Expert by Roger Kneebone review – the value of expertise
Before the Brexit referendum in 2016, Michael Gove announced that Britain had had enough of experts, depicting them as out of touch and elitist. This anti-intellectualism became commonplace in the UK and the US, despite some notable Tory U-turns. With the unprecedented public health crisis of Covid-19, the expert is back in fashion. Virologists, epidemiologists, statisticians, politicians and members of the public share a language of information about the coronavirus, ranging from social distancing, self-isolation and lockdown to covidiot, covexit and Barnard Castle. But whose knowledge and expertise counts?
This question has a long and complex history that encompasses the meanings of “truth” as well as the evolution of the scientific method. The term “expert” comes from the mid-19th century, with its focus on objective truth, and the rise of the professions, especially as a white, male, scientific enterprise (and in contrast to feminised and “morally useful” art subjects). This hierarchy of science over humanities persists, though in the era of fake news, scientific expertise is apparently up for grabs since access to data is democratised.
It is the ability to interpret that data, without political or social influence, that gives rise to true expertise, according to Independent Sage (an alternative to the government’s own Sage – the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies). Yet it is transparency rather than objectivity that is arguably at stake. For just as science and politics can never be separated (in shaping agendas, defining success, or determining the gender and ethnicity of those who “do science”), the notion of “the expert” is indivisible from the environments in which they exist – a theme familiar to historians of science and medicine.
Roger Kneebone’s Expert is less concerned with these social and political contexts than in the fundamental importance of experts in enriching our lives and keeping us safe: from doctors and lawyers, to artists and plumbers, Kneebone argues that experts provide inestimable creative and civic worth. There is also a formula towards self-realisation as an expert that borrows from medieval craft classifications: from the apprentice mode (“doing time”), through the “journeyman” phase of developing a voice, to becoming a “master” and passing on that hard-won knowledge.
Kneebone’s skills as a surgical educator, science communicator and “expert on experts” are unparalleled. His writing conveys warmth, humility and a deep compassion for the philosophy as well as the mechanics of medicine. In recounting his own development, from taking bloods as a Manchester trainee to repairing severed arteries in Soweto, finding his voice as a GP in Trowbridge and leading on public engagement and teaching at Imperial College London, Kneebone invites readers to track their own pathways to expertise. Unlike Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, which popularised the so-called “10,000-hour rule” ( an over-simplification of the work of the psychologist K Anders Ericsson), Kneebone cautions that practise alone won’t make us the best, though being the best depends on practise. This slow learning is at odds with the “push for quick results” endemic in 21st-century culture.
What Kneebone beautifully articulates is the relationship between seeing and doing, mind and body in acquiring skills that initially seem impossible, only to become automatic. Since learning any craft involves the apprentice-journeyman-master pathway, he argues, tending to the similarities between different kinds of expertise reveals their commonalities. And these are emotional, physical, intellectual and sensory. Whether rooting around in a patient’s gut, playing in an orchestra, braising fish or fixing a dishwasher, the route to expertise is remarkably similar.
Critically, however, there is a distinction between becoming expert, and being seen as expert. One might argue that expertise lies not only in the embodied acquisition of skills, rituals and performances (what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu termed “habitus”) but also in the tacit acceptance of expertise by others. In this sense the ability to be “expert” remains influenced by gender, class and ethnicity – just as it was with the emergence of the professions – as evidenced by the devaluing of women’s skills in the industrial revolution and the second world war, and in the workplaces of today.
This phenomenon is implicit in Kneebone’s own reported experience, when he describes being wrongly addressed by a patient as “Doctor” while still a trainee. At this, he felt “proud, though also like an imposter”. There is often a different trajectory for women, and people of colour, for whom the presumption of expertise is notably absent. Thus, female and black consultants in hospitals are routinely mistaken for nurses or porters. Women tend to be trusted and listened to less frequently than men, even when experts. And traditional female labour, such as caring, is seldom viewed as “expertise”, since it is feminised as natural.
Kneebone’s book provides an opportunity for us to consider these inequalities, and reflect on the relationships between knowledge, expertise, trust and legitimacy, all critical concepts in the fake news era. By focusing on the lifelong nature of learning, and the arc by which skills and aptitudes are accessed, acquired and transmitted, Kneebone shows how “becoming expert” is an ongoing, embodied process. Yet it is also one which, even inadvertently through the practices of professional identity, reproduce social, political and economic hierarchies. The path to “expert” reveals as much about the values of society as it does the individual acquisition of skills.
• Fay Bound Alberti’s A Biography of Loneliness is published by Oxford. Expert: Understanding the Path to Mastery by Roger Kneebone is published by Viking (£16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.