Jonathan McNair

In 2017, author Tom Nichols published a book titled The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters. Nichols makes the case that we are experiencing “the growth of an irrational conviction among Americans that everyone is as smart as everyone else” (p. 7).

Do you ever get tired of hearing about all the struggles that so many people face in our world? One day, you hear that three in ten people don’t have access to good, safe water in their homes. That’s 2.1 billion people. The next day, you read that in Ghana, 36 percent of public schools lack toilet facilities. Then, you see a YouTube video highlighting the lack of electricity typical in many corners of the world, making it virtually impossible for vast numbers of people to enjoy so much of the modern way of life that is familiar to the rest of us.

Do you have a family cow? It’s quite likely that you don’t, and it’s likely that none of your neighbors do either. But if you lived in the 18th or 19th centuries, chances are you’d have a cow, a horse, or maybe an ox. You’d probably have some chickens. You’d certainly have a garden for vegetables, and a few acres of land on which to scratch out a living. In the late 1700s, there were roughly two million people living in the American colonies. The most populous colony was Virginia, with about 500,000 of those people.