However, there's a problem that's becoming more endemic in our society; namely, it is the explosion of specialization in the fields of learning. This has led to a society of experts, or what I'd call "expertism" -- that is, where these intellectual mandarins, the "best and the brightest", decide for the rest of society what's good for it -- aided and abetted by government and the corporations. Noam Chomsky calls these folks action intellectuals, and points out many similarities between them and Leninist commissars, which I think is an interesting observation.
The problem goes through our whole education system. Subjects are taught as isolated wholes -- you take History, you take Algebra, you take Calculus, you take Sociology, you take Physics, you take Psychology, etc. The classes are taken in isolation, as if these fields had nothing in common with one another.
The division and separation of knowledge does the student a grave injustice; and if you are a student, don't look to your teachers (and certainly not the administrators) to fix the problem anytime soon. Rather, you need to be aware of it and deal with it on your own.
Why does this division of knowledge do students harm? Simply put, it creates the illusion that the body of knowledge that we have is entirely compartmentalized, and that, say, if you're not a scholar on something, you can't have an opinion of it. Historians study History, psychologists study Psychology, and never the two shall meet.
The result is deep learning that is also disjointed, and impairs people's ability to form moral judgments, because they feel they're not "expert" enough to make such judgments. It creates intellectual "turf" where scholars are supposed to keep to their existing camps and mind their own business.
This hyper-specialization, no doubt, was responsible for the creation of the atom bomb, where physicists and engineers plugged on ahead, funded by the government, without pondering the moral implications of what they were doing -- had those Manhattan Project researchers been versed in Psychology, Sociology, History, and other humanistic disciplines, perhaps they'd have found the moral courage to not give this ultimate power to American political leaders.
Specialization of knowledge prostitutes Science at the hands of Big Business and the Government, where well-funded researchers engage in study that doesn't benefit society (or humanity) as a whole, but which stands to make a company a ton of money, or give the government a new lethal weapon. The field of biotechnology reeks of this type of scientific sophistry -- where the power of Science is put to work for investor profit. The pressure to make a quick buck lead to things like Roundup Ready Soybeans, Prozac, Olestra, and rBGH, and other biological freakshows.
Put simply, Big Business doesn't have society's interests in mind when they fund research into new products; they are squarely serving the interests of their shareholders -- a micro-elite within society.
Scientists in this situation seem to rarely protest against this prostitution of their labors; while I think that the obvious monetary penalties for "wrongthink" are a disincentive to leave this work, I also think that the hyper-specialization of our education system has simply deprived the scientists of the moral grounding to actually consider the effects of their research. Put simply, they hold their hands up and say "it's not my job to consider the effects of what I create."
But that's a moral abdication; they are responsible for their creations, although they're shielded from this because they're doing it for the corporations that own them -- they're "just following orders".
This is what's demolishing our environment -- Big Business keeps its attention focused on investor profit (that's it's job), and researchers tinker away and give them new products (that's their job), while administration ensures it all runs according to plan (that's their job).
It ends up being a pernicious division of labor where those on top know what's going on administratively, but are clueless about the science itself, and those on the bottom, doing the research, don't know (or care) what their creation will be used for.
This hyper-specialization is already coming back to haunt us -- the US atomic program has cost the country trillions of dollars; and that doesn't even really factor in the vast amounts of atomic waste accumulating. Biotechnology is a disaster just waiting to happen; the chemical industry continues to pollute our habitat with near-impunity.
Specialized education produces deep but narrow thinkers -- people who may know a lot about a given process or discipline, but lack the intellectual equipment to see beyond their field. This cannot continue without serious harm coming to the human society.
An example in my case was a class I once took called "Alternatives to War", which was a multidisciplinary course, combining the History, Psychology, and English departments (three professors taught the class). They approached the problem collectively from each of their research angles. The result, for students, was a fascinating exploration of a topic which couldn't have been attained exclusively within each discipline.
By bridging the gaps between disciplines, the student begins to be able to comprehend the world more clearly, they begin to be able to form connections between ideas which were formerly isolated and divided.
The one area of academic study that at least tries to do this is the Humanities, which, unsurprisingly, is the area that is being squeezed out of universities by corporate dollars -- corporations want specialized thinkers -- competent technicians versus full-blown scholar-philosophers or critical thinkers.
They've used their enormous economic clout to bankroll the disciplines that make them money, which then distorts the academic institution and causes those un-economic studies -- the Humanities -- to gradually wither away for lack of funding, or to find some way to market themselves.
Some examples of Humanities distorted in this way are Public Relations and Marketing -- these are prostituted forms of Journalism and Psychology. Other examples are Graphic Design, which is a prostituted form of Art. English morphs into Copywriting (or Public Relations, again). The corporate presence on campuses (and of course in high schools) puts getting a job first and foremost in people's minds, which then leads them to pursue their narrow job training (which is called "education").
Philosophy and History have pretty much died out, because they're simply not so readily marketable, and probably because of Philosophy's emphasis on critical thinking and History's emphasis on studying and learning from the past. These are not desirable traits in the corporate, capitalist, consumerist society, which wants everyone to live in an ongoing, unreflective present.
The way to combat this prostitution of knowledge is to actively bridge the gaps in your knowledge; to cross into new disciplines and find common links between them. The result will be a well-rounded individual who is capable of making effective moral judgments based on actual knowledge. This forms the basis of effective critical thinking.
So, whatever your discipline or area of interest, try to actively explore other areas, and watch how things come together. In my case, I studied (on my own) History, Philosophy, Psychology, Sociology, Biology -- and was struck at certain common ideas that, had I clung to only one discipline, I'd have never discovered.
By doing this, you'll empower yourself and depower the "experts" and "action intellectuals" who dominate our society.
a4a
7/18/98
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