Specialism

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Feb 26

“The disease of the modern character is specialization.”

~ Wendell Berry

The thing to understand about contemporary populism is that it’s not a complaint about the existence of an “elite,” but about the poor quality of the elite that currently exists. Populists are not anarchists. The aim of populism is not to eliminate political authority, but to widen the distribution of political influence by investing new elites with the authority to break up the monopoly on influence that current elites are said to have.

Elites come in different flavors. And there’s more than one kind of populist. For the currently dominant right-populists, “the elite” are not the uber-rich but the over-educated class that rules legacy gatekeeping institutions. This kind of populism, as Joan C. Williams put it after the 2016 election of Donald Trump, “resents professionals but admires the rich.” She was talking specifically about the white working class, but the attitude was always more widespread than that, and has only spread more widely in the meantime.

It’s common to catch right-populists simultaneously mocking these “technocrats” for their low quality and panicking about their diabolical brilliance. Which is it: are elites bad because they’re stupid, or bad because they’re smart? In many cases, populists simply haven’t noticed the inconsistency. But I think this is because they’re stuck with a language of anti-elitism that makes it hard to articulate what actually makes them mad about the people who seem to run the world. With the right vocabulary, populists might be better able to name the problem, which is not that the world is being run, but that many of the people who apparently run it are the special kind of smart that makes you stupid. It’s in this sense that they really are “low quality.”

The Germans, of course, have a delightful word for this. A fachidiot (fack-ID-yot) is, roughly translated, a nerd. Fachidioten are people who know a lot about one thing and nothing about everything else. They’re stupid precisely because they’re smart. This is obviously a bad thing to be, and I think the time-honored disparagement of fachidiots has for the past several decades gotten a bad rap. Society should discourage nerdery. People shouldn’t be so interested in one thing that they don’t have any other interests. It’s boring and obnoxious.

Large parts of public and private life have been consumed by the populist upheaval, which seems to be a sort of sequel to 1984’s Revenge of the Nerds. Now it’s revenge against the nerds. Technocrats, like nerds, are people who earnestly believe that if anybody is debating something, it’s because somebody has failed to do their homework. For the technocrat, as for the nerd, there’s a Correct Answer in a book somewhere, and being a good citizen is a simple matter of asking the people who’ve read the book to tell you what that answer is. They don’t see any need for the aggressive contest called “politics” when you have “the facts.” And it just so happens that they have the facts.

Accusations of “anti-intellectualism” and “know-nothing-ism” will always smell like nerdery to a gleeful populist bent on retaking his democratic place at the top of the social hierarchy. But the nerd of classic stereotype is only one type of fachidiot. The bullyboy jock who stuffs the pimpled geek into the locker is just as much of an idiot, in that he knows a lot about one thing and nothing else. Arrogant weaklings for whom all sports are “sportsball” find their spitting images in meatheads who think they’re cool because they can’t do math or read books. There’s plenty of German-style idiocy among the vaunted common folk and their tribunes.

Another translation of fachidiot is “blinkered specialist.” The problem with both the jock and the nerd, and with the many other types of fachidioten who populate the social menagerie, is that they are specialists. If you can read that word a little out of focus, my meaning will come into view. I’m not talking about someone who has a particular interest or skill and turns it into a career. I’m talking about someone whose attitudes toward life have been shaped by an ideology. You might call this ideology “specialism,” and its adherents, “special-ists.” A special-ist is someone who has internalized a social division of labor that has nothing to do with the bounding of attention required for any individual to master a discipline, and everything to do with the alienation of one hypertrophied part of the soul from the atrophied remainder. Under specialism, the division of labor becomes the division of the laborer.

It’s easy to see the pathologies that result from this division when it takes the brutal form of the factory assembly line. The uber-special-ist is the Foxconn worker, spending his endless working hours blankly repeating the same 9-second operation, while numbly contemplating the suicide nets that management has installed to make sure its highly profitable “division of labor” doesn’t get sidetracked by the laborers’ discontents. But the mind of many a high-status specialist is often no less blank than the line worker’s, even if status and wealth render it better insulated against the spiritual consequences.

“Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart” – Max Weber could not have described better the “nullity” of the dreary fight between spirit-less technocrats and heartless populists, between political nerds and political jocks. It’s null because technocrats and populists aren’t different in the way that would make one party a real alternative to the real ruling spirit of the age. If the problem with the technocratic elite is that they are “low quality,” the problem with populism is that it places a lot of hope in a “common people” whose quality is often no higher. When forced to choose sides, my sympathies are often with the populists, mainly because I tend to blame the technocrats for lowering the quality of the people they’ve been trying to “empower” for the past several decades. But that doesn’t change the fact that “the people” are often every bit as stupid as the stupid-smart elites think they are. As a crowd, “the people” really are a lot of anti-intellectual know-nothings. It’s just that this puts them in good company with a lot of intellectuals.

I’m having some fun with this. “Crowds” are easy to criticize, but crowds are made of individuals, and some of them contain multitudes even if they run with people who don’t. Neither the expert class nor the common man is really so monolithic, and both populists and elites include in their ranks many who have resisted the disease of specialism, even if they, like all of us, also specialize in something, be it blue-collar or white-collar work – a status distinction that is itself increasingly moot, as white-collar workers are steadily “proletarianized” by digital technologies. My real point is to point out a problem that has already been pointed out more carefully by abler thinkers – this “disease of modern character” called “specialization,” as Wendell Berry puts it – and to suggest that if we think of the populist-technocrat fight as one symptom of this disease, might see the conflict in a different light.

Jan Werner-Muller has made another kind of “both-sides” argument about populists and technocrats. “For both sides,” says Werner-Muller, “there is no point in exchanging arguments, no space for debate . . . both pose dangers to democracy, and the fact that they can perversely reinforce each other compounds the peril.” Both populists and technocrats, in other words, are “fundamentally anti-pluralists.” But why are they anti-pluralists? There are many reasons, but one is the special-ism that afflicts not just populists and technocrats but the whole “modern character,” as Berry says.

“Pluralism” – the acceptance, if not the celebration, of the sheer fact that reasonable people give incompatible answers to the same question, and that politics is therefore about judgment and persuasion, not Correct Answers that foreclose debate – is too often understood as a theory, to which everybody must agree to assent. This is, suffice it to say, a very modern, and not a very pluralistic, way of understanding pluralism.

Pluralism is not properly an ism. It’s a sensibility that can and must be cultivated by experience. One of the ways that specialism damages special-ists is by depriving them of the kinds of things that cultivate a pluralist sensibility. “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” The special-ist, the fachidiot, the nerd or the jock, the populist or the technocrat, is a person who only has a hammer. And what is specialism but the notion that everybody should only have a hammer, or a screwdriver, or whatever tool has been assigned to them by an economic system that can only gain productivity by squeezing laborers into ever smaller persons confined to ever smaller activities? But when all you have is a hammer, the consequence is not just that everything looks like a nail. It’s that you can’t see the use of a screwdriver, which after all is not very useful for pounding in nails. You can’t see the reasonableness of someone else’s answer (which has nothing to do with being persuaded by their answer) to a question that concerns you both. You can’t experience the dispute like a pluralist. You can only assume, like the technocrat, that someone has failed to do their homework, or, like the populist, that it’s just a question of “common sense” or “gut feeling” that brooks no discussion.

Specialism is sharply at odds with the republican ideal of an active citizenry capable of engaging in an ongoing debate about how to govern itself. A special-ist citizenry confuses that debate with a failure to put the right special-ist in charge, be it nerd or jock. Anybody who tries to imagine what a rejuvenated citizenry would look like ought to have in mind not just a person with a hammer who’s willing to listen to a person with a screwdriver, but two people who are both as familiar with hammers as with screwdrivers. Small-r republican citizens are the opposites of fachidioten. They’re jacks of all trades, and they expect their leaders to be Renaissance men.