Specialization

From consumer appliances that save time and energy (dishwashers, self-cleaning ovens and microwave ovens!) to objects which help us multi-task our time (tapes to learn French in your sleep, meals on a stick!) to experts that help us manage our lives (accountants, pet psychologists, house cleaners, financial planners!), we’re all focused on efficiency. The end goal is to specialize so effectively in one particular task that you become expert at it – everything else can be parceled out to the lowest bidder.

What do we achieve, as a society, from this specialization of time? We have the highest standard of living in the world when measured in strictly material terms. The marketing departments of many Fortune-500 company would have us believe that this is the entirety of human motivation and satisfaction.

But many people realize that this is not the end goal of their lives. They want to spend more time with their families, or time pursuing the parts of their life that provide them with the most joy. But somehow, these other demands seldom seem to win out in the end. The demands of professionalism, careerism, and intense specialization are such that most people seem unable to voluntarily fall behind the rest of the pack.

Many years ago, Follett wrote that orders are disobeyed when they go against human nature (Follett. The Giving of Orders. Classics of Public Administration, pp. 37-43). This is also true for our daily activities, which are increasingly being managed by a host of specialists. The more complex our social structures become, the more they rub up against human nature.

Specialization is a form of technology, and like any technology it creates a disconnect between people and the appendage/skill that it took the place of (McLuhan. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man). A society that intensely specializes creates a rift between common sense (intuitive human nature) and the rules necessary to manage a complex society.

For example, common sense argues that local conditions should have bearing on who receives government benefits intended to help people who are temporarily down on their luck. (June, the single mother who everyone in town knows is a hard worker, deserves preference over the lazy bum Joe who never pays his child support on time). But complex bureaucracies cannot abode decisions like this to be made at the local level, as it would create disunity within the system. This is one example of how human nature and specialization can conflict.

This creates a deeper conflict, because the essence of human life is work -- work with meaning, purpose, and direction. Much of this work rubs against the grain of human nature (Gatto. The Underground History of American Education). Very few tasks in our society today have anything more than an abstract sense of meaning, purpose, and direction.

Even professions considered to be filled with meaning and purpose, such as education, are increasingly abstracted. Modern teachers do not produce students who can read and analyze complex works, they teach proscribed curricula that produces students capable of getting 70% of multiple choice questions right on their tests. There is overlap between these two goals, but the overlap is abstract and not terribly satisfying -- as evidenced by the fact that over half of new teachers leave the profession within the first five years.

This unhappiness with jobs that purport to be of service to others is not isolated to education. It is endemic in many professions.

McKnight notes a common refrain from young people, many of who ask him some variation of: “Can you tell me what good work needs to be done in America? I thought that professional training would lead me to good work, but it has led me to live off some people who don’t need me and others I can’t help."

McKnight notes that many service-oriented jobs, such as teaching and nursing, have a deep tendency to identify additional human needs in order to fund their own continued growth. This creation of deficiency in other people is also troubling to many people:

"The politics for a new definition of legitimate work in America may grow from the confluence of citizens angered by the professional invasion of personhood and young professionals disillusioned by lives wasted in the manufacture of need. The possibility for this politics requires an economy that can provide legitimate work for all those people who do not want to make a living by creating deficiencies in their neighbors.” (McKnight. The Careless Society: Community and Its Counterfeits.)

Quinn is also critical of our drive to create more programs, stating that:

“Programs make it possible to look busy and purposeful while failing. If programs actually did the things people expect them to do, then human society would be heaven: our governments would work, our schools would work, our law enforcement would work, our penal systems would work, and so on. When programs fail (as they inevitably do), this is blamed on things like poor design, lack of funds and staff, bad management, and inadequate training. When programs fail, look for them to be replaced by new ones with improved design, increased funding and staff, superior management, and better training. When these new programs fail (as they invariably do), this is blamed on poor design, lack of funds and staff, bad management, and inadequate training.
This is why we spend more and more on our failures every year. Most people accept this willingly enough, because they know they’re getting more every year: bigger budgets, more laws, more police, more prisons—more of everything that didn’t work last year or the year before that or the year before that.” (Quinn. Beyond Civilization.)

It is important to note that humans did not always live this way. The story of other ways of living is a blind spot in our society. We are taught to believe that our culture is wonderful, that many people wish they could live like us, and that cultures more primitive than ours simply aren’t smart enough to build grain silos and organize standing armies.

But these societies often had something that we did not -- a sense of purpose, meaning and joy.

This is not intended to idealize a highly complex subject, but I do believe that the we need to recognize that human needs are generally not fulfilled by intense specialization. For every professional athlete who deeply loves their ability to do nothing but throw basketballs into metal hoops, there are a stadium full of people who derive very little satisfaction or joy from their own work.

Specialization is something that humans have practiced for all, or most of our history. Men and women had different roles within a family, just as older people had different roles than teenagers within a tribe. Based on studies of the few remaining hunter-gatherer societies in the 20th century, other specializations were also common -- such as tribal chief, medicine (wo)man, or 'that guy Joseph who is particularly adept at tracking wounded wildebeasts through the spring monsoons'.

There is a distinct difference, however, between specializations which are based on common sense and those which are based on organizational efficiency. It is common sense that not every member of a tribe can learn about the 11,000 plants and animals common to a bioregion, and that someone may specialize in maintaining a 'database' of this knowledge. However, it rubs against human nature when an 11,000 page rulebook determines whether or not a particular medical procedure will be covered by your insurer. Those whose job it is to tell sick people that, no, they cannot see a doctor or have a procedure performed -- these people are on the short and unhappy end of the organizational hierarchy stick.

This type of specialist did not used to exist:

"Hunter-gatherer societies ... contain no more than a few dozen distinct social personalities, while modern European censuses recognize 10,000 to 20,000 unique occupational roles, and industrial societies may contain overall more than 1,000,000 different kinds of social personalities." (Tainter. The Collapse of Complex Societies).

What we have, then, is a drive towards complexity that makes our lives less joyful.

This is the definition of insane or stupid ... I forget which one :P