The definition of civilization is specialization.

You know where civilization came from? Some cave person was better at hunting than some other cave person. So they made a deal. The better hunter went off to find food while the not-so-good hunter stayed home to clean the cave. It worked out better than both of them hunting and cleaning, so the idea took off.

Pretty soon, the hunters found that some of them were better at big animals, others had a talent for fish. And the cave cleaners discovered that some of them were better at taking care of cave babies while others cooked a mean mastodon stew.

The dawn of 'civilization', the way they like to define it in school, is really the moment that people had to depend on other people for survival.

Now we're so civilized that you couldn't possibly take care of all your own needs. But the upside is that you get to live more than twice as long as the average cave person and you know about stuff like music, taxes, and quantum mechanics.

What's interesting is that while people like the idea of civilization, they tend to see an increase in specialization as ridiculous. A hundred years ago, a doctor was a doctor. Now we have doctors who specialize in internal medicine, emergency medicine, livers, hearts, skin, cancer, all kinds of things. By the time you're an adult, we'll probably have doctors that specialize in medicine for 3-year-olds. Or ring fingers. Or something else I can't imagine.

The reality is, back when the first doctor decided that he or she didn't want to bother with anything other than patients who had problems with their pancreas, a lot of people thought it was ridiculous. Now, if I have a problem with my pancreas, I'm going to find the best person I can afford to fix it.

My father--your grandfather--told me that he believes that the government is deliberately encouraging specialization to make it harder for small businesses to survive. It used to be that you could start a company with a desk, a telephone, and a secretary, but now you're required to have an attorney, an accountant, and a human resources person. This, he says, is bad.

Later in the conversation, he asked how you were doing. He wanted to know whether you were talking yet. I joked that you were speaking two languages, which he thought was great. He said he thought we should hire a French cook, Swedish maid, German driver, and Chinese butler so you could be exposed to a bunch of different languages.

I told him we were going to hire one person to handle all the languages, but he didn't think that would work as well. I guess he didn't think it would be civilized.