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The Great Endarkenment
The Great Endarkenment
PHILOSOPHY FOR AN AGE
OF HYPERSPECIALIZATION
Elijah Millgram
3
3
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It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
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With offices in
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9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Acknowledgments ix
Bibliography 283
Index 297
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ix
1}
And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. And it came to
pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of
Shinar; and they dwelt there. And they said one to another, Go to, let us
make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone,
and slime had they for mortar. And they said, Go to, let us build us a
city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make
us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children
of men builded. And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have
all one language; and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be
restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go
down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand
one another’s speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon
the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the
name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language
of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the
face of all the earth.
—genesis 11:1–9
The Kipling-like just-so story, evidently meant to explain something that has
to be a central part of any acceptable philosophical anthropology, makes a
miracle out of an inevitability, and let’s take a moment to consider why.
Putting up a skyscraper requires a great deal in the way of technical spe-
cialization; you need the architects and the code consultants, the mechanical
engineers and the plumbing engineers, the civil engineers and the landscape
architects, the waterproofing consultants and the hardware consultants, the
lighting designers and the daylighting consultant, the interior designers and
the acoustical consultants; and we haven’t so much as gotten to the specialty
consultants. On the client side, there have to be project managers, owner’s 1
2 { The Great Endarkenment
representatives, the financing team, and so on. Once the project goes into
construction, the general contractor will engage steel fabricators, roofers, elec-
tricians, plumbers, framers, drywallers, painters . . . and we have barely gotten
started on the full list.1
Now, in the course of acquiring their professional specializations, the spe-
cialists will have learned a technical vocabulary, and often enough, not just
a vocabulary, but specialized notation and techniques for manipulating it, as
when the architects learn to read blueprints or the engineering students take
calculus. They learn discipline-specific standards, guidelines, and priorities,
along with the hard-to-formulate sensibilities that allow them to work with the
approximations, idealizations, and other avowedly not-quite-true assertions
which make up such a large part of the information in any field. And when
they have come up to speed, the normal upshot is—and this much should
be familiar from almost anyone’s experience nowadays—that only a similarly
trained member of that specialization can properly understand them.
The obstacles to mutual comprehension go deeper than the fact that
outsiders cannot read specialist professional literature. Because professional
standards end up being framed in a proprietary vocabulary, one that can take
anywhere from five years to a decade to learn, outsiders cannot so much as
understand those standards. Because specialists internalize those standards,
outsiders cannot understand the specialists’ concerns and preferences (in part
because they cannot comprehend what the preferences are for, in part be-
cause outsiders cannot see why anyone would have those preferences). And
because they cannot share the technical sensibilities of the insiders, even
when people seem to understand, say, pronouncements on factual matters
in someone else’s area of expertise, they are not normally competent to use
the information they superficially understand; the information that special-
ists work with is accompanied by special handling instructions. What we saw
quaintly called confounding of language—the inability of one person to un-
derstand another—is entailed by the ability of a society to build a decently tall
tower.
We are, and are becoming ever more, a society of specialists. As recently as
the early nineteenth century, it was possible for a polymath—such as, famously
at the time, William Whewell—to master all of the science of his day.2 It is not
nearly possible any longer; specialization is far more highly articulated than at
any time in previous human history, and because this difference in degree has
come to amount to a difference in kind, I’ll mark the newly extreme form of
division of labor with the label hyperspecialization. Consequently, communi-
cation across the barriers between professions and disciplines is our own very
pressing problem, and it threatens not just our more ambitious enterprises but
the successful management of our day-to-day lives.
The builders of the Tower of Babel are represented as committing the sin
of hubris (though that is a Greek rather than a Hebrew way of putting it); so
the lesson of the tale might seem to be that we should give up on high-rise
construction and, in general, on overly ambitious technical projects. But
we cannot walk back our commitment to hyperspecialization; whatever the
drawbacks of hubris, there are at this point simply too many people on our
planet to do without this sort of division of labor.3 Hyperspecialization is
necessary if we are to keep anything on the order of our current population
alive, which is to say that the resolution of the biblical tale—geographical
dispersion into distinct societies composed of people who presumably do
speak the same language—is no longer an option for us. When the languages
in question are those of communities of experts, that would be to segregate the
specialists from one another, and specialists can only get the job done when
they work together. We have no choice but to live together and cooperate
with other individuals whom we cannot possibly understand, in executing the
large-scale and very demanding projects on which our survival now depends.
1.1
3 This is not a new observation; see, for instance, Hayek (1994, p. 110).
4 { The Great Endarkenment
1.2
1.3
What sort of problem does hyperspecialization put on our plate? Our reap-
propriation of the story of the Tower of Babel suggests that some of the most
pressing issues will have to do with social coordination: that is, they will be
4 Take the distinction with more than one grain of salt: mathematics is supposed to provide the par-
adigm of a priori knowledge, but Polya (1990), a thoughtful discussion of mathematical investigation,
suggests that not even the paradigm stays on its side of the boundary. (See, for instance, the emphasis
on observation and induction in his Chapters 1–4.)
5 A recent movement, so-called experimental philosophy, presents itself as a turn away from aprio-
rism, but let me suggest that you take that with a grain of salt, too. While work done under that heading
is somewhat of a hodgepodge, the core of the movement consists in the social-science investigation of
what people’s “intuitions” are. Sometimes this sort of investigation is presented as debunking philoso-
phers’ claims to know things without looking, but not nearly as often as you might think. Sometimes
it is presented simply as a way of determining just what the intuitions are, so that they can be used as
a basis for further philosophical theorizing; see Weinberg (2013, pp. 93ff) for a description of the ap-
proach. Calling that a turn away from the a priori is a little like a creation science institute announcing
that its research is now empirically informed, because instead of just telling you what the Bible says,
from memory, they look up chapter and verse.
6 { The Great Endarkenment
about getting along and managing cooperative enterprises with people whom
we do not understand. If we think of the subject matter of ethics as centrally
concerned with how human beings are to get along with one another, and
if hyperspecialization requires us to rethink even the very basic social traffic
rules, then we can expect it to set a new agenda for moral philosophers—as
I argue, in Section 3.6 and in Chapter 9, that it does. If you unpack that very
quick train of thought, you will see that it turns on a consideration that it’s
time to add explicitly into the mix.
Specialization is not in itself a distinctively human capacity, and since we
were discussing the building of a tower, recall that other animals do on oc-
casion execute relatively complicated cooperative construction projects: bees,
for example, or ants.6 However, the form that specialization takes in human
beings is, as far as we know, unique. For a given species of ant or bee, the types
of specialized task involved in setting up a nest or hive are fixed, and so where
human beings sometimes decide that their next building will include features
seen on no previous skyscraper (for instance, the sort of mass damper installed
in Boston’s John Hancock tower, and then in New York’s former Citibank
building), and that they will have to hire new kinds of specialists, bees do not.
Previously unheard-of specializations cannot belong to a fixed repertoire; they
cannot be, as we used to say, instincts. Thus people learn their specializations,
and not always the same ones. They are able to work their way into any of
an apparently open-ended list of disciplines or professions, and what is more,
they are able to switch from one to another—although because the costs of
doing so are high, these migrations do not happen very many times over the
course of a life.7 Thus someone might (real example) start out as a dancer,
then work for an architecture firm specializing in theater design, then for an
IT department, and subsequently become a vice-president of a bank. To have
a way of marking this, I will say not just that human beings hyperspecialize,
but that they are serial hyperspecializers.
Thus the social traffic rules cannot be fixed ahead of time as they are for the
social insects. But then, if the configuration of differently specialized human
beings changes regularly, if there are no rules for coordinating activities that
are workable no matter what the roles are, and if it follows that the moral
rules have to be rewritten equally regularly, then the distinctive form that
8 For recent discussion of the idea that we may need to treat our moral guidelines as revisable, see
Millgram (2009d), and Richardson (2013).
9 For instance, Millgram (2005a, Chapter 1) describes one way we observe what is and isn’t a good
idea. Millgram (1997) gives an argument that we have to learn what matters from experience; the pres-
ent discussion is one way of framing that argument, by providing a deeper explanation for some of its
premises. I’ll give a philosophers’ example below, in Section 10.7, especially footnote 47, with follow-up
in Section 10.9.
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