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Specialists are Deviants from Perennial Truth
Interesting read:
"Most of our modern ideas suffer from being no more than breakfast cereal. Most of the energy and attraction in them is in the packaging. Inside there is very little substance. A lot of it is fried air with sugar-coating. There may be a few grains of truth, but not enough, not the whole truth. Yet the world feeds on these light and snappy ideas and on nothing else. The rest of the complete breakfast is completely missing. Even those ideas which are profound and practical for our world still suffer from incompleteness. We can have the right ideas about politics and economics, but life is more than politics and economics. The affliction of specialization is myopia. As specialists we are under the delusion that our small area of expertise informs us about everything else. We know more and more about less and less. Truth has been carefully compartmentalized. Colleges and universities have been carefully departmentalized. We are all specialists, and none of us are generalists, and there is no glue to hold all our fragmented truths together. There is thinking, but no thought, as in a complete understanding that is comprehensive and coherent.
G.K. Chesterton had a word for all the specialists of the modern world. It is a surprising word. A jarring word. The word is “heretics.” The problem is not that the specialist—or heretic—is wrong, but rather narrow and incomplete. The heretic is someone who has broken himself off from a wider view of the world. The heretic, says Chesterton, has locked himself in “the clean, well-lit prison of one idea.”1 Another way Chesterton puts it is that the heretic has one idea and has let it go to his head.2 It is a case where myopia leads to madness."
Personally, I dislike the words "Heretic" and "Hersey" given its historical connotations and the overall paradigm of ideological intolerance and sectarian exclusivism that these words are wrapped around. I see "deviation" as a more holistic way of explaining the concept above. Nonetheless, Chesterson was dead-on about the scourge of specialists and their endless specialties that has inflicted out modern age.
"Most of our modern ideas suffer from being no more than breakfast cereal. Most of the energy and attraction in them is in the packaging. Inside there is very little substance. A lot of it is fried air with sugar-coating. There may be a few grains of truth, but not enough, not the whole truth. Yet the world feeds on these light and snappy ideas and on nothing else. The rest of the complete breakfast is completely missing. Even those ideas which are profound and practical for our world still suffer from incompleteness. We can have the right ideas about politics and economics, but life is more than politics and economics. The affliction of specialization is myopia. As specialists we are under the delusion that our small area of expertise informs us about everything else. We know more and more about less and less. Truth has been carefully compartmentalized. Colleges and universities have been carefully departmentalized. We are all specialists, and none of us are generalists, and there is no glue to hold all our fragmented truths together. There is thinking, but no thought, as in a complete understanding that is comprehensive and coherent.
G.K. Chesterton had a word for all the specialists of the modern world. It is a surprising word. A jarring word. The word is “heretics.” The problem is not that the specialist—or heretic—is wrong, but rather narrow and incomplete. The heretic is someone who has broken himself off from a wider view of the world. The heretic, says Chesterton, has locked himself in “the clean, well-lit prison of one idea.”1 Another way Chesterton puts it is that the heretic has one idea and has let it go to his head.2 It is a case where myopia leads to madness."
Personally, I dislike the words "Heretic" and "Hersey" given its historical connotations and the overall paradigm of ideological intolerance and sectarian exclusivism that these words are wrapped around. I see "deviation" as a more holistic way of explaining the concept above. Nonetheless, Chesterson was dead-on about the scourge of specialists and their endless specialties that has inflicted out modern age.
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