The age of the dilettante

We live in the age of the dilettante, when everyone’s opinion is as good as everyone else’s.

The obvious problem with this approach to knowledge is that while in certain spheres it might be valid, in the vast amount of knowledge that we now have it is a recipe for obscurantism and the dissemination of ignorance.

My perspective, I grant, is shaped by having spent 40 years this year seeking to understand the world of the long 18th century and, especially, the community of the English Particular Baptists. While I began my academic career nearly 50 years ago with the world of late Antiquity, by the early 1990s I was almost exclusively writing academic books and articles about my 18th-century forebears, with whose Christian tradition I most closely identify.