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Since specialization is a way of coping with the inadequacies of the human mind, it should hardly be surprising that those with the vision of the anointed often view specialization negatively, or that their vocabulary often reflects that. Cosmic decisions require minds with cosmic scope—and to say that there are no such minds, that the human experience must be broken down into manageable-sized pieces, is to deny the vision of the anointed. Meanwhile, those with the tragic vision have often proclaimed the virtues of specialization. Adam Smith attributed much of economic progress to the “division of labor,” Edmund Burke said that he “revered” the specialist within his specialty, and Oliver Wendell Holmes said that specialists were more needed than generalists, whose presumptions he derided. But such views are the opposite of the views among the anointed.
The Vision of the Anointed
Thomas Sowell
Experts have their place and can be extremely valuable in those places, this no doubt being one reason for the old expression, “Experts should be on tap, not on top.” For broader social decision-making, however, experts are no substitute for systemic processes which engage innumerable factors on which no given individual can possibly be expert, and engage the 99 percent of consequential knowledge scattered in fragments among the population at large and coordinated systemically during the process of their mutual accommodations to one another’s demand and supply.
Intellectuals and Society
Thomas Sowell
In the constrained vision, where man cannot directly create social results but only social processes, it is as characteristics of those processes that freedom, justice, power, and equality have significance.
A Conflict of Visions
Thomas Sowell
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