Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is echoed by Wendell Berry's The Unsettling of America, published in 1977: "The disease of the modern character is specialization. Looked at from the standpoint of the social system, the aim of specialization may seem desirable enough. The aim is to see that the responsibilities of government, law, medicine, engineering, agriculture, education, etc., are given into the hands of the most skilled, best prepared pe…
But what is the real-life practical alternative? It is makes lovely and invigorating fiction to imagine men who have learned to competently conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, butcher a hog, set a bone, and program a 1973-era computer. But life is short and any art takes long to learn to sufficient depth that you can solve dynamic complex problems. How many more men would have died if Ei…
Questioning how shifting the focus from society to the individual would harm the larger whole seems to skirt around the discussion.
Was the unidimensional valor given for Stagg’s meteorological accomplishments a worthy reward for a lifetime of hyper-specialization?
And to the, in my opinion more important, flipside: how does the psyche heal when, perhaps for reasons entirely outside of an individuals’ control, the specialized-man fails the one task they spent a lifetime training for. What happens when you define a man by one function and in the critical moment they fail?