According to author Chris Hodges “…Specialists must master narrow… subjects and disciplines rather than reflect on and challenge systems of power. The specialists reign over tiny, often irrelevant, kingdoms and ignore pressing social questions that require a broader understanding of the human condition. The specialist cedes questions of power… They are qualified only to speak about the minutiae of their area of study or discipline… Once he or she corners an obscure topic… locks out the non-specialist through the use of… obscure vocabulary.”

Yet modern society seems to rely on experts, and our specialists are becoming increasingly focused – perhaps that is part of our reliance upon the subject master. Is becoming a subject matter expert such a bad thing? In business it should (in theory at least) mean that the corporation is reliant upon that expert be able to translate the needs of their specific domain into the overall direction of the enterprise. It may seem true that within the educational realm that there are many that have dedicated their lives to studying specific and very focused disciplines, and certainly some of these fields of study do seem to be based on very obscure topics.

Indeed the study of remote esoteric subjects can be deemed as a part of advancing humanity as a whole. Indeed many of us wish to be at the top of our field, the king-pin or guru – and what is wrong with that? Nothing, yet often such an approach can seem rather limited in scope, and can to many others seem to be entirely irrelevant. To what extent do we need to place the things that we do within the scope of the pressing social questions of society? It could be argued that each and every one of us needs to look at the impact of the things we do within the greater context of society.

Because a technical specialist know how to do something does not infer that they must do it. It was precisely this type of thinking that led writer Isaac Asimov to think about the three laws of robotics. In other words to Asimov technologists should not build machines that can harm humanity, or, by its inaction, allow humanity to come to harm. These ideas have certainly made a few people think before taking action, yet there are plenty of technologists that proceed to do something because they can without giving any thought to the social implications of their actions.

In talking about specialists here we are not simply thinking about specialists in a technical field, we do include financial specialists, doctors, lawyers etc, etc. Certainly one thing that it is easy to agree with Mr Hodges about is the use of obscure vocabulary. It is true that many specialists hide behind the words of their profession, and fail to communicate effectively with members of other professions, or lay people. But the use of obscure vocabulary is not in and of itself evidence that these specialists give no thought to pressing social conditions. Indeed it is often these experts that push for social change. See the discussions that happen every day on discussion sites like LinkedIn Answers or Quora and it is possible to see that specialists are impacted by the right and wrongs of the human condition and the systems of power.

Certainly we should all be giving more thought to pressing social questions. Right now these issues are exploding across the world in front of us. Yet the same question we ask of democracy in a far-away land should also be asked of the society in which we live. We should not take everything we are told for granted, indeed there is a school of thought that says we should question everything and accept nothing as true until we have tested it for ourselves. Indeed this writer has stated that intellectual debate seems to almost be a dead artform.