Selected excerpts from Bottleneck:
For students of my generation at Oberlin, the "open stacks" policy that gave them freedom to browse throughout the college library was a truly wonderful opportunity for the use and on-going development of their advanced primate heads. Assigned searches or unplanned explorations could broaden intellectual horizons. [p.20-21]
Based on my observations in the university libraries that I frequent, this is rarely done by students these days. (In fact, it is rare when you see a student with a library book, period.) As Catton points out, we are all specialists now.
I will argue in later chapters that because of further elaboration of division of labor in the 20th century -- since Durkheim's classic analysis in the 1890s -- the disfunctional effects have come to outweigh what he claimed to have shown was its function, the fostering of social solidarity based on mutual interdependence among diverse specialists. [p.53]
...no one produced the whole marketable product, much less the entire array of goods or services involved in a society's way of life. Thus no worker was self-sufficient. Specialization increased efficiency but sacrificed independence. [p.62]
Instead of division of labor being the great producer of organic solidarity, it now appears that division of labor corrupts. Relations between differently specialized persons in today's societies are increasingly like those between predators and prey. [p.90]
Have we in fact become a society in which people's routine activities constitute, in effect, preying upon each other?...And continued selling of products is imperative -- because with today's division of labor no specialist is self-sufficient. [p.93]
Note how this -- and the following -- is related to the premise of this movement.
Modern societies are "becoming ensembles of social organizations that persist only because persons are coming to experience their interests, energy, and hopes as irrevocably tied to their functionary status in the service of some physical or social technique," says Manfred Stanley....The problem goes much deeper than the qualities of capitalism versus communism, etc. It is the same problem whether a regime's sacred scripture was authored by Adam Smith or Karl Marx. Division of labor impairs self-sufficiency, necessitates exchange among specialties, and thus tends to cause people to treat one another as "resources" and/or "customers." We are dehumanized.
There is a continuing market for edible products because the food we eat today is digested and metabolized, so tomorrow we need to eat again. Demand for performance of the many occupational categories that specialize in providing "durable goods" are different. Workers in a televison factory, for instance, may have no further livelihood once every household has been equipped with a satisfactory TV set -- unless having multiple sets per household can be made the norm, or new flat screen models can make possession of an old cathode ray tube TV seem demeaning.
Being "on a treadmill" means, beyond implications of drudgery or tedium, that each member of an industrial society has an abiding interest in never letting his particular job be finished. The system's need for his special function must never be allowed to be satiated....Artificial obsolescence, a wasteful custom inducing customers to replace a still functioning possession with a newer model, is a strong argument against Durkheim's optimistic apprasial of division of labor. [p.94-95]
It should be noted that within the "edible products" category there are also many specialists that are not necessary to the production and consumption of healthy food. Indeed, many are a detriment to it.
...In the course of the Bishop's [Samuel Wilberforce] two hour string of eloquent phrases expressing righteous disapproval of the idea of evolution, he turns to Huxley and asks him whether the apes from which he claims to be descended were on his gandfather's or his grandmother's side.
Huxley responds by declaring, "If...the question is...would I rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means of influence and yet who employs these faculties and that influence for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion, I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape." [p.106]
Fast forward to the present. Where is there now such an intelligent, rational and quick-thinking member of our species who, like Darwin's Bulldog [Huxley], is ready to rebuke societal "standards" that have grown so degenerative...Should the precious symbol-manipulating ability of our species be so wastefully (and destructively) deployed? Was that our destiny? Has the division of labor and the invention of money done irreversible damage to the promising hominid line? [p.106]
That is one thing that this society excels at: dulling all of the senses.
No American president since the Second World War has escaped the delusion that result from ignoring the concepts in nature's dictionary. All have failed to comprehend the basic change in humanity's ecological situation. [p.170]
I rejoice at having lived in the time just preceding the bottleneck century, even though the view ahead, as these 16 chapters have enabled [hopefully] us to discern it, must appear extremely disheartening. Genuine knowledge, however mixed a blessing it may sometimes seem, is never as oppressive as languishing ignorance. [Epilogue, p.215]
I hope...that...bottleneck surviviors will have evolved social systems better able to be circumspect in their use of their planet and its vulnerable biosphere. [Epilogue, p.217]
