but, a long time ago (i'm talking about evolutionary time), jobs didn't exist. every person had to be a generalist, capable of figuring everything relevant about their world out for themselves. as human society came to be and progressed, it became clear that this was inefficient; for the most part, it was more efficient to conjure up an army of specialists. key here was the notion of trust: i trust that a doctor who has spent time researching medicine will be better at diagnosing and curing me than i will. i trust that a mechanic who has spent time communing with automobiles will be better and diagnosing and curing my car than i will.
and so on. most jobs fall into this category; it is simply more efficient if one person has as their full-time job to figure out and understand methods and disseminate them to the world. as far as i can tell, there are two other categories of jobs, both smaller: one is the job that anyone can do, but for which it is more efficient due to startup/slowdown time to have some people do full-time than everyone do part-time. cab drivers. garbage men. receptionists. not all of these are great exemplars (cab drivers have to know the city better than ordinary people), but you see the category in question. the other is the pure knowledge job, like being an academic, which i'm not the best person to analyze in depth due to my proximity to the situation.
as usual, i digress. this has several implications. first, it weeds out the generalists like, in my opinion, myself. i don't think i'm built to do any one thing -- i think i'm built to perceive situations and deal with them as they arise. at the risk (ha!) of sounding egotistical, i think the generalist should be a valuable member of society. the generalist is, by definition, the sort of person who will be able to incorporate knowledge quickly. if we ever do encounter extraterrestrial intelligence, the generalist will be the person best able to understand them. but the generalist is being crowded out; most jobs now require prior experience or specific training. (i recently browsed on-line job sites and was disappointed to find this.)
the second niche that i find interesting is the niche of the spiritual leader, the priest or rabbi or imam or whatever. what is their job? it is to discover answers to moral questions. but morality is such a personal thing; it seems that in this realm, more than most, someone who has not gone through our precise experiences cannot know the right answer to our questions.
in particular, it seems paradoxical that most religions instruct their teachers to eschew worldly pleasures and experiences in order to live a fairly secluded life. how can you instruct someone to deal with situations that they have not been through themselves? i think most people would agree with me when i say that the friends who understand me best are the ones who have been through similar things, and yet a lifetime religious person, because it is not just a job but a lifestyle, has gone through (at least recently) a qualitatively different world than i have.
where does morality come from? i have an answer to this question now. one of the things that sets humans apart from other creatures is our ability to attribute sentience to conspecifics. we understand that other people are analogous to us. (psych experiments yield some fascinating results -- among other species, the ones more closely related to humans have this to a larger degree.)
this part isn't an accident. it's precisely because we can do this that we can have things like cooperation, because we trust that on some level the people we are interacting with are like us and can be counted on to respond in a predictable way. and it's because we have cooperation that we've evolved into an efficient society with so much spare time on our hands that we can have weblogs and SETI and whatnot. in other words, it's not an accident that the person who's writing this has this sense of analogy.
but morality is, i think, an accidental byproduct of this. we start to become superrational -- we have ideas that we want other people to have, because we understand that this analogy exists. we strive to treat all others equal (even though this goes completely against what one would think evolution dictates our impulses to be) because we want others to treat us equally. we experience feelings of conscientious revulsion about killing people, because we want others to experience those feelings about us.
this is why our society is conformist. conformity is a very useful thing to have; the more uniform our morality is, the more reassured we can be about how other people will act. it's safe.
in the world today there are two contradictory tendencies, both of which make sense to me. there's the trend towards conformity, which makes sense for the reason i've currently said; if we can assume that everyone else will act as we act according to a set of rules, that's less time and mental space that we have to spend worrying about this, which leaves us more time for everything else. and then there's the trend towards nonconformity, which also makes sense, because in order to move forward as a society we need to encourage unorthodox thinking.
why do we want to move forward as a society? because the reason that we exist today is because our ancestors moved forward via unorthodox thinking and outcompeted previous societies. humans took that great leap upwards from other species when we evolved the ability to communicate and absorb novel ideas from other members of our species (language is necessary here.) but once everyone has that ability, the tribes that come up with the best novel ideas will win out.
what's the best solution? it seems clear to me that the best solution is to keep the nonconformists isolated from the rest of the world. they persist as a breed and come up with novel ideas, but the rest of the world does not have to worry about encountering them on a day-to-day basis. i obviously do not believe this ridiculous solution, but something like it is already in place.
quite frankly, every nonconformist is destined for a life at the fringes of society. i would rail against this if there were some entity to do so at, but every person feels pressure from society to conform. most do, leaving society self-perpetuating; a few characters don't, and persist around the fringes, propagating their nonconformity down through generations and leaving the nonconformist genes alive should we ever need them again.
while i doubt that anyone has rationally come to this conclusion and tried to implement this plan, and we certainly have not had enough time for evolution to filter out societies that don't use it, this may be where the underlying thread of equality comes in. most people (in america, anyway) have the notion that equality is a good thing, but no one treats everyone in their lives as exact equals. we like or dislike people for various reasons, various personal traits. we don't sleep with everyone. and so on.
we shun the nonconformist who doesn't wear a tie to a job interview or who sees the benefit of a system with slavery or who doesn't have an indoor voice. it makes sense. we don't like dealing with people so different from ourselves. but we maintain the facade of equality so that we can keep these people around from when we may need them.
i don't believe half of what i've written here, but it's food for thought.