When I was a sports-mad young lad of 10, my mother worried that I showed little interest in books. In response, she suggested we move to a house close to the Etobicoke Public Library so I might begin to take advantage of its offerings.

I took longer to respond than she hoped, but by university days books had become very important to me — as a professor of literature they became the substance and glue of my daily life.

My preference these days is for works of fiction, but my men’s book club in Peterborough has helped to widen the perimeters of my reading. Our group, known affectionately as The Original Kawartha Men’s Book Club, recently introduced me to Tom Nichols’s “The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters.”

And, as has often been the case, I was impressed by the suggestion. The choice was made by John Boyko who, as many of you know, is a very fine non-fiction writer himself. 

Nichols argues that America today has lost confidence in its educated class, in those people with advanced degrees and impressive credentials who advise the country’s leaders on matters of health, science, space, borders, and international alliances. Think George F. Kennan, Henry Kissinger, and Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Low levels of information

For Nichols, “the death of expertise” is a different problem from “the historical fact” of low levels of information and attention “among (American) laypeople.” “The issue is not indifference to established knowledge; it’s the emergence of a positive HOSTILITY to such knowledge. This is new in American culture, and it represents the aggressive replacement of expert views … with the insistence that every opinion on any matter is as good as every other. This is a remarkable change in our public discourse.”

A retired professor from the U.S. Naval War College, an expert in Russian affairs, and a staff writer for “The Atlantic,” Nichols sees this change as “unprecedented” and........

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