Generalism Versus Specialism: An Inclusive Approach

     Some debates are destined to continue indefinitely. One that has stuck in my craw for many years arises from a famous Robert A. Heinlein / “Notebooks of Lazarus Long” entry:

     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.

     For all my admiration of Heinlein’s fiction and his overall philosophy, I find the above statement ludicrous...even offensive. It evoked two responses from me:

• “Can you do all that? Show me.”
• “At what cost to you and those you love?”

     Alma Boykin attempted to square the circle:

     I think it comes down to the question of applying Heinlein’s idea to an individual or to society. For the individual, I firmly believe that having a broad range of knowledge and skills is beneficial, and possibly life saving if not for you than for someone else. Granted, the character in the book who is speaking is older than Methuselah, and has had time and the need to learn all those skills and more, but look at what Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts used to be required to learn before they aged out of the programs. If you have a wide knowledge base, and skill base, I think you are better prepared for when life knocks you sideways and you have to re-group and possibly head in a different career direction or life-path.

     However, is that best for the economy and society as a whole? There is indeed value in specialization, both at the level of assembly work and manufacture (as Smith argues most famously in the pin-makers passage), and at the level of regional markets. Why should London not have more pin makers, and Scotland more sheep-raisers? Scotland had land and a declining population of people, with lots and lots of sheep (1760s-70s), while London had lots and lots of people who could do piece work and thus earn a living at a relatively unskilled task. It was far more efficient to send wool to London in exchange for mass-made pins and other goods, and far cheaper for all parties (so long as sea-trade remained viable), than for the Scots to try to make pins for themselves and for Londoners to raise sheep in the public parks. Today, in the 2010s, we see similar specialization from places with lots of people and intellectual capital as compared to places with natural resources and physical capital. Or we did, until the ‘Internet and other related forces threw a joker into the deck.

     Miss Boykin makes some good points, as do some of her commenters. Yet there is little to no consideration of the costs attendant upon electing specialization versus attempting the Way of the Renaissance Man. Whereupon your humble Curmudgeon must leap to fill the gap.

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     The most impressive individual I know personally shall be used to represent Generalism. I’ll call him Joe, mostly because that’s his name.

     Joe has been, at various points in his life, a soldier, an electrical engineer, an educator, a security specialist, a construction expert, a radio expert, a police officer and deputy sheriff, a husband and father, and more. He’s executed the duties of all those undertakings superbly. He and his wife live in a four-building compound he personally designed and built from the ground up. He maintains it almost entirely without assistance from specialists.

     My admiration for Joe is unbounded. I can’t think of anyone whose general knowledge and overall competence is greater. If there’s anyone walking the Earth today who’d have a fair chance of rebuilding civilization after a world-shaking calamity, Joe’s the man.

     But Joe is seventy years of age, and – to the extent possible for one who’s always available to help others with their problems – is retired from paid employment. He occasionally worries about money. He didn’t occupy any of his various niches long enough to accumulate a substantial “security stash.” Thus, he and his (also retired) wife must watch the pennies. Fortunately, they maintain a modest standard of living and have no debts whatsoever. Given the continuation of Social Security, they can make ends meet.

     Generalism, which can be supremely emotionally satisfying, has that cost.

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     Now for a representative of Specialism to counterbalance Joe. Once again, I’ll make use of a specialist I know well: in this case, myself.

     Early in life I chose software engineering as my trade. I’ve dabbled in a couple of other fields, but software has always been the main string to my occupational bow. Moreover, as I aged I became even more narrowly specialized: from programming generally to real-time programming, to real-time systems programming, to real-time systems simulation programming. As there was always a need for my specialty, and relatively few specialists in my sector at any given time, I was able to command a high salary, a large part of which I managed to save.

     I can’t fix my own wiring or plumbing. I can’t do more with an automobile than change the oil and filter. I certainly can’t do architecture or command the skills required for construction. When things of that sort need doing, I must consult specialists who do them for money. But I have an ample pension, a large nest egg, and no debts. Barring the complete collapse of the dollar, I’m secure against financial hazards. I can indulge my and my wife’s pastimes. I can enjoy my retirement without worrying about the future. (I can also drink a lot of wine.)

     Whereas Joe’s cost is a degree of financial uncertainty, my cost is a high degree of dependency upon paid specialists.

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     Most of us don’t consciously choose to become generalists or specialists. We tend to arrive at one of those poles by the implications of our priorities. He who opts to become a generalist will tend to place independence from outside assistance above other considerations. He who arrives at a specialty will tend to promote the financial advantages that accrue to a successful specialist. But each track has an associated cost that must be paid.

     Part of the price specialists such as myself must pay is a (hopefully innocent) envy of generalists like Joe. Words could never capture how ardently I wish I had his all-around competence. But it was not to be, precisely because of what I valued most.

     Societies don’t make conscious choices either. As I wrote in Freedom’s Scion:

     As they exited the tree-lined corridor from the commercial strip and turned onto the pathway to Morelon House, Althea halted her husband and turned to face him. “I can’t figure out what he’s planning, can you?”
     Martin gazed at her ruefully. “I’ve been thinking about that and nothing else, love. But I’m dead certain it’s nothing we’d enjoy.”
     “So what now?”
     He grimaced. “I don’t know. Postpone the trip, for sure. How to get our initial load up to Thule? Frankly, I don’t think we have much choice. Our clan had heavy-lift capacity at one point, didn’t it?”
     She nodded. “Yeah, but we sold the plane when Adam’s dad set up shop here. Charisse said she was happy to get rid of it. It made more sense to hire it out, so we wouldn’t have to maintain a plane and train pilots.”
     She glanced at the entrance to Morelon House. The old mansion looked as sturdy as ever. It presented an appearance of immutable strength to all who saw it. Yet it had begun to seem to her that the clan had undermined that strength in several ways, with several decisions. None of them had been fatal; indeed, when each was made, it had appeared to be the obvious choice. Yet in combination, they had rendered Clan Morelon massively dependent upon the wills and skills of a multitude of outsiders...persons who might not be as available or dependable as one would hope.
     —That’s the downside of the division of labor, Al.
     Yeah. I can see that, Grandpere. But how could we have avoided it?
     —By resisting all the temptations to specialize and to make use of specialists. By purchasing absolute self-sufficiency at the price of economic advantage. Which, incidentally, no clan or society known to history has ever managed to do.
     The incentives are too strong, aren’t they?
     —Judge for yourself, dear. Put yourself in Charisse’s place at the point when Jack Grenier moved into the area and started offering his services around. Would you have done as she did, knowing only what she did at the time?
     Probably. If there’s a lesson in this—
     —If there is, Al, no one has ever drawn it. The division of labor is the one and only path toward general prosperity. It can go to an incredible depth. A frightening depth. And it is utterly reliant upon the character and good will of the specialists. Let one critical specialty be corrupted by political forces, or conceive of a grudge against some other group, or even decide that it can rape its customers without fear of reprisal, and the destruction spreads faster than anyone can act to check it.

     The choice may not be a conscious one for an individual, but it’s guaranteed not to be a conscious one for a free and prosperous society.

On Knowing What You Are

     Quite some time ago, back at the late, lamented Eternity Road, I wrote a piece about the difference between what you are and who you are, and the importance of distinguishing accurately between the two. What you are is your nature; who you are is your individuality. The former is not truly malleable, while the latter is almost entirely a matter of free choice.

     Quite a bit of contemporary Sturm und Drang arises from the desire of some among us – unfortunately, a rather strident some – to invert those two categories. They want to believe that they can reshape their natures, and to compel the rest of us to agree that they’ve done so. Conversely, they treat much of their individuation as immutable – often using bits of it as a claim upon others.

     It occurred to me just a few minutes ago that a political party has the same dichotomy to deal with. Baldilocks’ recent article about the Democrats drew it into high relief:

     The Democrat Party’s latest strategy sits poorly with some of its loyal backers.

     The Democratic party is facing a revolt from the left after the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman said the party would back pro-life candidates in 2018.

     The DCCC chairman, Rep. Ben Ray Lujan, told The Hill that there will not be “a litmus test” for candidates on the subject of abortion. Lujan’s comments come as Democrats attempt to rebuild a broken party that has hemorrhaged elected offices on both the state and national level....

     Saying that the Democrat Party had taken the lead on abortion advocacy is a Captain Obvious assertion, but individual Democrats are far less homogenous in their opinions and beliefs about abortion. And now, after a long record of losing elections, with the 2016 election being the straw, the Party wants to win again.

     And such is the nature of politicians and political parties regardless of affiliation: say what you need to say — even repudiate your most revered sacrament – then, when you win, drop the mask.

     Juliette’s cynicism about politicians is a good match for my own. But more to my current point, what we’re seeing here is a test not for individuals but for the Democrat Party. It consists of a single issue – abortion – and whether the Party will enforce consistency about that issue upon its elected officials. For what Juliette has said above is quite correct: to the political creature, what matters is gaining and holding power; what he says or does to do so is merely a matter of choosing the most effective tactics.

     Everything we’ve seen from elected Democrats since Roe v. Wade suggests that trusting a Democrat to be sincerely pro-life is an act of utter naivety. But then, we’ve had a slew of indications that Republican politicians are no more reliable in their campaign promises, haven’t we?

     It’s becoming ever more imperative that Americans who continue to believe in the nation’s political arrangements reflect, objectively and dispassionately, on how well those arrangements have served us – and on how well they’ve served the true agendas of those in power.

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     Kurt Schlichter has recently penned two columns:

1. The Military Coup Against Donald Trump of 2018, Part I
2. The Military Coup Against Donald Trump of 2018, Part II

     ...which describe how the sort of coup against the Trump Administration some on the Left have been calling for might really eventuate. The outcome is anything but rosy: it entails the destruction of what remains of Constitutional protections for freedom of expression. Yet as Schlichter makes plain, that’s exactly what the plotters intended; they merely wanted to be the ones to decree what may and must not be said.

     At this time, the Left is striving by various methods to extinguish the expression of what we might call traditional American sentiments. As the Democrats don’t hold the preponderance of political power, it’s an effort that’s almost entirely in the hands of private forces. Of these, the “Antifa / Black Bloc” thugs are the most notorious. But we must not overlook other players, nominally apart from political maneuverings, who have taken a hand in the proceedings. The machinations of Leftists at Facebook and Twitter are already well known. Just today another such player has shown its cards:

     YouTube is, of course, a wholly owned subsidiary of Google. Just recently, YouTube / Google struck the accounts of wildly popular conservative / traditionalist lecturer Jordan B. Peterson, even to the extent of removing his access to his Gmail account. Massive protests forced Professor Peterson’s accounts to be restored...but had he been less popular and less widely admired for his forthright defenses of traditional arrangements, would the outcome have been different?

     Apparently, corporations of immense importance to contemporary self-expression have been deciding that what they are isn’t profit-seeking institutions after all, but rather organs of the Left. They’ve enlisted in the Left’s drive to construct a totalitarian State in which only the sentiments the “social justice warriors” approve shall be expressed. If they are certain enough to act thus, isn’t it a decision the rest of us should acknowledge – and act upon?

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     As above, so below, say the mystics, and indeed it is so. All things that God has not “fixed in the everlasting congruity of things” (Sir Thomas Carlyle) ultimately reduce to individual decisions and the actions that proceed from them. And so we see, beneath all the newsworthy developments, the phenomenon of individuals deciding that their political allegiances are more important than lifelong friendships with those who hold other views.

     We don’t talk about this much, possibly because it’s so very sad. After all, the point of a Constitutional system such as ours is to make it possible to relegate matters of public policy to a “safe space” of their own: one in which disagreement on such matters can be tolerated. Plainly, a substantial number of persons within our borders – I refuse to call such persons “citizens,” or more offensive yet, “Americans” – have decided that the Constitutional order doesn’t suit them, specifically because power has escaped their hands. The election of Donald Trump has proved more than their never-terribly-well-concealed totalitarian impulses can take.

     A military coup of the sort Kurt Schlichter describes is currently unlikely; the correlation of forces is too plainly against the Left. But the operative word in that sentence is currently. Remember the Obama Administration’s efforts to purge the command ranks of the “politically unreliable.” Dozens of generals and admirals were removed from their posts for no other reason. The Obamunists’ enforcement of absurd “diversity initiatives” – essentially, rights to serve in the military that supersede what had previously been considered disqualifying characteristics – was another stroke to that effect, though apparently of less impact.

     Nothing is absolutely reliable except the laws of Nature...and we mustn’t be too confident that we know them to the last button, either.

     Know what and who you are. Don’t confuse the two. In particular, know your dealbreakers, especially as they determine with whom you’re willing to have converse, personal, commercial, or otherwise. Sauce for the goose and all that.

Trivial Pursuits?

     It seems that Nature – if it isn’t my evil twin gleefully hashing things up for me to write about – is determined to provide me examples of virtually every observation I’d like to make. Today’s batch is particularly fertile (that’s fertile, as in manure):

     “When you break the big laws, you do not get liberty, you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws.” – G. K. Chesterton

     Yes, you saw that here fairly recently. This time around, my focus isn’t on laws, but on offenses against widely held sentiments. Have a list of links for your reading pleasure:

• The legal marijuana industry is too damned white!
• “I got a C in Advanced Oppression Theory? WAAAHHH!”
• “We’ve had enough male James Bonds!”
• “What do you mean ‘he,’ you cisperson, you?”
• “Shut up, you wrongheaded faggot!”
• “No more heterosexual heroes!”
• “You can’t be a good scholar! You’re not diverse-minded!”

     Mind you, I said “widely held,” not “majority held.” Like it or not, there are people who regard using the “wrong” pronoun as an actionable offense. The folks making noise about the above “controversies” – another word that’s gradually being stripped of its meaning – must regard their respective Causes as among the highest of their priorities. What does that say about their concerns for such matters as defense against violence, prospective survival needs, and acceptance by a congenial group?

     The trivia linked above – and I assure you, you won’t find a Level One through Three concern anywhere among them – don’t even make it to the Maslovian Hierarchy. They constitute pure pettiness: foofaurauws over trivialities. By implication, those who’ve become massively exercised about them have satisfied every other level of the pyramid. That makes them the most fortunate people on Earth.

     To occupy one’s time with the whinings of the uber-fortunate is to waste it. Yet increasing amounts of public attention are directed to such ends. It suggests that our entire sense for what matters and what doesn’t has been thrown for a loop and needs to recover swiftly.

     However, it is worth a few words about why such nonsense gets anyone’s attention in the first place.

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     There remains tragedy even in this richest and most blessed of nations. There are victims of true and serious injustices – and lately a hefty fraction of those injustices have been perpetrated by agents of the State: my aggregate term for America’s 88,000-plus governmental bodies. There are persons who lack important things, including the sort many would call survival necessities, and who go unaided despite their troubles being no fault of their own. There are villains in high places...and villains who aspire to high places and who – please God, let it not happen – might yet reach them. And there are those who deserve our respect and remembrance for their service and, sad to say, don’t get either.

     A concern with trivia misallocates human energy that might go toward the amelioration of one of those items. If a reasonably intelligent and well-informed person is visibly consumed by such trivia, what inference can we draw about him?

     Perhaps we’ve overestimated the depth of his intelligence or the breadth of his knowledge. It’s easy enough; maintaining a veneer of intellect and erudition is a learnable skill. Or perhaps we don’t appreciate the true dimensions of the concern upon which he focuses. That, too, is not unknown even among the most civilized and compassionate of men. But it’s quite possible that we’re entirely correct – that he’s giving his attention and emotional energy to nonsense. In that case, we must ask why.

     In some cases, it’s merely virtue signaling: behavior intended to instill in the individual a sense that he’s “on the side of the angels,” or to ingratiate himself with others who hold a particular priority, or both. In today’s exceedingly fractious society, there’s more of that going on than ever before. It suggests that perhaps an element of the Maslovian hierarchy is involved after all: the need for acceptance by a suitable group. If so, one might question the virtue-signaler’s choice of groups, but chacun a son gout and all that.

     In other cases, it’s a bid for stature...and sometimes for power. There are many well known cases of a person of no particular repute rising to high status by hitching his star to a cause that eventually catapults those involved with it to prominence. Need I mention Al Sharpton or Johnnie Cochran in this regard? I thought not. How about Richard Kessel? If you’re not a Long Islander, you might not have heard his name. Still, he’s an example of the syndrome.

     But in a few cases, it’s a sense of personal insignificance that’s tantamount to exclusion: the sense that one is insignificant, “left out:” “If I’m to be heard I’ll have to scream, but I should have something to scream about.” In his magnificent near-future novel Michaelmas, Algis Budrys deemed it the tendency of entirely ordinary people to raise their voices in a simple assertion of their own existences. But when there’s so much screaming going on, it’s highly unlikely that anyone will be heard.

     This appears to be an artifact of our “mass-media culture:” the sense that unless one “makes the six o’clock news” somewhere, one’s life is essentially unimportant. There’s a huge fallacy in there, to say nothing of a complete absence of seemly humility, but a dwindling number of persons appear astute enough to perceive and grapple with it.

     Whatever the reason in some specific case, the appropriate countermeasure is always the same: a snort of dismissive laughter, a wave, and a leisurely stroll in another direction. It’s required if we’re to reestablish appropriate priorities in society generally that we not grant our precious time, attention, or emotional energy to those peddling – at increasingly high prices both in money and human energy – such trivial pursuits.