I am a pundit, somebody who opines and comments on the news. There are no real qualifications to punditry though having a rudimentary way with words and good general knowledge helps. That is one reason there is a constant oversupply of would-be pundits and why it is quite hard to become established as one.
Experts are different. They are, by definition, specialists. Their knowledge is concentrated in a narrow field which gives them what we refer to, of course, as expertise. Pundits make great pub quiz team members but, in public life, their role is generally limited to being translators of ideas rather than originators of them. While it's fashionable to judge pundits harshly, the fact is that without them the disconnect between true intellectuals and the public would be largely unbridgeable. We have our place.
The difficulty is that punditry is both fun and easy to do. This presents an ever-present temptation to experts to parlay the deference due to their expertise into a platform on other subjects outside their field of study. To, in other words, become pundits.
And this is their right. There are no qualifications to become a pundit because the existence of pundits is just an outcome of a culture that lets anyone have their say on anything wherever they can find a platform to say it. You can't tell somebody they're not entitled to express an opinion on geopolitics just because they have a doctorate in linguistics.
There is, however, a warning attached to this.
In the normal course of things, we accord more respect to experts than pundits because of the intense level of subject-matter knowledge held by experts in their respective fields. That hold can be broken when experts venture into topics where they are less sure-footed. Especially when they seek to clothe their opinions in the authority of expertise in another field.
It is one thing for experts to venture their views on questions of public import as citizens in a body politic. It is quite another when they assume a voice of authority on questions in which they are not authorities. Usually, this is pretty harmless. Among the punditry, we all like to laugh at the professor who pontificates on a subject in which they have no instruction and make fools of themselves in the process. Seeing the renowned biologist Richard Dawkins make schoolboy errors as he opines of questions of metaphysics and history is, if nothing else, a useful egalitarian tonic.
But sometimes the times are extraordinary enough that people in needed fields do well to exercise discretion and circumspection when it comes to political matters. Right now, we need to hear from epidemiologists and we need the public to listen to them. Their views on political economy, however, are less vital for this emergency and it's not necessarily a good thing for experts to give doubters an excuse to lampoon them and mentally discount their communications on the more vital areas of their work.
Is this entirely fair? Not really. And there can be no question of trying to muzzle anybody to prevent them from expressing their views on subjects of public importance. But the present emergency calls for all of us to voluntarily exercise some discipline, forbearance and circumspection for the common good. That goes for members of the public, it goes for pundits and, yes, it goes for experts too.