- “Above all else, the mentat must be a generalist, not a specialist. It is wise to have decisions of great moment monitored by generalists. Experts and specialists lead you quickly into chaos. The mentat-generalist, on the other hand, should bring to decision-making a healthy common sense. He must not cut himself off from the broad sweep of what is happening in his universe. He must remain capable of saying: “There’s no real mystery about this at the moment. This is what we want now. It may prove wrong later, but we’ll correct that when we come to it.” The mentat-generalist must understand that anything which we can identify as our universe is merely a part of larger phenomena. But the expert looks backward; he looks into the narrow standards of his own specialty. The generalist looks outward; he looks for living principles, knowing full well that such principles change, that they develop. It is to the characteristics of change itself that the mentat-generalist must look. There can be no permanent catalogue of such change, no handbook or manual. You must look at it with as few preconceptions as possible, asking yourself: “Now what is this thing doing?” * (Frank Herbert, Children of Dune)
Skilled labor, and specialization in an oxymoron. The idea that obsessing over a singular subject makes one skilled or knowledgable, is a laughable idea, and only could exist in a paradigm in which such a myopic focus is prized. It ignores a time when men and women were truly skilled, where they had to cultivate and develop a plethora of proficiencies and talents, just to get through the day. The contemporary times in which we live, where humans are molded into a gear in order to make a machine function, is a relatively new phenomenon, and for most of human history, specialists were exceedingly rare. Specialization is contributing to the death of human agency, as we become more specialized, we lose our independence, our agency, and ultimately our humanity. We are fast approaching a future where people will not be regard each other as humans, but rather as another tool to provide goods or services. This disregard for the humanity of others is a cold future that we should do our best to steer away.
Historically, humans have seldom devoted the entirety of their working lives to a singular subject. Hunter-gatherers, and agrarian peoples, both settled and nomadic, were required to engage in generalist behavior. This is to mean they had to be capable of accomplishing a number of tasks, and these tasks typically did not require much time to learn how to complete. This is considered “unskilled labor”. However, there really is no such feat that is truly “unskilled”. An agrarian farmer, such as a sheep or cattle herder, on paper requires little education in order to become a herder, however it might take years before a shepard is competent enough to manage a flock on their own. It takes a variety of skills to understand how to move the flock, it requires some level of knowledge of animal psychology, physiology, etc. If the shepard is utilizing herd dogs, training those dogs could take years upon years of time and energy investments to train the dogs, which in turn is a skill. As stated earlier, not only would those shepards have to know all of those skills, on top of that, they would typically have a whole variety of skills unrelated to sheparding, such as carpentry, weaving, tool making, cooking, and on. The shepard was more self reliant because they had to be, there we no carpentry firms, or weaving firms, that could produce goods, or provide services, to give the shepard what he needed to live. To define what a skilled labor is, we have to take into account how it impacts individual autonomy and agency. A contemporary “skilled” job focuses the individual on a specific task, or thought process, in order to accomplish a goal. A specialist can really only accomplish one type of task. A generalist, in contrast, utilizes a variety of tools and experiences in order to accomplish an overall goal. A generalist can accomplish a variety of tasks, many of which are unrelated to each other. A specialist relies on a narrow “toolset” (whether actual tools, or experiences), whereas a generalist is not limited by a specific toolset or experience base.
This was due to the fact that there were no machines or factories that could create everything needed to allow people to live, and for society to function. People more or less had to manufacture almost everything they needed themselves. Aside from a few, true specialists, blacksmiths as an example, the overwhelming majority of people could not afford to have someone produce goods or services for them, unless it was something that required far too much investment for them to build and maintain on their own. Folks back in the day were skilled by necessity. And even then, a true specialist such as a blacksmith would not devote all of their productivity towards blacksmithing. It was not until the rise of guilds, and mercantilism, that specialists begin to devote the majority of their productivity towards a single craft or trade.
This is in contrast to modern times, where fewer and fewer people engage themselves into learning anything that is not directly related to their wheelhouse of employment. This is unsurprising, humans, like all animals, want to exert as little energy as possible, and learning how to do something that you could easily just hire or pay someone else to do for you is a more straightforward path to accomplishing something with as little energy or time used as possible. If you can pay someone who can complete the task in half the time, why not? Especially if learning how to do the task has a costly buy-in to learn the skills needed to complete it. It might take years to learn how to be a competent electrician, plumber, mechanic, and this is not to consider the potential investment in tools and schooling needed to become competent. The biological reality of conserving energy applies to humans. This leads to attempting to get the most amount of work accomplished, with the minimalist amount of effort. Specialists can indeed accomplish tasks more efficiently, and at a lower cost. Economies of scale apply to workers just as much as capital investments.
To a certain extent, specialization is inevitable. It is impossible for everyone to generalize to the point where they could learn everything. There is too much knowledge required, just as one example, to learn how to engineer or manufacture a smartphone, one of the most common utilities of the modern era. This is not including the cellular network in which the utility of a smartphone can function, and everything related to that. In the end, everything is interrelated, and interdependent on each other to function, and some amount of specialization is required. Much like how blacksmiths, before now, were necessary to focus their time on blacksmithing, which allowed them to create the materials that society required to function. To say that we should wholly reject specialization, and embrace the tradition of generalism, is not reasonable or feasible.
The issue with specialization is when it consumes the practitioner. Specialists are excellent at addressing problems within their specific field, in specific circumstances. A mechanic is great at repairing motor vehicles, and doctors are great at treating diseases. We expect only a mechanic to repair a blown out CV axle, and we expect only a doctor to treat an ailment. This is not to say that doctors cannot do mechanic related activities, and vice versa, in fact, that is part of the issue. We expect mechanics to stay solely in their lane, and doctors to stay solely in their lane. This leads to a situation where a mechanic is utterly beholden to a doctor in regards to medical issues, and doctors are wholly beholden to mechanics when there are mechanical issues. We ought to give some amount of cross training, so a doctor can repair their vehicle, and a mechanic the knowledge to treat themselves. As stated in the beginning, it creates a myopia in which problems cannot be solved, or the solution to a problem is believed to only have one solution, when there are in fact many other solutions.
Furthermore, specialists tend to imbue their specialization into problems outside of their specialization. An epidemiologist will look at the spread of a disease, and conclude that the only course of action to fight it is to follow their specific recommendations and guidelines. However, the epidemiologist is trained to look at an issue through one specific lens, and will ignore other issues, or solutions related to the problem. Locking everyone in their houses for a month might be the easiest solution to a spreading disease, but there’s an endless number of issues that are also occurring in parallel to the disease, and a lockdown might make those other issues express themselves even more.
Specialists need to be specialists, however, specialists also need to learn to be generalists. It is not even possible for a specialist to know the entirety of the field they are specializing in. And even within their own field, some level of generalization is necessary. To use the mechanic as an example again, there are no mechanics that only spin the wrench counterclockwise (taking the bolt off), or mechanics that only spin the wrench clockwise (spinning the bolt back on).