The Last Minute Hero

I have mentioned in a previous blog that when I was at school back in the 1970s and doing my ‘O’ Levels, I came to the conclusion that no matter how hard I worked I would be very unlikely to pass French. It made sense to sacrifice the subject and concentrate on the ones I was better at. Looking back, passing French would have been much more beneficial than say, Physics but the name of the game was passing exams, not acquiring knowledge for future use.

The French exam came in at least two parts – it may have been three, I really can’t remember more than fifty years on – and one part was Spoken French. This was an absolute fiasco for me. While the written exam was bad enough, at least my lack of knowledge and preparation would not come to light until the results came out a couple of months later. In a spoken exam with an external examiner sitting opposite me and expecting some sort of coherent responses to his questions, my inadequacies were exposed immediately. In all of the spoken exams that particular examiner sat through, I doubt that the phrase “Je ne sais pas” was ever used so liberally.

Sure enough, when the ‘O’ Level results were published, I got the lowest grade of fail in French, although since my shortcomings were well known to my teachers, I was also entered in GCE French, where I scraped a Grade 3, the equivalent of an ‘O’ level pass (goodness knows how!) My experience in the subject was ample proof of the aphorism, “Fail to prepare and you prepare to fail,” even if it was my choice not to prepare.

It may be a solely British trait, although I suspect not, but in this country we do love the bumbling, unprepared amateur who comes along and wins the day against the professionals, be it in sport or any other enterprise. Look at Ealing Comedies like The Lavender Hill Mob, or Passport to Pimlico, or The Titfield Thunderbolt, and it is ordinary people with no discernible talent for something, ‘giving it a go’ and succeeding (to a point). Look at Four Weddings and a Funeral, which opens with the bumbling  Best Man, Charles (Hugh Grant, premiering the role that he has reprised in pretty much every film he has made since) turning up late for the wedding, forgetting the rings, and delivering a witty and well received speech with not a shred of apparent preparation, and then bedding the glamourous and enigmatic American, Carrie (Andie McDowell).

In sporting fiction – especially the comics that I read as a kid – there’s a trope of the match between the team of highly skilled, highly trained, somewhat earnest and humourless professionals taking on a rag-tag team of under-prepared amateurs, who turn up having had no training, with no plan and lacking the proper equipment, and win. Quite often this win is achieved by the late arrival of one superstar talent whose preparation is even more lacking than the rest of his team. In borrowed and mismatching kit, this last-minute hero secures victory with the winning goal, try, wicket, or runs as appropriate to the sport.

The victory against seemingly superior opposition, and against insuperable odds is not confined to sport. Books, films, and TV programmes all have stories of derring-do in which the hero – preferably someone who has retired from their profession, or is totally unsuited for the role, having no expertise in the matter in hand – is plucked (preferably, reluctantly) from their now mundane existence and thrust into a position where they must save the day from whatever existential threat the family/team/community/planet, is facing. And of course, he (or she) triumphs.

All the better if our ill-prepared hero wins the day single-handedly against some villain who possesses a vast army of minions, incredible, advanced technology, and a superiority complex. Better still if our hero has character defects (cowardice, stupidity, phobias, addictions, etc), which they overcome in the process of their victory. Overcoming their own demons and finding redemption is as common, and as critical, as their defeating their adversary in these stories.

Perhaps the frequency with which we see, read, or hear stories of (fictional) heroes who have no specialist knowledge, or particular talent for something, but do have plenty of good old fashioned grit and pluck, triumphing over some well-equipped, knowledgeable, foe is why we have developed a mistrust for experts in recent years.

Michael Gove once said that people have ‘had enough of experts,’ although he rowed back on that slightly, saying that his words had been taken out of context. I tired of that being wheeled out as a justification or in mitigation for a comment a long while ago. Even in context, the remark is usually as egregious as it was allegedly out of context.

What Gove says that he meant was that “people have had enough of experts from organizations with acronyms that have got things so wrong in the past.” Amounts to the same thing really, as no expert is infallible, but on balance, I’d rather trust an expert than a layman in connection with their particular subject; I've got some plumbing repairs necessary, which I'd rather trust to an expert, qualified plumber than to an enthusiastic amateur, no matter how much common sense they may have. 

And, so it seems, would Michael Gove as two years after expressing his mistrust of experts during the 2016 EU referendum campaign, he was lauding them in work on climate change that had been done for him in his role as environment secretary. Naturally, it helps if the experts support your position.

The problem with experts is that they cannot be infallible, especially when predicting the future, hence the mistrust that Michael Gove had in those experts who he believed had got things wrong in the past. Most mistrust of experts is born out of them saying things with which we don’t agree, or which are unpopular and don’t support expectations, not because they are necessarily wrong. 

We are all experts at something or the other; for instance, I once actually had a job where my role was described as Subject Matter Expert. This did not mean that I knew absolutely everything about the subject, nor did it make me infallible, but I was right an awful lot more often than I was wrong. Experts may deal with facts which are immutable and thus not open to challenge, but they usually have to use those facts to interpret, extrapolate, and predict. These are not always exact sciences; hence experts don’t always agree and don’t always get things right.

In the face of expert commentary that we don’t like, we are sometimes asked to use what our Prime Minister has recently described as “"good, solid British common sense." I don’t think that Britain has a monopoly on common sense, nor that British common sense is better than German common sense, or New Zealand common sense; in fact, recent events seem to suggest that the quality of British common sense has declined recently.

A belief that common sense is an adequate substitute for know-how, or having faith in those with expertise, can be exacerbated by a failure to recognise one’s limitations. Common sense can be used to justify making a decision that flies in the face of expert advice that we find inconvenient. In extremis, this leads to the form of cognitive bias known as the Dunning-Kruger effect in which people of low ability overestimate their ability and are unable to recognise their lack of ability. This can lead to some outrageously counter-intuitive statements and actions on the part of the afflicted.

Depending on circumstances, it can be startling to watch people make decisions based not facts, but on a hunch, preferring to trust their own gut feeling because they do not understand the evidence-based conclusions reached by experts in the field or because those conclusions are inconvenient. When this happens and the outcome is neither life-threatening, dangerous or otherwise costly, then it matters little – it can even be mildly amusing - right now, however…