“Specialization is for insects.”
–Martin
The benefits to the post-Enlightenment world of career specialization are so well known and rehearsed that they have become a part of the mythology of modernization. What schoolboy cannot recite, for example, the civilizing effects of the division of labor on primitive societies? Of pottery, tool making, hunting, and farming? What teacher of history bothers even to question the desirability of this increased specialization, given its necessary confluence with such unquestioned boons to human living as urbanization, commerce, the emergence of the middle class, and the phenomenon of leisure—that fertile soil for democracy? It seems to go without saying: as people come together to create societies, individuals enrich the lives of their neighbors with the products of increasingly specialized skills.
The perniciousness of this myth of development is that it ignores the central question of human existence—namely, the purpose of life. “What does it mean to be human?” seems too broad, too ethereal a question for a career man or woman to ponder. The career specialization that gives us ever faster cars and computers is a symptom of a great spiritual sickness, a plague that has been nibbling almost imperceptibly at the human soul ever since the advent of modernity. Specialization has, I grant, propelled every large scale human development since the agricultural revolution. It has also fed our post-Enlightenment preference for material goods over spiritual ones: the preference for dollar-and-cent accounting over metaphysical speculation, for example; or the preference for warehouses over cathedrals. (more…)
