The General Welfare
A number of diverse thinkers in the middle of the 20th century looked at specialization, the channeling of information into discrete categories, categories widely defined to include thought, professions, or institutions, as an increasing societal problem. Specialization presented increasing difficulties in determining how information, science, technology, might best be utilized in that now discarded, eternally nebulous Platonic notion of kalos, “the good,” call it universal value as opposed to specific.
Long ago, Thomas Jefferson quipped everyone thought Plato profound because nobody knew what he was talking about, certainly notions of the good exemplify this. Jefferson’s jab is especially amusing coming from someone who in America’s founding document replaced Locke's right of property with the pursuit of happiness. A decade later, in the constitution's preamble, his fellow revolutionaries followed with a just as ambiguous thought about promoting the general welfare. All these terms convey some sense of societal wide, universal value.
In his 1951 work Science and Humanism, renowned physicist Erwin Schrodinger concisely framed the specialization problem,
“It seems plain and self-evident, yet it needs to be said the isolated knowledge obtained by a group of specialists in a narrow field has in itself no value whatsoever, but only in its synthesis with all the rest of knowledge and only inasmuch as it really contributes in this synthesis something toward answering the demand 'who are we?'”
He added,
“The awareness that specialization is not a virtue but an unavoidable evil is gaining ground, the awareness that all specialized research has real value only in the context of the integrated totality of knowledge.”
Schrodinger declares as self-evident the problem of isolated knowledge in terms of the ancient Delphic Oracle's bidding to “know thyself,” the finest example of paradox in the tradition of Delphi. For millennia, most especially in the last century America, this search for self-knowledge focused on some deeper nonexistent inner meaning, while the only possible answers are to be found in the world surrounding us, the world from which we came. Schrodinger's use of “who are we” as opposed to “know-thyself” is much more helpful. Who we are directly connotes the ability to understand the self by understanding we, that is the species Homo sapiens. Specialization does just the opposite, limiting understanding of ourselves with endless division, an inability to comprehend the “integrated totality of knowledge,” that is the understanding of we, and thus an incapacity to promote the general welfare.
In 1951, Schrodinger was completely wrong thinking the awareness of specialization as an unavoidable evil was gaining ground. In fact specialization has become even more greatly championed, not just isolated knowledge, but domineering economic myths of the general welfare promoting individual greed. Each individual came to be defined by how they specifically fit into society, not by how their actions help define greater society. Foremost, individuals are now socially defined by how they “make a living,” a process requiring ever greater specialization or as a comparably valueless, generic, eminently replaceable labor/service. In return, the individual defines themselves and greater society through acts of consumption. As Hannah Arendt in her sublime 1958 work The Human Condition astutely observed a society defined primarily by labor and its divisions “consumption takes the place of all truly relating activities.”
Organization of society became more and more specialized, most especially with the corporation, which is inherently a specialist structure providing specific products or services. In regards to Schrodinger's integrated totality of knowledge, Plato's the good, Jefferson's pursuit of happiness, or the constitution's general welfare, today, all are exclusively and specifically measured as GDP. “It is not my business to cavil whether this mercantile attitude is moral or immoral, crass or subtle. It is my business to show that it leads to the misunderstanding and the mistreatment of information and its associated concepts.” (Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings)
Looking at how the ubiquity of specialized organization came to pass, we can begin with the great Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries, a revolution that continues today. In a 1958 speech, atomic bomb creator J. Robert Oppenheimer talks about the development of specialized scientific knowledge,
“All these growths and wonder is almost unavailable to man in general. It is typically available in small specialized parts to rather small specialized groups, groups which it is true stretch from land to land, groups which feel across the physical frontiers and across the barriers of political and doctrinal hostility... but still small groups in marginal communication with each other and in marginal communication with man at large.”
Today, it is simply impossible for any individual to have a great grasp of all the diverse generalities of science, while increasingly difficult for a specialist to just keep up with the growth of knowledge in their own individual field. As for Schrodinger’s interest for a synthesis of specialization with the rest of knowledge, it is not even a concern. “The consequences for our ideas of education, our ideas of community and many of our political ideas are indeed not trivial.” (Oppenheimer)
With growth in scientific knowledge comes ever more technology. Through technology, scientific understanding socially manifests itself, even if neither the ideas or the workings of the science or any given technology are understood beyond a small group of specialists. The questions of how any adopted technology then shapes the greater society are mostly ignored by the specialists and given less thought by society as a whole.
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Having any ability to address the concerns and problems caused by the Scientific Revolution's unavoidable evil of specialization, compels us to dig even deeper to specialization's roots, particularly in how we as a species receive and process information. Looking from this perspective, our senses, the way we receive all information, are specialized, having specific implications. “Even in the sense organs there is a kind of organization, preorganization, of what it is you will learn of, of what it is you will notice, of what will be part of the structure of knowledge... the sense datum.” (Oppenheimer)
The senses are specialized, data received as sound, touch, smell, taste, and sight. Specialized data of any sort automatically limits other data “in a kind of precognitive way the cost of knowledge is a great deal of ignorance, the cost of perception is a great deal of imperceptiveness. …one has to adopt the view that the potential is infinitely larger than the real.” (Oppenheimer)
This is a perspective offered by a person responsible for one of history's most destructive technologies. Implementing and adopting any technology limits perception, creating ignorance of alternatives. The greater the societal adaption of the technology, the greater the limitations. Every technology defines our experience just as each sense. Once again, an easy example is the barely century old American car culture. Since inception, it has completely redesigned the American landscape to the point it becomes impossible for people to consider alternatives. Around for the same short period, the screen is proving both more powerfully socially transformative and limiting than the automobile. With technological adoption “over centuries by the rigorous separation and specialization of the senses,” Marshall McLuhan wrote in Understanding Media, we become increasingly numbed to alternatives
It is imperative to understand both the extraordinary power of specialization and its resulting restrictions, whether it concerns knowledge, technology, or social organization. To use a contemporary political term, specialization results in prejudice. McLuhan writes, “Any specialist task leaves out most of our faculties.” Society in the 21st century is a great jumble of specializations, some with much greater power than others. For example, Microsoft's power as a corporation compared to an independent software coder or most other Tech companies to constrict future development.
With technology development, we have no coming together, no synthesis or ability to view society as a whole — the general welfare — understood by the Greeks and America’s founding generation as an inherent responsibility of politics. Our politics are completely broken, our institutions archaic, — government, corporate, and cultural — incapable in every way of synthesizing the whirlwinds of specialization we are engulfed.
Looking at the Industrial Era, Hannah Arendt succinctly sums up politics,
“Specialization of work and division of labor have in common only the general principle of organization, which itself has nothing to do with either work or labor but owes its origin to the strictly political sphere of life, to the fact of man's capacity to act and to act together and in concert. Only within the framework of political organization, where men not merely live, but act, together, can specialization of work and division of labor take place.”
All politics is defined through organization. To in anyway be useful, all information and communication need to be organized. Inherent in all organization of information is also the organization of communication. Two centuries ago, with the founding of modern republicanism, the essential importance of information and communication were built into the American constitution with the rights of freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and the right to assemble, along with the establishment of Post Offices and post roads, and most problematic and not well thought “securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries,” which today has become the corporate patents and copyrights shitshow. The following two centuries saw republican revolutions of every stripe across the globe focus on universal literacy as a key necessity. With modern republicanism, the organization of information and communication came to be understood as key components of any notion of self-government.
Norbert Wiener writes,
“Information is even more a matter of process than a matter of storage. That country will have the greatest security whose informational and scientific situation is adequate to meet the demands that may be put on it, the country in which it is fully realized that information is important as a stage in the continuous process by which we observe the outer world, and make our acts effective upon it.”
In all its forms whether verbal, transferred via a specific medium, or inherent in the design and workings of technology, information's value is only realized with its communication. Once a technology becomes popularly adopted, the technology becomes a form of tradition, shaping society as great or greater than ancient religious tradition. A technology's adoption is a doubly limiting process. All technology destroys tradition, simultaneously instilling a new tradition of the technology itself. We lose the knowledge of the old tradition and become limited by the new tradition of the technology. “One has to adopt the view, that without tradition we would know nothing, but with tradition we have also lost a great deal of our possible knowledge.” (Oppenheimer)
It is only with feedback that technology becomes accountable to the greater systems it is been introduced, whether the life of an individual, the structure of society, the shaping of an entire civilization, or the restructuring of the planetary environment. With industrialization, most feedback – political, social, and cultural – in response to technological change has largely been ignored and dismissed. Systemically, the specialization created with any given technology has proved largely impenetrable to feedback. Our institutions, most of which are hierarchically centralized are not organized to continuously incorporate feedback. Once a new system of technological power is established, those with power, just as all power across the past, have little interest to incorporate feedback that might change the means of power that secures their position. Examples of this are myriad, most recently industries had to be forced, complaining incessantly the whole time, to simply address the problems of air and water pollution they produced. Today, what might eventually prove most detrimental without extensive and continuous feedback, is genetic manipulation by industries in society that neither understands or dismiss the processes of natural selection.
It is quite clear our established institutions – political, government, corporate, and cultural – have limited ability to react or more profoundly to initiate design for the good, the universal as opposed to specialized parts. Indeed, recent decades has seen the division of the established body politic into a reductio ad absurdum of special interests and selected identities completely incapable of conceiving, much more act, in the general welfare. The general welfare is not in need of a greater invisible hand, but multitudes of luminous cooperating hands.
Specialization has proved an enormously powerful way to organize. To create organization that fosters the whole, understandings of “who we are,” requires societal reformation. A reformation that understands information's value is not in its storage but in its communication. To be democratically utilized, information requires distributedly networked participatory organization where feedback is both incorporated and continuously engaged. It includes understanding any such organization begins literally from the ground up, taking into account local ecological systems, not simply using technology to roll over and homogenize. It requires developing new values besides those of leviathan corporations and their anything but free-markets. Certainly we know other ways value can be expressed, most especially in that most human of values, participation in thought, deliberation, and action.
Our leviathan corporations have attempted to meet the growing needs of processing information outside their limited specialized perspectives by establishing massive generalized consulting firms such as McKinsey and Deloitte. These entities specialize in processing information. It matters not what information. They analyze a given corporation’s specialized information, however, their decision making is itself specialized, exclusively accounting only one objective, making greater profits. At this point, it should be clear to all this restricted valuing is an inadequate measure of the general welfare. It is telling of our times these massive corporations have developed to provide outside perspective, though perspective capable of offering little real change.
We now witness a massive push to automate specialization with the next generation of compute technology that is purposefully marketed as a gain for the general welfare. Yet just as with any technology, we can be assured automating established specialization will not create new so much as lock in established ways. It is quite clear in organizing the future, we need to not simply automate information processing and decision making, but structure people into the processes, if we in anyway hope to use technology for the general welfare. We need new organization incorporating comprehensively educated individuals into processes that seek synthesis of specializations, looking to define “who we are.”
Norbert Wiener wrote seventy-five years ago,
“On the other hand, the great source of intellects for the future, if not intellectuals, is the body of men trained for a profession like engineering or medicine or natural science - professions demanding intellectual stamina and encouraging intellectual curiosity. If these men can be given the entree to the social sciences and to literature, not in the form of a few courses of cliches, but through the understanding interest of teachers with a sociological or literary bent, already acquainted with scientific methods and habits of thought, then they will furnish a far better, even far more truly American source for the sociology and literature of the coming age than any earlier age or country has known. They must be taught that knowledge and culture are not private treasures to be locked up in a safe, and to be inspected only by the elite, and that all knowledge and all cultures are one and indivisible. They must learn to approve what they already feel, that nothing less than the whole man is enough to constitute the scholar, the artist, and the man of action.”
Citizens promoting the general welfare.