“We are in an age that assumes the narrowing trends of specialization to be logical, natural, and desirable.”
R. Buckminster Fuller, The Wellspring of Reality
This article is part of “A Guide to the Wellspring”, a series of posts helping unpack Buckminster Fuller’s essay “The Wellspring of Reality.”
I’m a comprehensivist who has always had to specialize to make a living.
Most of us are.
In other writings, Fuller points out that we are naturally generalists as children, interested in everything and exploring our world in every direction. But as we grow older, society tells us that we need to specialize, that we need to choose a career and focus on a narrow aspect of that career to succeed.
When I reached working age, “desktop publishing” was a new thing. I specialized in converting those new electronic documents into forms that could be printed on older-generation printing presses. It was a specialty that was destined to be made obsolete as soon as the technology of printing caught up with the technology of creating documents.
Then the World Wide Web came into being.
I was attracted to the fact that it was still in an early stage of development and a “webmaster” had to be more of a generalist, knowing about everything from server maintenance to graphic design. Over the years though, webmasters have become more specialized. We now have back-end developers, front-end developers, user interface designers, specialists in JavaScript frameworks, content management systems, theme development, and the list goes on.
This kind of specialization is typical in just about every industry.
In medicine, general practitioners become pediatricians specializing in children’s medicine, or OBGYNs specializing in women’s medicine, or one of many, many other specialties. In a corporation, the only people who are tasked with understanding the whole organization are the CEO and the CFO; otherwise, employees specialize in their small bit of the business. Lawyers specialize in tax law or injury cases, or some other niche of the law. In science, it’s expected that you find a very specialized niche if you want to make any new discoveries.
This is the trend that Fuller is talking about. Our society continues to encourage individuals to pursue more and more narrowly specialized areas of knowledge. Clearly, based on his statement at the top of this article, Fuller did not find this trend to be logical, natural, or desirable, and he discusses why in a number of other locations in the essay.
Being a comprehensivist (the opposite of a specialist) doesn’t mean you can’t acquire specialized knowledge. All knowledge is additive, so you can simply add a more comprehensive viewpoint to what you already know and benefit from both kinds of knowledge.
