Needed: A New Concept of the Global Professional
Ancient Greek/Roman/Hellenistic discovery and oath of profession as art and calling as in medicine, for example
Medieval concept of profession as guild craft: the stages of expertise as apprentice, journeyman, and master
The rise of modern universities and scientific/scholarly societies: the paradigm of empirical knowledge as the basis for professional pursuit
Max Weber: 19th century society as bureaucratic the professions as specializations of knowledge-practice with defined disciplinary operations and legally sanctioned protocols of prescribed relationships with clients and status/privilege relationships with peers
Consciousness revolutions and experiments of the 1960s-70s: the demythologization of knowledge and skill -- expertise to be exercised for and by the people; the writings of Ivan Illich on ‘deschooling’ society’s monopologic of expertise-institutions vis-à-vis a new sense of the “tools for conviviality” …taking control of life-domains from experts, from learning, transport and shelter to health care e.g. in the Feminist revolutionary manifesto, Our Bodies, Our Selves…
A new concept needed: that of the global professional in the 21st century: the professional as transdisciplinary amateur
· appetite, curiosity, a fresh and inquiring mind as defining the amateur like the etym of the philosopher, a “lover of knowledge,” a life-long learner who doesn’t stop at the stage of degree credentialization or career-pinnacle recognition but whose love of his/her field always is revealing something new and substantively new all the time…
· a “don’t-know mind” a Socratic watchword as he demolished the pretensions and pomposities of the experts of his day (how clear is a general on the nature of true courage?…) and a confession (e.g. vis-à-vis death) that we truly don’t know about ultimate things despite our arrogant carryings on (reputed words of a famous Oxford don: “What I don’t know isn’t knowledge!”); how many paradigms of knowledge have to bite the dust before we -- in practice acknowledge this in our educational endeavors?... a favorite teaching phrase of a famous Korean-American Zen Master: ‘Only go straight and don’t know!’ ...Edward Said’s concept of the true intellectual…
· grounded: what distinguishes the true amateur from the dilettante or the dabbler [although as the author of the famous psychology of the flow-peak experience Csikszentmihalyi reminds us, dilettante originally meant one who takes delight in], is a solid grounding in the knowledge and standards explicit and tacit -- of a particular (historically honored) discipline or area/field of investigation; thorough digging in one spot is a necessity; of particular note: if a practitioner in any field doesn’t realize that their field is infinite with respect to refinement and development “ars longa, vita brevis” then he or she is a hack, is in it just for the job/money, is not a professional
· an appreciation of interconnectivity: the recognition of the intrinsic inner connections that plumbing deeply in the various fields reveals ‘ a unified field theory isn’t a fantasy or dream, but that toward which all fields move… knowledge is ultimately one, there is no such thing as ‘history’ or ‘math’ or ‘science’ or ‘art’ or ‘philosophy’ or ‘medicine’ or ‘technology’ or ‘political science’ under the bright moon of enlightenment or in the nature of things: all things, and all inquiries, end in a silence we can’t articulate but can only and finally appreciate in that silence whether transcendent, awe-struck, or dumb… And note: there is a huge difference between ‘interdisciplinary’ and a ‘transdisciplinary’ perspective…
· an amateur does not have a “bedside manner” as an adjunct to his or her profession now back to a calling (Parker Palmer), or way of life he or she dwells in care; a global responsibility or stewardship, a planetary and deeply personal habitation (Theodore Roszak) supervenes in which the rigors of response-ability, intimacy, and sensitivity to what is needed become the norm; there are discrete domains of activity and care but these distinct domains do not occlude our freedom of movement or our solidarity with each other; sabbatical forms of rest and refreshment are at the heart of the sane and loving amateur, no longer at the mercy and tyranny of artifically pressurized scholarship, punishing and rigid schedules or beguiling badges of status; thus the true amateur becomes the ‘animateur’ (Peter Senge) or ‘servant leader’ (John Greenleaf) in a variety of continually trans-secting settings as backyard becomes planet, planet becomes backyard, and ditch becomes salvation…
IMPORTANT NOTE: After schematizing a concept of the new global professional and how his/her practice differs from the bureaucratic expert, attention should be given to a similarly new concept of the global and globally educated/formed citizen…
“City-zen-ship:” the art and practice of living in community, on whatever level…
Cheers, Dan Novak
9.16.08
