Specialization
is a necessary requirement of any reasonable civilised people. To have a
complicated society you need some people to focus on some things and get good
at them, and you need other people to focus on other things and get good at
those as well. You need people like surgeons, a highly specialized skill,
because they play an important part in keeping your civilisation well, but not
everyone has the time, money, intelligence or inclination to be a surgeon. You
need specialists like mechanics, and plumbers, you need engineers and
scientists, and all sorts of other specialized people and professionals to help
your civilisation function at a high level and in a healthy and stable way. You
need men to be men and provide, and you need women to be women and be mothers
and nurturers and carers of all kinds. These and other forms of specialization
are integral, vital, and good. So, one would be foolish to say specialization
is inherently evil.
Despite this
it needs to be acknowledged that specialization has an inherent flaw, we could
call it the “checkout” flaw. That is in a heavily specialized society like ours
many people will use the excuse that they are not an expert or a specialist in
a certain field as an excuse to checkout rather than thinking critically about certain
policies and agendas. But many people will even go further than this. There is
a tendency among people who have chosen just to rely on the experts to then turn
around and attack those who question such authority. Great evil can happen
because of this tendency. M Scott Peck[1]
explains this for us very well,
“For many years it has seemed to me that human tend to behave
in much the same ways as individuals— except at a level that is more primitive
and immature than one might expect. Why this is so – why the behaviour of
groups is strikingly immature – why they are, from a psychological standpoint,
less than the sum of their parts—is a question beyond my capacity to answer. Of
one thing I am certain, however: that there is more than one right answer. The
phenomenon of group immaturity is – to use a psychiatric term—'overdetermined'.
This is to say that it is the result of multiple causes. One of those causes is
the problem of specialization.
Specialization is one of the greatest advantages of groups.
There are ways groups can function with far greater efficiency than
individuals. Because its employees are specialized into executives and
designers and tool- and diemakers and assembly-line workers (who are in turn
specialized), General Motors can produce an enormous number of cars. Our
extraordinarily high standard of living is entirely based on the specialization
of our society. The fact that I have the knowledge and the time to write this
book is a direct result of the fact that I am a specialist within our
community, utterly dependent on farmers, mechanics, publishers, and booksellers
for my welfare. I can hardly consider specialization in itself evil. On the
other hand, I am thoroughly convinced that much of the evil of our times is
related to specialization and that we desperately need to develop an attitude
of suspicious caution toward it. I think we need to treat specialization with
the same degree of distrust and safeguards that we bring to nuclear reactors.
Specialization contributes to the immaturity of groups and
their potential for evil through several different mechanisms. For the moment I
will restrict myself to the consideration of only one such mechanism: the
fragmentation of conscience. If at the time of MyLai, wandering through the
halls of the Pentagon, I stopped to talk with the men responsible for directing
the manufacture of napalm and its transportation to Vietnam in the form of
bombs, and if I questioned these men about the morality of the war and hence
the morality of what they were engaged in, this is the kind of reply I
invariably received: 'Oh, we appreciate your concerns, yes, we do, but I'm
afraid you've come to the wrong people. We're not the department you want. This
is the ordnance branch. We just supply the weapons-—we don't determine how and
where they're used. That's policy. What you want to do is talk to the policy
people down the hall.' And if I followed this suggestion and expressed the same
concerns in the policy branch, this was the response: 'Oh, we understand that
there are broad issues involved, but I’m afraid they're beyond our purview. We
simply determine how the war will be conducted—not whether it will be
conducted. You see, the military is only an agency of the executive branch. The
military does only what it's told to do. These broad issues are decided at the
White House level, not here. That's where you need to take your concerns.' So
it went.
Whenever the roles of individuals within a group become specialized,
it becomes both possible and easy for the individual to pass the moral buck to
some other part of the group. In this way, not only does the individual forsake
his conscience but the conscience of the group can become so fragmented and
diluted as to be nonexistent. We will see this fragmentation again and again,
one way or another, in the discussion that follows. The plain fact of the matter
is that any group will remain inevitably potentially conscienceless and evil
until such time as each and every individual holds himself or herself directly
responsible for the behaviour of the whole group-the organism-of which he or
she is a part. We have not yet begun to arrive at that point.”
I hope you
can see the important application of what Peck is teaching in this section of
his book. He is explaining why people in society will tolerate great evil committed
by their representatives. It is because they can simply say, it’s not their own
fault, or it’s not their job, or it’s not really their concern, it’s all on the
authorities. Peck also explains elsewhere that the basic human attitudes
underpinning this are laziness and narcissism. That is people are just too
slothful and apathetic to do anything about great evil being committed, and too
focused on their own little world to care what others are doing in society at
large. As long as they can live their lives and be left alone as much as
possible, they will tolerate their national or business leaders doing terrible
things and live quite at ease. They will easily be able to console themselves
that it is someone else’s problem or fault.
This came up
often in the Covid years where many in the church, many who were even not ok
with what was happening, would say to pastors who spoke out: “Shouldn’t you
just be focusing on preaching the gospel?” This was a cynical attack on people
who were doing something, by those who were too afraid or too cowed or too
lethargic to say or do anything themselves. But they weren’t just acting out of
these motivations. They were also under the false assumption that it was our leader’s
job alone to handle this, and the rest of us should all just leave them to it.
But this is precisely the kind of thinking that leads populations to tolerate
their governments doing unjust wars, or unjustly persecuting their fellow
citizens, or committing other evils. It is a necessary condition for evil to be
able to prosper.
In other
words, Peck has outlined part of the psychology behind the old saying, “Evil triumphs
when good men do nothing.” He has explained how otherwise rational and decent
men and women can become participants in evil, simply by convincing themselves
it is not their job to do anything. They can ignore their conscience because
they have created a bunch of assumptions for themselves that excuse them from having
to act. This is how groups can essentially become conscienceless, because most
people, or all the people in the group, pass the buck onto someone else,
usually an authority figure.
A friend of
mine noted on social media the other day that he was disturbed by the fact that
most people did not appear to have a line in the sand when it comes to evil
being perpetrated on their fellow citizens. But when you think about it, this
makes sense for people who have compartmentalized in their mind and in their
society who can do what and when. If they say to themselves, “well this is the
responsibility of the authorities”, then they have successfully washed their
own hands of any participation in the evil. And to some degree they are
correct. They did not do it themselves, so all of the blame is not on their
shoulders. However, if they continue to do nothing when afforded the
opportunity through voting, political advocacy, or protests, writing, lobbying,
meeting with politicians, or just helping those in need and standing with them,
then what they have really done is excused their own evil by pretending it is
not an issue. There is sometimes a limited amount of things people can do, but
if people excuse themselves from having to do any of these things, then they must
accept that they share some of the moral responsibility.
The truth is
though in a society where we all get a say, we are responsible for how we use
that say, and we should use it for good (Prob. 31:8-9).
Peck also
notes that, “Specialization contributes to the immaturity of groups and their
potential for evil through several different mechanisms.” What he is saying
here is that blind trust in the experts, simply by virtue of the fact that you
are not one of them, is a primary mechanism for allowing society wide evil to
happen, and it manifests itself in different ways.
It does take
wisdom to know when you can and when you cannot trust these experts. But it
takes more than that, it also takes effort. Peck notes that a lot of people are
not willing to make this effort, because it is personally and socially
difficult. You have to reject the desire to just focus on your own corner of
the world, you have stop the apathy and sloth that demotivates you from
investigating further, and you need to take some ownership for the direction of
your society and then you need to act on this within your means peacefully. If
you have done this, then you can say you did what you could to oppose evil. If
you did not, then you checked out, and helped contribute to the evil. You may
not like hearing this, but it is the way things are.
Evil
triumphs when good men do nothing. It can triumph when they do, but the least
you can offer your brother, sister or neighbour, is to try to speak out against
it when it raises its evil head. Often you cannot do much more than this. Sadly
many people over the last few years were not willing to even do this. But what
about next time?
References
[1] M.
Scott Peck 1990, People of the Lie, Arrow Books, pp248-250.
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