Expertise plays an essential role in sustaining democracy, according to Liz Fisher, professor of environmental law at Oxford University’s Corpus Christi College.
“Expertise and democracy are not in opposition to each other—they’re fundamental to each other,” Fisher said. “What we are thinking about is how the interaction between experts, expert knowledge, and the processes of constitutional democracy operate with each other.”
The Schiller Institute for Integrated Science and Society, Boston College Law School, and the Program on Global Ethics and Social Trust co-hosted Fisher in an event titled “Geek Democracy: How to Be an ‘Expert’ in the Anthropocene,” as part of the Climate and Migration Lecture Series.
Fisher discussed how, in her experience, expertise has not always been viewed as complementary to democracy, but instead its opposite.
“I’ve been working in this space for many years, and what I’ve discovered is if you say ‘democracy,’ your audience smiles,” Fisher said. “If you say ‘expertise,’ your audience frowns. We think of democracy as warm, as alive. We think of expertise as rigid, cold, and hard, and we sort of think we should keep them apart from each other.”
Fisher explained that people are frequently tempted to view experts as either infallible “truth machines” whose word is final or as threats to democracy. Fisher argued, however, that it is possible to value both without priority.
“What we see is this idea that the choice we have is, ‘Do we pick democracy, or do we pick experts?’” Fisher said. “And that’s something we see in the public space, and it’s also something we often see in scholarship. In actual fact, it’s not that binary. We need both.”
Expertise comes with limitations, as experts tend to focus solely on details relevant to their scope of inquiry, Fisher said—a concept she illustrated through the “Invisible Gorilla” test.
“In [the Invisible Gorilla test], people are handing around a basketball,” Fisher said. “Some have white T-shirts, some have black. And you’re asked, ‘How many times does someone with a black T-shirt hold the basketball?’ So you watch the clip, and that’s what you focus on. In the middle of it, someone in a gorilla suit runs on, dances about, and then you’re asked, ‘How many times did someone with a black T-shirt [hold the basketball]? And by the way, did you notice anything else?’ And about half the people don’t notice the gorilla.”
Fisher emphasized that democracy isn’t just reliant on expertise, but expertise is also reliant on democracy—the two are reciprocal. To demonstrate this, Fisher displayed a photograph of a housing development in Australia.
In the image, multiple individuals observe and listen as two commissioners decide how to allocate the site. Although the visit appears expert-driven, many people are involved in the process, Fisher noted.
“That is the thickness of democracy,” Fisher said. “It doesn’t point in one way. It points in many different directions. There isn’t a lot of different expert knowledge in the resolution of that dispute, and it doesn’t have a simple resolution.”
Fisher said that an expert opinion is valuable only to those who respect it, and democracy is more meaningful when people make informed decisions.
“Expertise is not so much a destination, but it’s a process,” Fisher said. “It’s a commitment to a certain set of values. So much of what we do as an expert, and gaining our expertise, is invisible to others.”
Collaboration is essential in developing individual expertise, according to Fisher.
“Being an expert doesn’t mean knowing everything,” Fisher said. “It’s being an expert in a tiny area and collaborating with others who are experts in what they do. There’s nothing quite like it—it’s incredible.”
