Reject Specialization, Embrace Generalization
I am working to unlearn the harmful habits our specialist culture instills in us.
The specialist puts himself in charge of one possibility. By leaving out all other possibilities, he enfranchises his little fiction of total control. Leaving out all the “non-functional” or otherwise undesirable possibilities, he makes a rigid, exclusive boundary within which absolute control becomes, if not possible, at least conceivable.
But what the specialist never considers is that such a boundary is, in itself, profoundly disruptive. Its first disruption is in his mind, for having enclosed the possibility of control that is within his competence to imagine and desire, he becomes the enemy of all other possibilities. And, secondly, having chosen the possibility of total control within a small and highly simplified enclosure, he simply abandons the rest, leaves it totally out of control; that is, he forsakes or even repudiates the complex, partly mysterious patterns of interdependence and cooperation, controllable only within limits, by which human culture joins itself to its sources in the natural world.
The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin
of all particular things.Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.Yet mystery and manifestations
arise from the same source.
This source is called darkness.Darkness within darkness.
The gateway to all understanding.
This past year, I reached an important milestone in my path of transcending this mortal coil and realizing my final form of morphing into Nick Offerman. I am halfway kidding, but I did finally finish reading The Unsettling of America by Wendell Berry[1], a substantial portion of which I enjoyed in audiobook form, which was, coincidentally, read by Nick Offerman.
I knew Offerman is good friends with Jeff Tweedy and George Saunders, but Wendell Berry too? Maybe I actually do want to become Nick Offerman…
I have probably mentioned this book before. Prior to a proper, continuous read-through, I read it in bits and pieces over the years, and it’s been hugely influential to me. Ostensibly a book about the industrialization of farming and modern farming policy in the US, The Unsettling of America is just as much a book about that as it is about cultural criticism and ecological philosophy. I’ll let you read it for yourself, if you feel so inclined.
Wendell Berry is subversive. He’s the kind of writer you might see quoted as much by lefty environmentalists as by right-wing so-called libertarians. He praises the ideas of the ancient Chinese philosopher Confucius as well as those of Thomas Jefferson. As with all good thinkers, it’s hard to put him in a box, and I find myself questioning his ideas almost as often as I find myself getting excited about them.
One of the latter kind of his ideas can be found throughout The Unsettling of America, in which Berry argues that the modern world is overrun by “specialists,” often to our detriment. We live in a complex, technologically advanced society (the kind specifically dominated by high technology), and that necessarily means dependence on an ever-widening and deepening class of specialists.
As our world becomes increasingly complex, so too does our dependence on specialists who must in turn become ever more specialized. I am one such kind of specialist, and odds are you are as well. If we aren’t careful, we can easily become so laser-focused on one discrete component of the overall system that we fail to see how it all works together. We miss the forest for the trees.
Specialization has given us many wonderful things as well as many terrible things. A specialist in the field of medicine can develop a polio vaccine to save thousands of lives while a specialist in the field of warfare can devise an atomic bomb to destroy thousands of lives. I think most of us tacitly believe we take the good with the bad, but Berry is not so convinced it’s a balanced acceptance. I tend to agree with him.
One of the most acute negative side effects of specialization’s ascendance is the fracturing and — in many cases — total collapse of relationship or kinship. We see this in Berry’s critiques of industrialized farming — in which farmers specialize in growing certain crops and devote their careers to optimizing their output through heavy machinery and artificial fertilizers — versus what you might call traditional farming — in which farmers are generalists who manage numerous complex relationships between nature, crops, livestock, soil, and, crucially, the community.
Berry often uses the term “husbandry” when talking about traditional farming — a word he uses in the more archaic sense of managing a household[2]. The key difference between these two approaches is myopia. One (modern farming) is so near-sighted that it produces a bounty of gigantic fruit and vegetables at the expense of nearly everything else important to a healthy agricultural system (erosion control, soil microbiome, pollinators, disease prevention, nutrients), while the other (traditional farming) views farming as a holistic practice that must carefully balance growing food with the health of everything else. Done well, traditional farming methods (what we might today call regenerative agriculture) contributes to the flourishing of all life, not just the life of the soy bean or the corn plant.
Simply put, it’s a problem of quantity over quality.
Berry makes this juxtaposition in the context of farming, but it’s a common theme you see popping up all throughout his work. Another big way he talks about this is through the lens of community and its rapid deterioration in so-called developed countries. Once you see it in one area, you start to see it everywhere. The specialist mentality is deeply entrenched in our culture, and it makes us miserable.
Berry does not argue — and neither do I — that we should abandon all forms and degrees of specialization. (I am quite happy that I was born in a time and place where vaccines against terrible diseases are widely accessible.) Rather, this brings us to another major theme in The Unsettling of America — restraint.
I would encourage you to think past the somewhat puritanical connotation this word has taken on in modern times — restraint as a synonym for deprivation or forbiddance — and to think of it instead as something akin to prudence or skill. A prudent or skillful carpenter knows when to use power tools and when to use hand tools, for instance. Specialization is not inherently a bad thing. Rather, it’s a tool, and like any tool, it’s most beneficial when used appropriately and skillfully.
At the risk of reciting one too many aphorisms — when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
I will wrap this up by saying, as I get older, I intend to continue unlearning many of the harmful habits our specialist society instills in us. As one of my good friends always says, “Don’t put yourself in a box.” I want to be open. I want to learn how to do a little bit of a lot of things. Of course I will naturally be better at some things than others, in which case there’s nothing wrong with deepening my practice in those areas, but that doesn’t mean that thing has to become my sole focus.
This is a nice idea. In practice, it’s actually kind of hard. Our world is not conducive to this kind philosophy, so we must work to change it.
Happy New Year, everyone!
- I purchased this book at BookMan BookWoman — one of my favorite bookstores ever — in 2014 or 2015. BookMan BookWoman sadly became another victim of New Nashville in 2016 due to rising rents, a phenomenon often mentioned as a passive, unavoidable thing but which is, in reality, a very active choice someone made to push out a wonderful piece of Old Nashville’s unique culture. RIP. [↑]
- See the etymology of “husbandry,” which, interestingly, originally meant managing a household, itself stemming from the word “husband,” which used to be a word for a peasant farmer in the Middle Ages. Wow, full circle moment! [↑]