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06593_Field_TCUM T158.txt
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become specialists like Vulcan, the smith and armorer. And how
do whole communities act when conquered and enslaved? The
same strategy serves them as it does the lame individual in a
society of warriors. They specialize and become indispensable
to their masters. It is probably the long human history of
enslavement, and the collapse into specialism as a counter-
irritant, that have put the stigma of servitude and pusillanimity
on the figure of the specialist, even in modern times. The
capitulation of Western man to his technology, with its
crescendo of specialized demands, has always appeared to
many observers of our world as a kind of enslavement. But the
resulting fragmentation has been voluntary and enthusiastic,
unlike the conscious strategy of specialism on the part of the
captives of military conquest.
It is plain that fragmentation or specialism as a technique