Quotes about Specialization

Literature, like anything else, can become a wearisome business if you make a lifetime specialty of it. A healthy, wholesome man would no more spend his entire life reading great books than he would packing cookies for Nabisco.

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

Human cultures progress through a dance of specialization and integration.  The problem is that the human trait of abstract thinking has allowed our ability to specialize to outpace our ability to integrate knowledge.  Thus, we know more and more details about nothing particularly relevant.  Life becomes a game of trivia played between people who don't have an intrinsic understanding of who, or what, they are and who have little idea how larger social, scientific and cultural systems operate. 

All the "freedom" in the world can not solve this problem, but rather leads to greater confusion.  Lack of freedom throws us into panick and again causes confusion.  We often seek grounding in religion or political movements, but the price of suspending our disbelief is our relinquishment of authority to others no more qualified than the rest of us.  We can not afford, in our globalized, interdependent world, to turn over our otherwise intelligent minds to ideologies and theologies.  We can not afford the divisiveness and arrogance inherent when one believes that theirs is the only way, the "right" way, and that other paths are "evil" or inferior even if they work very well.

If we declare our race to be HUMAN, our religion to be KINDNESS and our nature to be A WONDERFUL SPECIES OF PRIMATES, we will gradually learn to exercise rational control over our minds, our culture and our planet.

Nietzsche is absolutely correct, even more correct today than when he wrote it in Thus Spake Zarathustra:  I looked all about me for human beings but all I saw were fragments, deformed creatures with too much eye or too much ear.  This is what the modern culture of specialized intellect--the kind of one-sidedness that banausic utilitarianism alone can value--works so hard to produce.