Casting doubt on expertise ...

... Lionel Trilling and the Social Imagination. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The towns in which Trilling’s young men from the provinces grow up are examples of community: they are small, and their residents know one another well. The metropolises that the young men set out to conquer are examples of society: one knows very little of most of the people one meets there, and one is bound to be indifferent to most of them. ... “Historians of European culture are in substantial agreement,” Trilling said, that with the emergence of society, “something like a mutation in human nature took place.”