FW: Social Solidarity

I have recently read excerpts from Emile Durkheim's The Division of Labor in Society. There are a few points in that work that I am still unsure about. I can't decide if I agree with him or not on these, and I think that writing it out might help me to come to a conclusion.
He said that mechanical solidarity "can only be strong if the ideas and tendencies common to all the members of the society are greater in number and intensity than those which pertain personally to each member... This solidarity can grow only in inverse ratio to personality... Solidarity which comes from likeness is at its maximum when the collective conscience completely envelops our whole conscience and coincides at all points with it. But, at that moment, our individuality is nil. It can be born only if the community takes smaller toll of us." I think that it is impossible to have a community in which every person is exactly identical, so I take this description as purely hypothetical. I think that even in a rural farming town in the US, there is not enough mechanical solidarity to eliminate personality, or even diminish it. Farmers don't live in entirely self-sustaining communities, they still need people to teach their children, people to run grocery stores, people to sell their crops to. It's true that they don't depend on each other for things, but they are still part of a larger society that they must be connected to in order to survive. At least in the United States, the idea of mechanical solidarity is virtually obsolete. Organic solidarity is the sole cohesion found here.
Which brings me to my next point of debate. Durkheim says that organic solidarity allows personality to grow by forcing everyone in society to become a specialist in one area. He argued that "in higher societies, our duty is not to spread our activity over a large surface, but to concentrate and specialize it. We must... choose a definite task and immerse ourselves in it completely, instead of trying to make ourselves a sort of creative masterpiece, quite complete, which contains its worth in itself and not in the services that it renders." This is a very anti-renaissance type of thought. In the renaissance, people were encouraged to think in many fields of sciences and philosophy, but now it is rare to find someone with any kind of practicable knowledge outside of his or her college major. Why? Because someone who knows a ton about beetles can make more money (by doing a better job) studying beetles than someone else who studies plant and animal life in general. It's a competition issue. I have struggled a long time to find a reason to agree with this kind of thinking. I tend to prefer the renaissance method, so I'm not sure I can agree with Durkheim when he says that this division of labor is necessary in modern societies and that it is for the best. That's hard for me to swallow, because I think that narrowing our specialties also narrows our vision and our ability to learn foreign concepts. There are too many people that cannot see another person's point of view because they do not have similar backgrounds. People can't see the effects of their actions on other people because they are trained only to look for the effects on certain areas. This creates and fosters misunderstandings and disagreements that should be easier to resolve than they are. I think that more people would see eye to eye if we didn't have to specialize ourselves so thoroughly in order to secure our niche in the economy. That's my reasoning, and it's hard to agree with Durkheim on this point. An understanding and well-rounded society would provide more cohesion and solidarity than Durkheim's divisive and self-interested organic solidarity.