Not one to accept the mishmash of ideas which is the modern worldview, Professor Minogue reminds us:
A free State is one in which there is a strong resistance to professionalization; it is marked by that “versatility” which Pericles claimed for Athens. [page 150]
This is not to argue that professionalization is bad. Minogue was himself a quite highly-regarded professional in the field of political history and theory. This is to argue that we should resist professionalization as we should resist any good thing that might outgrow its own domain, in a sense — might outgrow its own good.
The modern age is one of monstrous growths of that sort and we are learning, some probably already knew of this from studies of history, that one problem with excessive professionalization is that it quickly decays into an amateurism of the bad sort, a rigorism tied to yesterday’s thoughts and embedded in a general sloppiness of thought. This is a still greater danger in this excessive professionalization which I’ll be emphasizing.
One obvious example of professionalization gone bad, in this year 2011 of an ongoing worldwide crisis, is banking and finance in general. The professionals, in the commercial banks and the central banks and the government bureaucracies, carry about heavy degrees from prestigious universities as well as a long list of equally prestigious conferences which were gatherings of Nobel laureates, government ministers, and other highly professional experts who all belong to the right societies and the right country clubs. Unfortunately,, it seems they mostly know how to enlarge the financial sectors of economies to a bloated and unsustainable size, largely by encouraging the solution of problems and non-problems as well by way of products and services which provide large flows of fees and other incomes to financial professionals. Which creates a new round of problems to be solved by financial professionals.
Of all modern professionals, scientists and engineers have maintained the highest levels of what could truly be labeled professionalism, the attainment and disciplined deployment of high levels of knowledge and skills in a field. They have done so precisely because they are forced to respond to reality rather than being fully free to build their own little ghettos in which they can serve their own interests and the interests of some of the human institutions to which they belong. Having said that, there are those even from the scientific community who have worried about the effects of the corporatization of science — some articles summarizing the results of complex experiments in fields such as particle physics might have lists of dozens or even hundreds of `authors’. This large-scale will probably drive out the sorts of true individuals who can take on the role of prophets to their fellow-scientists and will also make it difficult for any remaining members of the herd to feel even the need to exercise personal moral responsibility. Anyone who has read a history of the Manhattan Project or a biography of a major participant will know these moral problems were already showing up in that project, relatively small by current standards, and showing up despite and because of the fact that those scientists of an earlier time tended to be more individualistic and had been raised in societies which didn’t pay undue respect to political or military or professional authority.
There are others who have given personal testimony about the decay of fundamental honesty in the practice of science. Back in the 1960s, Michael Polanyi, chemist and surgeon and philosopher, was so testifying. More recently, David Ruelle, a French physicist who was one of the rediscoverers of what’s misleadingly called `chaos theory’, testified that copies of his articles had actually been cut out of journal copies in the libraries at universities where his academic rivals were resident — see Chance and Chaos published in 1991 by Princeton University Press. Put this together with the ease of assembling scientific research teams to build weapons which could be fairly labeled as evil and the ease by which scientists carry out research which their parents and grandparents would have considered the stuff of science fiction nightmares not so long ago, and we have warnings that the professionalism of even scientists might well be decaying into what might be called amoral service of one’s self and one’s institutions. After all, there’s nothing morally special about those who have minds capable of fluently working in the formal systems of quantum mechanics. The moral goodness often found in scientific research is arguably a carryover from the early modern traditions of the amateurs who founded these fields of research and often remained amateurs, that is — lovers, even when invited into universities or given grants to set up laboratories. (See my early blog posting, Are All Scientists Evil? for a slightly more extensive discussion of this issue.)
The point is that we’re all human beings and the focusing of the mind and spirit which can occur with any intense professionalization, including that of clergymen and moral philosophers, can lead us to enter a ghetto with walls which are no more than a self-serving blindness. When this happens, professionalization turns from a training/education and practice which serves higher ends, including especially the needs of human communities, and becomes a source of fragmentation and conflict of the sort which can quickly break down moral order. True human communities, including those of political natures, are formed and held together by bonds of dependencies which are of a moral nature, that is, both the shepherds and the sheep are dependent upon each other and both willingly take on the task of forming the appropriate bonds of moral order. And — again — professionalism can develop into a form which dissolves these bonds of moral order rather than building new bonds or supporting old bonds.