Quote:
Originally Posted by TGS
Why is it so bad to rely on the thoughts, insights and arguments of others who have more experience and expertise in a particular field to help us work out what we think about something. This seems to be particularly prevalent in relation to the creative arts - it's the "I don't know anything about art, but I know what I like" syndrome. Fine, nobody is telling you what you should like, but to dismiss the opinions, thoughts and arguments of people who have often spent many years developing their expertise, putting it up to scrutiny, testing out how their ideas work as some kind of snobbery is itself a kind of inverse snobbery. It's an aspect of the anti-intellectualism that seems to be prevalent in much of western culture and is as damaging as anything the nasty big corporations might do.
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Actually, I believe it is doing to them what they themselves practise. Ignoring what they aren't interested in.
If the argument is that you need some great consensus to pronounce worthiness on some tome, then clearly what a handful of people think matters very little. You can't have it both ways.
Or, as G. K. Chesterton said :-
"HEREIN lies the peculiar significance, the peculiar sacredness even, of penny dreadfuls and the common printed matter made for our errand-boys. Here in dim and desperate forms, under the ban of our base culture, stormed at by silly magistrates, sneered at by silly schoolmasters -- here is the old popular literature still popular; here is the unmistakable voluminousness, the thousand-and-one tales of Dick Deadshot, like the thousand-and-one tales of Robin Hood. Here is the splendid and static boy, the boy who remains a boy through a thousand volumes and a thousand years. Here in mean alleys and dim shops, shadowed and shamed by the police, mankind is still driving its dark trade in heroes. And elsewhere, and in all ages, in braver fashion, under cleaner skies, the same eternal tale-telling still goes on, and the whole mortal world is a factory of immortals."
The last statement is ridiculous, however. Ignoring some so-called experts is on the same level as poisoning thousands of people with an industrial accident through carelessness?