are not attacking expertise per se. It is fraudulent and dysfunctional specialisation they oppose. Their claim is that proper expertise subsumes moderating wisdom, and will soon be subverted if the latter's staying hand is removed. Anderson's severe overview concludes that wisdom's war against false expertise has already been lost. If he is right, Nemesis will not wait long in the wings. Right or wrong, he and his colleagues are ready to go down fighting.

The collection is informed by an implicit philosophy of history, conservative and largely, though not exclusively, Christian, to the effect that since humanity is rooted in history, the key to wisdom is experience. For all the indispensability of modern expertise, some of its forms seem subject to a disabling abstraction and sentimentality, as well as to passing fashions and fads. Some of the handiwork of this charlatanry is now manifest to everyone. For me, the educational pundits are the worst. Illiteracy, innumeracy, immoral behaviour, faddism, the hopeless loss of values and sensibility in the arts: these are directly or indirectly the results of legions of specialised "educationalists" and "advisers".

Writing on falling in love and marriage, Australian demographer Lucy Sullivan contrasts today's insistence on sexual freedom and indifference to wedlock, with wisdom's restraints on the former and upholding of the latter. Jon Davies' essay on work, steeped in biblical reference, celebrates the fulfilment and independence which wise commitment to the traditional imperative of human labour can bring.

Anderson's own chapter on friendship lauds it as cementing virtue, reinforcing and correcting marriage. Friendship is now trivialised, he alleges, even threatened by the suspicious cynicism of modern expertise. Frightening numbers of people are now paid to teach interpersonal suspicion and hostility, as for example so many feminists and race-relations "experts" are.