Specialization

This will end up being the first ever personal blog post I have ever written, so perhaps that’s some cause for celebration, or perhaps misery, or perhaps indifference, I guess only time will tell. 

Considering this is a ‘personal’ blog, it would make sense to say something of my ‘person’, so perhaps a good way of doing that would be to talk about my day up to this point. 

Well, I started today off by running, that was pretty fun, it was foggy out so I had to stop every couple minutes or so to wipe my glasses off, although looking back perhaps that was just an excuse so I could catch my breath, that’s always been a bad habit of mine, stopping while running that is. You’d think eventually your lungs would like, I don’t know, grow stronger or something, like every other muscle does, but so far that doesn’t seem to be the case. Oh well. During the run an old man stopped me and told me that I had to work out both sides of my legs, and in order to do that, I should try running up hills backwards. Perhaps I will try that. 

The rest of the day is boring so I’ll spare the details. I went book shopping, then I went regular shopping, then I went on a walk and now I’m here. 

In the short time it took me to write a description of my day I’m beginning to suspect my personal life is not nearly so interesting as to warrant writing a personal blog (today was one of the more exciting days in this past week), so, in order to alleviate this I’ll try writing about something a little more general. 

Whilst running and walking today I was turning over and over in my head an idea I had read of in Wendell Berry's collection of essays called The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, namely, this idea he's threaded through all of the essays I’ve read so far of ‘specialization’. Berry characterizes this tendency towards specialization we see nowadays as a ‘disease of the modern character’, and he provides ample reasons for why he thinks this is the case.

Firstly, what does he mean by ‘specialization'? Well, he means something like the almost narcissistic tendency of modern life and education to corner people into doing one thing, at the expense of losing care for things not in one's sphere of experience. This is of course in opposition to the ‘generalist’, or someone who takes a concern in things much broader than themselves, perhaps at the cost of less self actualization and resources to do what they personally want, but with the benefit of promoting the good of the whole. 

In the past the concept of a ‘specialist’ was unthinkable, but nowadays, where people don’t have to provide their own food, shelter, etc., it makes sense to focus more of your efforts on one thing you’re good at or are fond of, as all of your basic needs are already met. This sounds good on paper, but according to Berry, it really isn’t. 

Why? Well, specialization inevitably leads to something of a disconnect between all the various spheres of life. For instance, a salesman has no concern on what sort of effect whatever device he’s selling has on the environment, a consumer cares not what it took to get food on his or her plate, they only care that it’s there. 

This disconnect naturally leads to an apathy towards all things which aren’t in our immediate awareness. There suddenly arises an unscalable wall between, let’s use Berry’s example, a scenic view and the viewer who views it. It will never occur to the viewer that they are in fact apart of the view themselves, not literally of course, but in some deeper sense, and in fact, our modern use of language deems such integral unity as, in some way, unthinkable, as in ‘not-thinkable’ or ‘not possible to be thought of’, not so much because of the idea’s novelty or absurdity, but more so because the way of life which leads people to view the world as unified simply doesn’t exist anymore. As much as modern experience may lead one to assume that all spheres of life are fragmentary, it is fact impossible for this to be the case, Berry writes that humans are no more outsiders to Creation than any other thing, this is a ‘uni - verse’ after all. 

And naturally, if humans do really believe they are separate from the rest of the world, that can only lead to feelings of anxiety, Berry writes about mankind, ‘He ought to be anxious, because he is helpless’, with the implicit assumption being that he is helpless because he is a specialist, and in doing only one thing, does virtually no thing. 

Berry certainly raises some good points, but, thinking in terms of practicality at least, I can’t see how I can be anything but a specialist in today’s world. It’s really impossible to imagine a life where I’m obligated to fulfill most of my own needs, much less the needs of others. Ultimately, Berry seems to be viewing the past ‘generalist’ lifestyle through something like rose tinted glasses, sure there are upsides, but it’s very possibly the case that such a lifestyle was much worse in some ways than what we got now. I can only guess though, it seems we’re too far down the ‘specialist’ track to turn back now, so I’ll never really know. 

Although, now that I think about it, maybe there's an analogy here to what that old man was saying. If I’d consider the whole of my legs, not just the front of them, I’d realize that I’ve neglected training the back of them, and will thus heed his advice and train them as well. That’s one way of being more of a ‘generalist’, I guess, not as radical as an entire lifestyle change, but better than nothing.