I came to know the word "compartmentalization" well during the 1970's or 80's, when stories of late president John Kennedy's philandering ("womanizing" in today's term) scandals began to surface. "How could a person of such presidential caliber act so ludicrously irresponsible at the same time," marveled the journalist when reviewing many of the former president's outlandish escapades. "Through compartmentalization," he concluded.
That certainly threw a bad light on the word. Viewed more neutrally, though, the word could simply mean segregating things into different categories so they can be handled accordingly. And don't we all do that lots of the time: we prioritize things to do, we don't talk shop after work, we put on different hats to play different roles our job or family duties require, etc.?
Social scientists tell us civilization only begins when man does not have to spend all his time growing his own food, making his own clothes, and other living basics, but is able to concentrate on a certain "trade" that provides specialized service to others, and vice versa. Thus, an organized society where everyone has the luxury to develop and refine their specialty and that in turn propels the society to ever more advanced stages.
Today we live in one of the most, if not the most, organized societies in human history that values tremendously each person's specialty. Our education system encourages people to find and develop their talent as early as possible to become as great as possible in their chosen field. I remember the movie "The Fugitive," where the fugitive tries very hard to explain to the detective that he is really an innocent man, and the detective's short, no-nonsense reply to that is "I Don't Care," because his job, and his job alone, is to capture him as a criminal. It is a line intended for the dramatic, of course, but deep inside I think we all give a silent consent and even some admiration for the professionalism it displays. The term "generalist" has almost become a dirty word in our specialist dominated society: If you are good at everything, you are good at nothing.
But are things as separable as they seem, and even if they are, isn't the value of the whole greater than those individually? How do we "separate sin from the sinner" as if sin were just like a cancerous tumor we could easily remove from the patient with one swift cut? And when the boss compliments his employees as great talents (i.e., specialists) that contribute to the success of the company, isn't he the biggest generalist-in-charge who reaps the greatest benefits of the company?
I have done computer programming half of my professional life, and one thing I have been reluctant to do is to use those "object-oriented-programming" languages for my projects, not the least because I am usually the single person who creates and maintains the code, therefore has no need to make it "object-able," meaning portable and reusable, following the strict structural rules decreed by OOP. Rather, since I know every piece of my code, I can tinker and reuse them as I need in more efficient way than if I ever write them in OOP language.
But then I started programming Android apps and I was forced to use the biggest OOP language of them all--Java--and I very quickly understood the benefits of OOP and why the whole industry has been pushing it for decades. Through OOP structure, it has created a tremendous, reusable library that takes care of all the nitty-gritty of the low (device drivers) and the high (user interface) of application programming. No longer do you need to tailor-program in the particulars of individual hardware pieces or reinvent the nicest user interface of the world. They've all been done and sitting in the library for you. All that is required of you is your creative application idea and calling these components from the library into action. I am now a firm believer that one day everyone will be able to write a smart phone app to implement a good idea of his/her own, because the supporting tools will have been made so easy.
It seems we've come close to reaping the fruition of the Industrial Revolution then, from the day when we try to make individual machines work to the day when an assortment of machines can coordinate to work for us; from the day when we each have to bury ourselves in tedious bits-and-parts job to the day when we can raise our head and look around to see what fun things we can do for the day. Machines working for man, not the other way around, isn't that the end goal all along?
Indeed it would be foolish today to try to compete raw human intellect with that of computers' when IBM's supercomputer Deep Blue had beaten our world chess champion and artificial intelligence machine Watson had overpowered our Jeopardy wizards on TV, and a 10 year old with a smart phone at hand can Google anything anyone wants to know and become an instant walking dictionary. It would be like a professional racer trying to out-run a motor vehicle when the latter was first invented in the early industrial age.
But the human mind in any case is more than the combination of discrete functional blocks of memory, logic making, image processing, etc. that we architecture our computers to be, but something transcendent, vague but substantive, that morphs into intangibles such as intuition, passion, love and wisdom. Back in the "Fugitive" movie, the detective doesn't shut off his conscientious mind like a computer turns off its logic gate from 1 to 0 after saying those steely words, but keeps observing and ruminating, then concludes, not without a pinch of "gut-feelings" blended in with his cool logical analysis, that the man is innocent, and then determines and moves to help and nab the real fugitive with him.
And we all applaud and exhilarate in our heart, because we now know the detective does care, after all, as we all do, about justice being served, innocent people rescued. And his compassion, tenacity, guts and wits earn even more respect and admiration from us than that cold hard professionalism we saw earlier.
Larry Bird, one of the greatest athletes in NBA history who led the Boston Celtics to 3 time championships in the 1980's, was called "simply the best" by the Time Magazine in one of its cover stories. Yet Bird said of himself, "I don't shoot the best, I don't rebound the best, and I sure don't have the quickest feet on defense..." But he knows when to shoot, when to pass, and when to magically intercept a ball... all things combined, a wholesome way of playing that makes him the best of the best.
So, let's continue to pursue the best we can with our innate talent, but remember deep down inside we are not that different; use machines, but don't think like one; set and let the Calendar program remind us of things to-do, but do them creatively. Be wholesome, as our Father in heaven is wholesome... as it is said somewhere something like that :)
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