Narrow focus causes one to see a specific tree and miss the sunset

By David McElroy · July 1, 2019

I’m a generalist in a world which loves specialists. I’m interested in the entire forest, not just knowing everything about one or two random trees.

When I look up into the sky — such as in this photo I took in Trussville, Ala., six years ago — I see an integrated whole. I don’t focus on one or two trees. I don’t choose a specific cloud and want to study that cloud to the exclusion of the rest. I see beauty in the whole which wouldn’t exist in any particular part by itself.

But our world is set up today for specialists. We’re told that specialists are worth more money and that they have deeper knowledge. We have all benefited from the knowledge and training of specialists in many ways, but we’ve reached the point at which society doesn’t much understand the value of seeing how the many pieces of the whole fit together.

I’ve always been envious of people who could describe what they “are” in one word — a teacher, an accountant, a reporter, a mechanic, a plumber and so forth. No one word fits me. It never has. But I’ve recently realized that I’ve been looking at this the wrong way. The world has a serious need for specialists, but the people who understand what’s going on — who can help us find meaning and help dig us out of the hole in which we find ourselves — are the generalists. Like me.

It’s funny how we typically define ourselves in terms of what other people are willing to pay us to do, rather than in terms of what we intrinsically feel like on the inside. Do we do that because it’s just the social norm? Or do we do it because most of us have never taken the trouble to figure out what we really are? I’m not sure. I do know, though, that it’s impossible to come up with one word to say what I am.

An an ex-girlfriend used to be fond of telling me, “You’re a hexagonal peg in a world where you’re expected to be either a round peg or a square peg. You’re more complex than what most people are prepared to understand.”

About a month ago, I read David Epstein’s new book, “Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World.” He acknowledges the value of specialists in narrow fields, but he shows example after example of how real understanding and real breakthroughs — even in hard sciences — come from people who have a wide range of experience. People who understand multiple things often find ways of finding solutions in one field by taking analogies from another. I have a few quibbles with him, but the overall thrust of the book is excellent. (Here’s an article about the book if you’d like to decide whether to read it.)

Our world is becoming more specialized, both in the career sense and in the cultural sense. People are so specialized that even those in closely related jobs or subcultures misunderstand each other. That’s very true in work situations — which can make it more difficult to find solutions to hard problems — but it might be even more dangerous that we’re dividing into narrower and narrower subcultures, each of which believes its way should be the only way.

The people of almost every little subculture adopt the peculiar views and assumptions of their subculture. They become specialists in that tiny range of human knowledge, but they know almost nothing outside of that very limited range — even though they feel positively brilliant and have no idea how ignorant they are about the broader world.

As a generalist who’s trapped in a specialist world, I’m biased, but I think we’re all better off when we see far more of the forest — and understand how the trees all interact and form an ecosystem — than when we fixate on any one tree.

Social media seems to pigeonhole people by narrow interests. These are the Trump lovers over here and the Trump haters over there. Those are the dog people over there. And the car enthusiasts hang out right here. The fundamentalist Christians talk to each other — and nobody else — in this narrow place. And don’t go over there, because it’s for the fitness nuts.

The system somehow tries to force people to choose some specialist identity to take on, even as a cultural label.

A lot of things interest me but I don’t want to be defined by any one of them. The ability to segment by interests sounded good in theory when I heard the promise of the Internet years ago, but I think a lot of people are getting such tunnel vision that they’re no longer well-rounded.

The great science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein — who wrote some of my favorite books of youth — said something which I love on this subject.

“A human being,” Heinlein wrote, “should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, co-operate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”

I’m not as broadly capable as what Heinlein suggests. I suspect people of a few generations ago were far closer to what he describes. But even though my interests and experience aren’t as broad as what Heinlein says they should be, most people’s are even more narrow.

We live in a world in which people become very proficient in one narrow thing. This gives them confidence in themselves and makes them feel like experts. But they become so myopic that they don’t see how little they know — and this is dangerous.

In the years to come — which I believe will bring about terrible social and economic conditions — your specialist knowledge is going to be essentially worthless. We need more people who understand the broader world and how more things interconnect.

In the terms of my ex-girlfriend, we need more hexagonal pegs. While the square pegs and the round pegs fight it out, the hexagonal pegs might just find the way to survive and thrive in a more civilized way.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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