Socrates concludes that, since elenchus leads to truth, since the experts know what is best for the commonwealth, it is best to consult the experts and not the people on matters of statecraft. Rhetoric, the effort at convincing the people by appealing to what they know and care about and believe, is therefore a bane to the commonwealth because it does not begin with experts. One has to wonder, how do we decide upon the experts? In recent history, Walter Lippmann and others have argued that the people should only be consulted when the experts fail—-the demos gets to choose new experts in the event of catastrophe, crisis, breakdown, etc. Others contend that the people possess a unique form of wisdom, something that the experts can never capture. (Paul Woodruff, for instance, argues that Athenians recognized a form of good judgment that could only happen when everyone comes together to deliberate and vote on an issue.) Is there a truth that might escape the experts but not the people? Do the definitions that Socrates continually references begin with popular opinion (nomos) and not some natural order (physis)?
I think that different contexts call for different situations. For example, “the people” do not know how to diffuse a bomb. An expert in bomb diffusing would. There are also situations in which “the experts” may miss something. Any news channel at any time will demonstrate that. So who decides when? Who decides who decides when? I can’t come up a good answer. Perhaps we will discuss this in class.
Note: I thought I had posted this before I left for class, but I failed to answer the "Math Question." What a fool I am.
I agree that intelligent decisions can be made by small groups of people in a more orderly fashion than can be made by larger groups because often times in a larger group there can a be a lot of mayhem. Although, I do think there's something to be said about the idea that many minds are better than just a few. I do think it's possible that the bigger the group the easier it could be to find experts in fields or simply just people who have experience d first hand the matter at hand for example like Nhuy said, natural disaster. This reminds me of Sinclair Lewis during the 1920's. He was one of the few American authors who stayed in America during this time when most artists fled to Europe. I think that Lewis had an advantage over other American authors because he was actually able to write about American middle class society in an accurate way because he was living through it. He was also the first American author to receive a Nobel Peace Prize, so that could be considered proof of his expertise in the matter of his writings over other authors.
On rare days when I feel like I can handle the excessive graphics, I watch CNN. Yesterday was one of those days. According to the broadcast, Clinton is focusing her campaign on the "bread and butter" issues that will matter to the public instead of focusing on the idealism or high minded ideas. Is appealing to the public really necessary for good policies or just for a presidential candidate? I think as Americans, we have a tendency to both overestimate and underestimate the power of the public. We may overestimate its power because our policies have mostly been conducted under the influence of liberalism which places individualism at its highest priority. We may underestimate the power of the public because we have had experience with the incompetence of the American public or as some of you have stated earlier, that not everyone is an expert on policies etc.
I think the purpose of the commonwealth can also determine the role of rhetoric and the public. If your goal is to keep the people happy, then it will be necessary to consult their opinions even if they are a racist murderers. If your purpose is a just society then finding the right experts is necessary either through education, research which was suggested in another post. I find it interesting that our "experts" or the people in the senate, seem to have little actual expertise except for the ability to persuade the public that they would be capable to make decisions for them.
This issue makes me think of Campbell, on whom I just did my presentation. I think Campbell would say that there is no definition outside of human experience (something existential and abstract knowable only to the experts); furthermore, he believes that the universality of experience is what GIVES something its truth.
Personally, I tend to agree with Socrates that it is the job of experts to search for the truth (if there is one). I agree with Christ in the assertion that we are just not as informed today, however, I think the cause lies in the nature of our polity. Perhaps in a civic-minded society such as Paul Woodruff describes I could trust the general public to discover the truth, but in our liberal democracy we are not called upon to become enlightened citizens. This is essentially the Straussian indictment of the modern world: we are too self-involved to meet the challenges of civic participation, and to remedy this we must return to an Aristotelian society in which everyone was endowed with a civic education that would allow them to 1)know the truth and 2)participate actively in society.
I agree with both yours and Chris' assertions, but I wonder: if we are to agree with Socrates that it is for the experts to search for the truth, then are we to completely discount any notion (such as the one you alluded to) that becuase we are not, generally speaking, an educated enough society to discover the truth, that we simply can't and shouldn't? I can follow that line of argument, so I guess what I don't understand is that in order to "remedy" our intellectual weakness, we must "return to an Aristotelian society in which everyone was endowed with a civic education that would allow them to 1) know the truth and 2)participate actively in society." Socrates lived in an Athenian society that was supposedly the type of society to make good judgments, yet he still felt that it was up to the experts to search for the truth. So exactly what type of society are we looking for? Is there really one that wouldn't need to leave the truth-seeking for the so-called experts?
I agree that small groups of people can come up with intelligent decisions, but when that group grows to a large size, like Kelli says, it has the potential to become mob-like. This is why the people elect officials into government: large groups of people could never come to a consensus, so we elect who we think will best represent a majority of our views.
I agree with Chris that the people have a certain wisdom that the experts don’t possess. When I think of experts, for example those working in Washington, I think of people disconnected from our society. The people, those who elect the experts into office, really know what daily life is like in our society, and thus they would have insight into things the experts do not. But in our diverse population, there are so many different types of people who want so many different things that we could never come to an agreement about any decision.
I agree that experts are often disconnected from society. I definitely believe that there is a truth that could escape the them, but not the people. An expert on natural disaster may have studied extensively on the topic, but I think that a person who has actually had the misfortune to live through a natural disaster would have some insight on the topic in which an expert would lack.
I also agree with what your saying, that one who has lived through a natural disaster has more insight on maybe how they work, or what to do or not to do than an one who has only studied natural disasters and has a different kind of knowledge. But then who is the expert? The one with experience or just second-hand knowledge? Does an expert have to be schooled?
I agree with Nhuy Do's comment. Although societies level of education continues to expand, we still need look to the advice of experts in all areas of life. Experts are constantly improving and refreshing our previous knowledge. We are constantly looking to the experts to help provide us with good advice for makeing our own individual judgements. With that being said, the advice of experts can only go so far. An expert on hurricanes can tell a community when a hurricane is prepared to hit and what precautions should be taken in preparing for it, but after it is all said and done, the community is what comes together to help pick up the aftermath of the hurricane.
I think I agree with this, also. It seems to me that in Socrates' day, the idea of experts being given the power would be one which carried much less stigma than it would today - because today we have exponentially more information available to us just as average citizens. Therefore, we also feel exponentially more able to make decisions or give our input.
That being said, I also agree with Kelli that some number of experts are necessary, if not the entire answer, in order to deal with the world in an intelligent way and to avoid a mob mentality. Not everyone will have the kind of expert knowledge that someone who has studied a particular topic would, no matter how much information is readily available to us. I'll take the middle road here: the expert opinions are necessary to ensure a fairly-considered response to any issue, but at the same time, the voice of the people must play a huge role in that response.
Of course, this also assumes a huge amount of morality and education/knowledge in the experts, which, as Saba pointed out, isn't always the case. When you get to the point that your experts aren't actually experts, but people merely hoping to gain power and/or be elected over and over and over, rather than investing themselves seriously in the betterment of society, I'm not really sure any of the above points for the experts stand. In that case, I imagine the power returns to the people, among which new experts arise who have a better grasp on issues pertinent to society. Or perhaps society goes down the proverbial tubes. Who knows?
As to the question of how to distinguish those with true expertise from the rest, I would say that to be deemed an “expert” one has to fall into one of a few categories. They are either those with the highest educational pedigrees or they are simply those who are most convincing to the public or those who have been most successful in the past in matters of statecraft.
I would argue against the claim that the people should only be consulted in situations where the experts have failed, simply due to the fact that in a crisis, it is not necessarily reasonable to expect a large population of people (I tend to believe that the larger a group of people, the more prone they are to widespread and irrational fear and misunderstanding in a crisis-an assumption that could be contested, but its just my opinion) to make a wise decision in selecting new leaders.
Selection of experts was not always conducted by election. In the Athenian method of selection by lot, more emphasis was placed on the wisdom of the citizen in the conduction of state affairs. One need only submit his name to be entered in the lottery, and everyone entered had an equal chance at selection. Once selected, of course they were subject to scrutiny and harsh consequences were inflicted on anyone using their political position unjustly. But this kind of direct democracy was a fairly effective way of eliminating corrupt selection of leaders and a way of utilizing the wisdom gained by someone who has lived in the state and personally felt the consequences of prior political decisions. Most people that would be termed experts today come from a socially elite class, and would have considerably less of this wisdom. Of course, this form of selection would not be feasible today, but there’s something to be learned from it.
We often have very good hindsight- so good that we think it was foresight. So if some experts make a huge mistake, I may recognize it afterwards and feel like I could have told them not to do what they did because look what happened. I don't think this is really fair though. Experts make mistakes, but I think its safe to bet they make less mistakes than nonexperts would have making the same decisions. If my car won't start, I will have it towed to a mechanic. If I want to know about the plusses and minuses of different forms of government, I will consult political scientists.
"what most of people think" is the last place I want to place my confidence, because I could end up marginalized and exploited for not sharing some majority belief or belonging to some majority group. When experts can't come to some sort of consensus and a decision needs to be made, then by default, leaving it to the people to decide might be alright.
I agree with two of your definitions, but what do you use as support for your argument that an "expert" can be a person who is "most convincing to the public"? This may be the mark of a good rhetorician, but skill in speaking does not necessarily qualify one to make policy decisions or lead a country.
I don't believe that the people "possess a unique form of wisdom" separate from the experts, per se, but the people do have a form of insight that is necessary to keep government from becoming (completely) corrupt and self-serving. Democratic elections allow the public to exercise some measure of control to keep the experts from creating an insulated ruling group. Also, given the size and diversity of our current "public," they are bound to consider angles of and solutions to problems that a limited set of experts with a limited set of information can overlook.
So, representative democracy, in which leaders are elected from the people by the people, is bound to fail?
Definitions that come from popular opinion can be derived from a natural order. People (the popular opinion) define murder as bad because it goes against the natural order of a civil society. On the flip, there are definitions that seem at first to come from a natural order whose origins truly reside within popular opinion: adults are wiser than adolescents. This appears at first to be a natural order, but it could be argued popular opinion (and sheer numbers) made it that way. I guess I'm trying to say that natural order and popular opinion are interdependent. Maybe the expert's wisdom can be found in knowing which of the two he or she would be best-served in making their definition appear to be derived from.
I would not argue that the people hold a certain kind of wisdom that isn't seen on a regular basis. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to apply on such a large scale with the kind of population we have today for exactly the reasons that Kelli stated. A small community can collectively make an intelligent decision that a single governor or a small group of 'experts' had failed to see. On the other hand, a huge population such as our own could be likened to an unruly mob; so many people that they can say what they want and not be held accountable for it. It's much too large a group to come to any kind of general consensus, at least.
Combine that with the number of issues, national and international, we have on our plates today. There are just too many intellectual fronts for any one person or such a large group to make any sort of intelligent, reasoned decisions on any subject, really. Not to make a jab at our own patriotism, but look at the results of 9/11. Two buildings and suddenly the nation wants to blow the hell out of an entire country which many people could not even point to on a map? I don't think so.
We're just not as well informed today, I argue, even with all the new forms of media and information flow, as a group like the ancient Athenians. This is not necessarily because we're dumb, or anything. I just don't think people really care.
Ultimately I think the people should make decisions based on general agreement. I think when power is given to "experts" it is often abused so if it is diffused into the hands of many, it is less powerful, and less likely to be abused. On the other hand, the general population is often not as informed as the "experts" and are more likely to make decisions without having sufficient knowledge (ex: voting).