An acquaintance wondered if I was \u201choodwinked by expert culture.\u201d What a provocative phrase! (Provocative is a compliment, because it provokes my thought, not my defensiveness.) I responded, \u201cYou might be right. Blind spots happen.\u201d But what is \u201cexpert culture?\u201d Is it the received knowledge of the dominant worldview, what is taught by those whom folks think know?\u201d <\/p>\n
(I went on to say:) \u201cI am by no means in awe of these folks and hold in my consciousness to a growing degree each year the awareness that what they say may:
a. Arise from a medium-smart or not-very-smart-at-all consciousness. The difference is great! It\u2019s not a matter of real cleverness, but rather a nimbleness of mind that is willing to call one\u2019s own assumptions into question. Also (b), many experts have been and may well be simply mistaken. C. I keep in mind the possibility that so-called experts are often opinionated, their opinions clung to out of base prejudice and the need to maintain the illusion of being \u201cright.\u201d <\/p>\n
I allow that experts are sometimes right on for the reasons they give, or right on but not for those reasons; rather, they\u2019re right, or partly right for other more interesting reasons. Most often they (and sometimes I, too) are partly right and partly wrong, which offers an interesting challenge of dissection and analysis and discernment. <\/p>\n
Often so-called experts have attained their status in the eyes of others who are embedded in the worldview of the early or even mid-20th century. Since I keep these options in mind, I don\u2019t assume I\u2019m \u201choodwinked.\u201d However, I may end up buying something that I shouldn\u2019t, and that is because someone else in the dialectic of culture has thought of an antithesis that neither of us has thought of; but that\u2019s not being \u201choodwinked\u201d so much as \u201cAh, that might be a good alternative to consider.\u201d It\u2019s the stuff that marks the gradual advance of awakening on our planet. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
An acquaintance wondered if I was \u201choodwinked by expert culture.\u201d What a provocative phrase! (Provocative is a compliment, because it provokes my thought, not my defensiveness.) I responded, \u201cYou might be right. Blind spots happen.\u201d But what is \u201cexpert culture?\u201d Is it the received knowledge of the dominant worldview, what is taught by those whom […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,11,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-papers","category-literacy","category-wisdom-ing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=217"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}