Michael Pollan recently wrote a provocative and thoughtful essay called “Why Bother?” in The Times Magazine about whether it’s worth it to make individual behavior changes to fight climate change. There were a lot of pieces of the essay that Freakonomics readers would find of interest, and perhaps would quarrel with.
Here is a particularly compelling section about Wendell Berry‘s view of specialization:
For Berry, the deep problem standing behind all the other problems of industrial civilization is “specialization,” which he regards as the “disease of the modern character.” Our society assigns us a tiny number of roles: we’re producers (of one thing) at work, consumers of a great many other things the rest of the time, and then once a year or so we vote as citizens. Virtually all of our needs and desires we delegate to specialists of one kind or another — our meals to agribusiness, health to the doctor, education to the teacher, entertainment to the media, care for the environment to the environmentalist, political action to the politician.
As Adam Smith and many others have pointed out, this division of labor has given us many of the blessings of civilization.
Specialization is what allows me to sit at a computer thinking about climate change. Yet this same division of labor obscures the lines of connection — and responsibility — linking our everyday acts to their real-world consequences, making it easy for me to overlook the coal-fired power plant that is lighting my screen, or the mountaintop in Kentucky that had to be destroyed to provide the coal to that plant, or the streams running crimson with heavy metals as a result.
But is specialization really the culprit — or, more pointedly, is specialization as modern a concept as is commonly thought? Consider this passage from the Babylonian Talmud (Tractate Berachot 58a), which predates Smith’s tale of the pin factory by some 1,500 years:
Ben Zoma once saw a crowd on one of the steps of the Temple Mount. He said, Blessed is He that discerneth secrets, and blessed is He who has created all these to serve me. [For] he used to say: What labours Adam had to carry out before he obtained bread to eat! He ploughed, he sowed, he reaped, he bound [the sheaves], he threshed and winnowed and selected the ears, he ground [them], and sifted [the flour], he kneaded and baked, and then at last he ate; whereas I get up, and find all these things done for me.
And how many labours Adam had to carry out before he obtained a garment to wear! He had to shear, wash [the wool], comb it, spin it, and weave it, and then at last he obtained a garment to wear; whereas I get up and find all these things done for me. All kinds of craftsmen come early to the door of my house, and I rise in the morning and find all these before me.
(Hat tip: Leon Morris)
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I don’t think specialization is the culprit so much as a barrier to communication. Most educated people have a capacity to understand new systems as long as they are simple enough in the beginning and rewarding enough in the end.
Off-topic: Versus other blog’s comment sections, this is the ONLY one I’ve seen that is supplemental, and not detrimental, to the post’s contents. My compliments to the site and it’s readers…
We can be like the past and have 95% of the population dedicated solely to food production- and still never be sure we have enough food.
All of these touchy-feely arguments, rather than rational, arguments against modernization are the privelege of people who never had to worry about going hungry, and cannot fathom how division of labor and technology have saved so many people from disease, starvation, and death.
Given the density and complexity of information necessary to the practice of say Pediatric Hematology I don’t see how medical professionals will be getting less specialized any time soon; and I certainly can’t imagine why we’d want them to. Think about it, assuming that you had the money to do so wouldn’t you take your child, if she was suffering from acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL), to the pediatric hematologist specializing in ALL instead of Dr. Joe Oncologist? The situation is somewhat analagous to buying a suit. Do you get measured and have one made? Or do you buy off the rack? Is “pretty good” good enough for a suit? How about for your child’s odds of survival? Ultimately this is why “universal” health care will always fail of its promise – there’ll never be enough money or enough doctors to give everyone excellent health care and none of our politicians have the guts to tell the truth – that “pretty good” will mean some will die who might otherwise have been saved.
Anyway, back to the topic. The only downside I see to specialization is the echo chamber trap. Too often hyper-specialists go to seminars only with kindred hyperspecialists so they tend to simply reinforce and amplify the existing dogma. They also have the unhelpful tendency towards guild creation which they maintain through nearly impenetrable jargon and by playing musical peer reviewers for their journals to keep any heresy from being inadvertently published.
Fortunately even science has its “You got peanut butter on my chocolate! You got chocolate in my peanut butter!” moments. The couple I have witnessed and several that I have read about makes me worry though that those collisions occur far too infrequently.
The assumption is that in ‘the old days’ people were more in touch with, and therefore cared more about the environment. I don’t see any evidence for this at all. You can make a good argument that caring about the environment at all is a luxury good made possible by the economic benefits of specialization. The Breakthrough guys make this argument, which refutes the romanticized, nostalgic view of ‘the old days’ in the process.
Berry’s understanding of capitalism is also completely wrong: he has not delegated anything, rather companies have been formed to serve him. Pay more for sustainable food (whatever that is) and it will appear. Pay more for sustainable power and it will appear.
Props to Mr.Dubner for posting this article on this blog, its definitely worth a read-through.
The article makes a lot of good points on the environmental movement, especially where it fails. Too much of the movement just seems overwhelming and like #11 comments, unpractical and irrelevant to the majority of people who are just struggling for survival. Right now the environmental label still exists and that’s the biggest problem because it creates a division when large group participation is what is really critical. It would be better to have more people making small changes than having a small group of labeled “environmentalists” being very strict and diligent in greening their life in all aspects. We should work on getting a larger group of citizens making small changes in their daily routine and not feeling worried if every now and then they slip up and take a plastic bag or don’t recycle every can. Losing the label and gaining greater participation would be a huge step in the right direction. The “how?” question is still open.
We, as a society, are more in touch with our overall consequences than ever before simply because we are indeed resting our heels on the shoulders of our ancestors.
Even by the extent to which we have access to our ancestor’s practices and words, we are now operating from a very broad base of experience not seen at any other time in history.
As a whole, primitive man was not in tune with nature except for a well honed knowledge of how to use it at its basic level (hunting, fishing, etc).
They farmed land until it would not produce good fruit anymore, they burned huge tracts of land to flush out game, they poisoned their bodies with substances they thought to be medicinal, et cetera.
The problems we face today are magnified far out of realistic proportion and often times simply manufactured.
Primitive man, even people in underdeveloped areas today, couldn’t care less for their environment.
They’re more worried about their next meal.
If it behooved some tribesman to burn a tract of land to flush hard to find game, then so be it, he and his family had to eat. (And they were in touch enough with the earth to understand how resilient it is.)
If the price of a certain commodity rises substantially above another – and the local farmer is free to choose his crop – he’ll burn down the countryside to make room for that crop, and he’ll plant it until the soil is sucked dry of nutrients.
The sky isn’t falling, it’s just the nuts that keep hitting us in the head with ideas such as Berry’s.
I say we all fight global warming by being cool like the Fonz.