Three important notes about this file

Experts Good

Intellectuals key- some fields require specialized knowledge

Bronner 04- prof of political science at Rutgers, PhD from Berkeley (Stephen, “Reclaiming the Enlightenment,” Columbia University Press, p. 77-78)

But praise for the amateur also has its limits. To ignore the need for critical disciplinary intellectuals with various forms of scientific expertise is to abdicate responsibility for a host of issues involving knowledge of fields ranging from physics and genetics to electronics and even environmentalism. There is surely an overabundance of jargon and mystification and, as has been mentioned before, the need exists for a new sensitivity to the vernacular. 39 But it is also the case that complex issues sometimes require complex language and, often for good reasons, fields generate their own vocabularies. A judgment is undoubtedly necessary with respect to whether the language employed in a work is necessary for illuminating the issue under investigation: that judgment, however, can never be made in advance. There must be a place for the technocrat with a political conscience as surely as for the humanist with a particular specialty. The battle against oppression requires a multi-frontal strategy. Best to consider the words of Primo Levi who understood the critical intellectual as a “person educated beyond his daily trade, whose culture is alive insofar as it makes an effort to renew itself, and keep up to date, and who does not react with indifference or irritation when confronted by any branch of knowledge, even though, obviously, he cannot cultivate all of them.”

The alternative to expertise is naïve faith- Palin prove this is disastrous

Harris 08- Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA, CEO of Project Reason (Sam, “When Atheists Attack,” http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2008/09/19/when-atheists-attack.html)

The prospects of a Palin administration are far more frightening, in fact, than those of a Palin Institute for Pediatric Neurosurgery. Ask yourself: how has "elitism" become a bad word in American politics? There is simply no other walk of life in which extraordinary talent and rigorous training are denigrated. We want elite pilots to fly our planes, elite troops to undertake our most critical missions, elite athletes to represent us in competition and elite scientists to devote the most productive years of their lives to curing our diseases. And yet, when it comes time to vest people with even greater responsibilities, we consider it a virtue to shun any and all standards of excellence. When it comes to choosing the people whose thoughts and actions will decide the fates of millions, then we suddenly want someone just like us, someone fit to have a beer with, someone down-to-earth—in fact, almost anyone, provided that he or she doesn't seem too intelligent or well educated. I believe that with the nomination of Sarah Palin for the vice presidency, the silliness of our politics has finally put our nation at risk. The world is growing more complex—and dangerous—with each passing hour, and our position within it growing more precarious. Should she become president, Palin seems capable of enacting policies so detached from the common interests of humanity, and from empirical reality, as to unite the entire world against us. When asked why she is qualified to shoulder more responsibility than any person has held in human history, Palin cites her refusal to hesitate. "You can't blink," she told Gibson repeatedly, as though this were a primordial truth of wise governance. Let us hope that a President Palin would blink, again and again, while more thoughtful people decide the fate of civilization.

Our argument is not that experts are infallible, but that they are credible - their totalizing rejection is too extreme

Walton 97- PhD from the University of Toronto (Douglas, “Appeal to Expert Opinion: Arguments from Authority,” p. 29-30, Google Books)

The problem with appeal to expert opinion as a type of argument is that people in the past have tended to swing to extremes. The modern viewpoint has tended to assume that the method of science is the only kind of thinking that has validity and represents the truth. This view tends to defer to authority too much, thinking of the expert in absolute terms as someone who knows everything about his or her subject and who, consequently, cannot be questioned with any credibility by a non-expert. The postmodernist viewpoint, going to the other extreme, rejects authority as an elitist conception and refuses to defer to it at all. The problem with this pendulum reaction is that appeal to expert opinion as a type of argument cannot be evaluated reasonably. We need to seek out a middle way between these extremes if it is to be analyzed as a rational and useful kind of argument. Expert opinion needs to be treated as an argument that has some weight of presumption in its favor, but is not absolute, and is inherently open to critical questioning.

T/ disdain for expertism devolves into jingoism

Lilla 08- professor of humanities at Columbia (Mark, “The Perils of ‘Populist Chic’”, http://sec.online.wsj.com/article/SB122610558004810243.html?mod=article-outset-box)

The die was cast. Over the next 25 years there grew up a new generation of conservative writers who cultivated none of their elders' intellectual virtues -- indeed, who saw themselves as counter-intellectuals. Most are well-educated and many have attended Ivy League universities; in fact, one of the masterminds of the Palin nomination was once a Harvard professor. But their function within the conservative movement is no longer to educate and ennoble a populist political tendency, it is to defend that tendency against the supposedly monolithic and uniformly hostile educated classes. They mock the advice of Nobel Prize-winning economists and praise the financial acumen of plumbers and builders. They ridicule ambassadors and diplomats while promoting jingoistic journalists who have never lived abroad and speak no foreign languages. And with the rise of shock radio and television, they have found a large, popular audience that eagerly absorbs their contempt for intellectual elites. They hoped to shape that audience, but the truth is that their audience has now shaped them. Back in the '70s, conservative intellectuals loved to talk about "radical chic," the well-known tendency of educated, often wealthy liberals to project their political fantasies onto brutal revolutionaries and street thugs, and romanticize their "struggles." But "populist chic" is just the inversion of "radical chic," and is no less absurd, comical or ominous. Traditional conservatives were always suspicious of populism, and they were right to be. They saw elites as a fact of political life, even of democratic life. What matters in democracy is that those elites acquire their positions through talent and experience, and that they be educated to serve the public good. But it also matters that they own up to their elite status and defend the need for elites. They must be friends of democracy while protecting it, and themselves, from the leveling and vulgarization all democracy tends toward. Writing recently in the New York Times, David Brooks noted correctly (if belatedly) that conservatives' "disdain for liberal intellectuals" had slipped into "disdain for the educated class as a whole," and worried that the Republican Party was alienating educated voters. I couldn't care less about the future of the Republican Party, but I do care about the quality of political thinking and judgment in the country as a whole. There was a time when conservative intellectuals raised the level of American public debate and helped to keep it sober. Those days are gone. As for political judgment, the promotion of Sarah Palin as a possible world leader speaks for itself. The Republican Party and the political right will survive, but the conservative intellectual tradition is already dead. And all of us, even liberals like myself, are poorer for it.