The Myth of Specialisation

Yet dare not stain with wealth or power
A poet's free and heavenly mind:
If bright chameleons should devour
Any food but beams and wind,
They would grow as earthly soon
As their brother lizards are.
Children of a sunnier star,
Spirits from beyond the moon,
O, refuse the boon!


- Percy Bysshe Shelley, An Exhortation


We are reaching a bottleneck now - indeed, probably have reached it - at which society will cease to progress in any meaningful sense. Our philosophy will not be broadened, our hearts will not be deepened, and our minds will not be expanded. It is not, as many have claimed, that man cannot any longer know everything, but that he must know everything. Although it is perhaps true that knowledge is becoming more specialised, in some sense it has also become more general - though in sooth I do not know how this synchrony has occurred. Today authors must be marketing experts, poets must be orators, mathematicians must be financiers and architects must be risk assessors. Nobody can be alien to the exquisite agony of producing a CV, or surrendering the soul to the torment of a PowerPoint presentation, by which we might share our ridiculous findings with our still more ridiculous peers. All of this is, of course, illusory and nonsensical - as if committing some old rubbish to paper in pursuit of a job could ever say anything of the character. The CV is our modern mode of poetry. Just as poetry encapsulates and consecrates the spirit of the age, so the CV serves to illustrate the deformity that is the modern human - dull and lifeless, bound to the quotidian. Spiteful, adversarial, discriminatory, unfair, drowning in the specific (which is, after all, but an illusion) - in some sense our lives replicate and reflect the horrors of these damnable pieces of paper.

Yet I must go back to the idea of this corrupted specialisation, this generalised specific which infects with bluntness the arrow of human progression. Though I cannot claim to discern the exact origin of this phenomenon, I think it can reasonably be seen as the inevitable consequence of capitalism's endless march towards efficiency. Yet it is now devouring itself, sacrificing purity for profit. And of course, profit is a short-term phenomenon, like a flash of lightning to be captured in an instant, whereas knowledge, philosophy, art - whatever you wish to term it - is immortal, a great river which flows through the human heart. It is this which we persistently deplete in favour of the transient, the mundane. We build empires of dust, and all the while we make funeral pyres of gold. The base of capitalism is rooted in true nothingness, a vale of phantoms. The very core of its philosophy is illusory. This idiocy is allowed to reign because, well, idiocy is the prime comorbidity of power. Capitalism cares for nothing except the temporal and the present; indeed I have long suspected it to be a natural reaction to the prospect of death (though I will only expatiate on this when I have fully considered it). Certainly it entertains the concurrent tropes of life - short-termism and the search for endless progression or meaning. Its theme is essentially tragic, as a person searching in vain for something which was never there. Admittedly, in this sense it perhaps mirrors life itself, but it can offer no revelation, no wit, no charm, no recompense for sorrow. It is a distraction in the face of unknowledge - superficially pleasing but intellectually corrosive. It encourages us to categorise unknowns as if they were known, rather than to see them for the mysteries they are. The ultimate effect of which is, of course, to punch the final seal onto our lack of knowledge, to paste over the human heart with the sickly glaze of contentment. Capitalism cannot understand that love is a hunger, not a glut. It is a febrile agony, not a static appeasement. It is maniacal and unreasoned, not calculated and sterile.

I always find it curious that a thing so necessarily human, so buried in relations between men, can care so little for human beings, can impoverish the vast majority with no ramifications. It is an entirely human phenomenon which seeks to divorce us from all humanity, depriving us both of emotional experience and any true, sublime, unobstructed love. For everything is deceit when money is involved. Everything is bias.