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.

I believe wholeheartedly that to understand such a world of the past, one must approach it with sympathy and humility, listening to the voices of those who are now part of the Church Triumphant. And what I wish to especially emphasise in this short piece is that such listening takes patience and time. Oodles of time! Woe to the student of such an era, or any era of history, who thinks that they can casually drop into this world of the past now and then, and despite being really a dilettante, try to pass themselves off as an expert.

Now to the present day. If it has taken me 40 years of immersion in the world of the 18th-century Particular Baptist churches in England to arrive at a degree of comprehension and understanding (and there are days when I feel I know less now than when I began), should not all of the political dilettantes active on social media take heed about their analyses of the present-day about which they feel so confident.

First off, being in the woods blocks the sight of the shape of the woods. To really understand our present-day, we need to be 40 to 50 years down the road. When, in 1816‒1818, John Ryland, Jr. came to analyse the theological paralysis that had gripped his Particular Baptist community for much of the 18th century, he found it in one source: the hyper-Calvinism of London Baptists like John Brine and John Gill. But from our vantage point and with far more knowledge of his world, it is obvious that there are a multitude of causes for the stagnation of the Baptist cause that, to his dear friend Andrew Fuller, was nigh unto becoming a “dunghill”!

And then, given the complexity of modern Western society (a complexity that has actually ever been part and parcel of the human scene), it strikes me that one would need to spend most of one’s time studying the socio-political context of this era in history, as well as the economics at work, and also the philosophical and psychological factors at work in our worlds, to have a fair enough comprehension of what is happening in our day to pass a valid judgement. If you wish to have a good shot at being knowledgeable about such, you will need to spend 40‒50 hours a week, for a decade or two, studying the world in which we live. And then have the humility to admit you might well be wrong in some of your evaluations.

The acquisition of intellectual expertise takes time, patience, and above all, epistemic [relating to knowledge] humility.