I thought, in light of the recent post on ‘abolishing lawyers’, i.e. dissolving the division between those who understand and can use the law and those who can’t, that it might be worthwhile to throw out a few remarks on ‘division of labour’, something which often gets both praised highly and vigorously condemned.
Now I can’t speak for anyone else, but to my mind the issue seems relatively simple, once you distinguish two sorts of division of labour, what we might roughly call division of what is ‘naturally united’ (which I think those on the left have tended to be critical of), and division of what isn’t (which is less bad and very useful), where the ‘natural unity’ in question is the human person.
So compare the division of labour in the making of, say, a computer, and the division of, say, political labour. In making a computer you can divide the tasks of designing the casing, acquiring the materials for it, making it, designing the electronic components, acquiring the materials for them, making them, programming the programs, recruiting the tiny gnomes who live inside it and move the bytes from one spot to another, finding tiny hats for them to wear, etc. (my understanding of computers is not too advanced).
The point is, these different functions are all basically the same sort of thing ‘from a human point of view’. The human animal in each case finds out that following a certain sequence of actions produces useful results, and applies itself to following those actions diligently. There’s no big difference in this sense between them – and precisely insofar as the overall task and the component tasks are similar in this sense, we can divide them among different people without making much of a change in what sort of work each of those persons is doing.
By contrast, in the ‘division of political labour’, where you have, e.g., some people with the job of commanding and others with the job of obeying, some people with the job of taking an overall view of society’s common interests and some people with the job of just minding their own business, some people with the job of drawing up plans for others to follow and some with the job of following those plans – here matters are quite different. These ‘jobs’ are very different ‘from a human point of view’: they’re different sorts of actions, they deploy different kinds of instincts, different kinds of relationships to others, different ways of relating to the world.
Directionless Bones 