**Update: Here is the link for the Zoom bookclub meeting tomorrow: https://tinyurl.com/y97sde9g
We will start at 10:30, but I'll be on about 10 minutes early (at 10:20) if anyone wants to join and work out any kinks beforehand.
Looking forward to it!**

For our July book club, we will be reading The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters by Tom Nichols. This seems even more timely now than when we chose the book for the book club, since the current global pandemic has brought trust (or a lack thereof) in science and public health to the forefront.

Discussion will take place via Zoom. Details for joining the call will be available at http://www.facebook.com/cnyhumanists/ closer to the event.

About the book

Technology and increasing levels of education have exposed people to more information than ever before. These societal gains, however, have also helped fuel a surge in narcissistic and misguided intellectual egalitarianism that has crippled informed debates on any number of issues. Today, everyone knows everything: with only a quick trip through WebMD or Wikipedia, average citizens believe themselves to be on an equal intellectual footing with doctors and diplomats. All voices, even the most ridiculous, demand to be taken with equal seriousness, and any claim to the contrary is dismissed as undemocratic elitism.

Tom Nichols' The Death of Expertise shows how this rejection of experts has occurred: the openness of the internet, the emergence of a customer satisfaction model in higher education, and the transformation of the news industry into a 24 hour entertainment machine, among other reasons. Paradoxically, the increasingly democratic dissemination of information, rather than producing an educated public, has instead created an army of ill informed and angry citizens who denounce intellectual achievement. When ordinary citizens believe that no one knows more than anyone else, democratic institutions themselves are in danger of falling either to populism or to technocracy or, in the worst case, a combination of both. An update to the 2017breakout hit, the paperback edition of The Death of Expertise provides a new foreword to cover the alarming exacerbation of these trends in the aftermath of Donald Trump's election. Judging from events on the ground since it first published, The Death of Expertise issues a warning about the stability and survival of modern democracy in the Information Age that is even more important today.

Recent Media featuring the Author

A recent interview with Tom Nichols about how expertise is being treated during the pandemic. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/amanpour-and-company/video/why-dont-americans-trust-experts-anymore/