Numb Expert or Enthusiastic Novice?

On Enlightenment and Disenchantment

A new paper (h/t Tyler Cowen’s Marginal Revolution) states that expertise correlates with emotional numbness. The ability to process and categorize information entails emotional suppression, the authors claim. Connoisseurs were originally motivated by joy, but as they become more fine-tuned in their understanding of their domain, they lost their original excitement. There is a law of diminishing emotional returns to expertise.

For folks who have read and follow Shunruyi Suzuki’s concept of Beginner’s Mind, the above argument makes intuitive sense. That is why Suzuki instructs master meditators not to become experts, but to retain their sense of novelty. He makes emotional openness itself, paradoxically, a domain of mastery.

G.K. Chesterton imagines that every day God tells the sun to rise as if God were a child saying “do it again.” Whereas adults find repetition tedious, children are endlessly thrilled by it, perhaps because they spot subtle differences despite apparent sameness, or else, because for them, sameness itself is miraculous. Chesterton understands the tradeoff between expertise and emotional vitality and opts for the latter, making God a victim of surprise rather than an all-knowing grandmaster.

Though Chesterton doesn’t say it, I will: At a formal level, God can’t be both an expert in the world and a lover of it. For God to love the world, God must suppress God’s expertise. To the extent that God knows everything, God is indistinguishable from smart AI, a seamless operator with zero attachment.

At the human level—if the paper is correct (and I think it is)—we face a trade-off between enthusiasm and understanding. This might explain the disconnect and mutual suspicion between experts and lay-people that seems to dominate contemporary culture.

The populist hatred of elites and the elite condescension toward “deplorable” might be based, in part, on an archetypal and ahistorical tension between “head” and “heart.”

Max Weber already diagnosed this tension when he described modernity as “disenchanted,” and criticized followers of modern reason as “sensualists without spirit.”

How, then, to cope—if enchantment is predicated on non-understanding and understanding is predicated on numbness? Is there a middle way? A way to square the circle? Or do you reject the premise of a tradeoff?

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