In my last post, I argued that it does make sense to include certain people within the category of expert knowers and others outside as non-knowers. However, this raises the specter of unequitable power relations, with which I hope to deal in this post.
Someone may criticize this view as being elitist, and the concern seems to come up often enough that it should be dealt with. Is the attribution merely descriptive, or pejorative? If descriptive, then it probably fits; so what? If pejorative, then what exactly is wrong?
It is the denial of elitism that is problematic. On the one hand, it is harmful to deny one's own superiority in a given area if one clearly knows more. I rely on my doctor having more medical knowledge than myself; if she were to play humble and average Jane on me, claiming that she really doesn't know any more than I do, or any more than I could figure out on my own relatively efficiently, then she would have trouble curing me.
It also seems that a frank admission of elitism, that some people really do know more than others, that some people really are experts and this is something that it takes years of effort to achieve (and so is not open to the general public for scrutiny), is the ground on which we can even talk of oppression. If people are oppressed, they are actually oppressed. They are actually deprived of some good. To act as though we are all equal when we are not in actuality is to say that those deprived of an education have not actually missed out on anything; that is, they have not been oppressed, and we can all breathe more easily.
In addition, to deny elitism in this sense is to place either an undue burden on the individual, who must now shoulder all responsibility herself for everything she needs, or we must cheapen knowledge acquisition, as if understanding the world and the Other were a simple business. We live and learn communally, which entails our dependence on others who know better than us, even if dependence can be painful.
With that said, the problem with expert knowledge is deciding who the experts are. When we fill the concept of "rationality" and "expert" with content determined by the experience of white males, for example, then this perpetuates a cycle. Men do math, because men are good at math; they are the ones rational enough to do math. Which means that in the next generation, mostly men will be drawn to do math, which means that the stereotype sticks. Maybe a couple women are "unfeminine" enough to be mathematicians, but most women (and all the "real" women) stay out. And of course, examples could be adduced; it was the experience of privileged, rational, land-owning Whites who gave content to the Enlightenment notion of a person, for instance, such that it was a simply matter to consider black slaves as non-persons.
The problem here, it seems to me, is that we multiply the final causes (that is, the goals, that which unifies) of a discipline. We implicitly (since we dare not explicitly) hold both that medicine must work empirically, and that the doctors conform to our image of what a doctor should be. But what is it within each disciple that justifies it? We have our expert community pursuing a discipline; what justifies that community?
It seems important here that we can pick out some immanent criterion, something tangible and readily within experience. If we say that the certainty of math is what legitimates it, then the current experts are the ones who tell us what certainty is, and who can have it. This seems to me to be a way in which those experts in power continue their dominance against minority voices, perhaps illegitimately. But this problem is lessened if we look for a clear mark. What has distinguished the mathematical community of experts? Their unanimity. If a sizable body of people claiming to do math, and who have put in the requisite time for study, come to different conclusions, they could not simply be written off. This is because writing them off would both assume unanimity (which is why they must be wrong) and deny it (since not everyone has agreed). Therefore, this community must be admitted and their claims critically analyzed from within the community, perhaps leading to a redefinition of mathematics.
This can come about because communities are not static. Every expert community can have its common goals for the time being which unify that community. These may need to change; there is no reason to assume eternal essences to disciplines. After all, mathematics today is not the same discipline as of a couple centuries ago. Leibniz saw no need to have a mathematical basis for continuity, because everything in nature is continuous. Modern math doesn't care about the natural world, although it can be applied to it, and no principle can be left undefined. But the changes in math came about due to internal specifications of its goals, and internal processes changing those goals. When the goals split in different directions, we got two different bodies of experts: the mathematicians (favoring logical rigor) and the physicists (favoring description of the natural world). But both of these communities naturally grew out of earlier mathematics.
How does this relate to power relations? The goals of a community are what define the community; these in themselves do not seem to set up unjust power relations. If you don't want to empirically test medical techniques, you're simply not doing what the typical modern medical community is doing. Other aspects (to be covered below) may create injustice, but for the present we are simply defining the communities. Therefore, what creates the power imbalance is the community ignores its unifying principle, its form of life, for tangential concerns. If medicine is defined by being empirical, but we don't even bother to look at the empirical investigations of other sources of medicine or of medicine done by certain minority groups, then we have transgressed the inner life of the medical community itself. But racism within medicine is not to claim that medicine is set up such that minorities are bad doctors; it is to claim that the minorities would be good doctors but are prevented from being such by extrinsic concerns (if minorities would truly be bad doctors, they shouldn't be doctors, since they wouldn't be able to cure people well; I simply don't admit the starting hypothesis). Racism and sexism are problems precisely because they are at odds with the internal goals of the community.
So now the question might be: what keeps there from being a community which defines itself in terms of being white and male, and dedicated to preserved the white male culture? Nothing, really, and I'm not sure that there is anything intrinsically wrong with this. Kant and Plato said some good things, after all, and it would be a shame to lose them. But there should also be room for a community dedicated to preserving, say, black culture. There would be two reasons why our white male community could be problematic. First, it could dictate the concerns of other communities, preventing the black cultural community from existing, or at least flourishing. Second, and perhaps simply a variant of the first, such a community could create exocentric values; that is, values for those outside of itself (and poisoning individuals within, for that matter), which state that not only does the community have its own goals and processes and standards, but that these should be normative for others: people in general ought to study white male culture, since it is superior to other cultures.
Both of these points, though, seem to be illegitimate uses of expert knowledge. The specialist in white male philosophy is only an expert in that area, and so unless she is an expert in, say, black culture as well (and all expertise must be ratified by the community itself), she must defer to the experts in that field when making claims about it. Similarly, the mathematical community can say what it wants to about math, but mathematicians cannot in themselves set the value of math for everyone else (although they can extol the praises of why they themselves love math). There is a plurality of expertises, and experts in one field do not thereby have any claims in other fields until they have proven themselves again.
In summary, then, it would seem that a strategy for reducing unjust power relations in expert communities would be for such communities to a) pay attention to their own internal workings and to hold themselves to such internal standards, and b) respect other communities as being other with their own separate expertise.
Of course, this leaves other problematic issues. Do we say that Nazi Germany was free to abide by the inner life of its own community? It seems to me that political entities have their own problems, not least because the criterion of expertise is missing (there seems to be relatively little knowledge required for political behavior, other than how to gain power for oneself). At any rate, I do not claim to be solving all problems of injustice in this essay; I merely want to lay out some ways in which expert communities can keep their claims to expertise and their stratifications of knowledge-bearers, without thereby necessarily introducing concerns about race, gender, etc.
Now that I have something of a working theory, I would like to turn it to the problem of knowledge within religious communities as given through testimony.
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