In the midst of the COVID-19 epidemic, we are being urged by governments and the media to “trust the experts” – that is, public health officials. It sounds straightforward and obvious, but historians are experts too. Of course our expertise is different, but what it tells us, and what we should communicate to the public, is that “trusting the experts” isn’t nearly as simple as it may seem.
By definition, experts know much more about a given subject than the rest of us: that’s their great strength. But experts can also suffer from tunnel vision: though they know their own specialties, they may fail to look left or right and see the larger contexts, consequences, or costs of their actions. (One antidote to tunnel vision is a liberal education that introduces students to a broad range of disciplinary perspectives, but liberal education is now very much in retreat, as humanities enrollments plummet and vocational classes are filled to capacity.) The single-minded mission of a public health expert is to stop the spread of disease, which is of course an important priority. But if he is not trained in history or economics, he may not realize how relevant these bodies of knowledge are to the general health of society, and he may not appreciate the full costs of drastic public health measures.
Continued . . .
Gellieman
Article URL : https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/175087