In The Last Days of the Polymath, Edward Carr writes about a declining species of thinker and doer in this age of specialisation.
In an age of specialists, does it matter that generalists no longer thrive? The world is hardly short of knowledge. Countless books are written, canvases painted and songs recorded. A torrent of research is pouring out. A new orthodoxy, popularised by Malcolm Gladwell, sees obsessive focus as the key that unlocks genius.
Just knowing about a lot of things has never been easier. Never before have dabblers been so free to paddle along the shore and dip into the first rock pool that catches the eye. If you have an urge to take off your shoes and test the water, countless specialists are ready to hold your hand.
And yet you will never get very deep. Depth is for monomaths—which is why experts so often seem to miss what really matters. Specialisation has made the study of English so sterile that students lose much of the joy in reading great literature for its own sake.
A generation of mathematically inclined economists neglected many of Keynes’s insights about the Depression because he put them into words. For decades economists sweated over fiendish mathematical equations, only to be brought down to earth by the credit crunch: Keynes’s well-turned phrases had come back to life.
Of course Carr’s not talking about just any kind of generalist, he’s talking about the whole enchilada, a Da Vinci and even a Stephen Fry, someone who not only goes wide, but also deep.
Someone who performs brain surgery by day, writes code for a military drone at lunch and excels at foxy boxing at night.
Otherwise, many of us would be on the list as master Twitterers and Facebookers of wide ranging bon mots, dissertations and practical advice in 140 characters.
Holding forth on biology to cultural studies to bicycle mechanics and the latest viral ads and memes – our knowledge knowing no boundary nor reluctance to curiosity – proverbially a mile wide and one-inch deep.
And maybe that’s OK in a world where endless knowledge and augmented realities sit hyperconnectively waiting at the ends of our fingertips. Maybe there will be a new kind of polymath? Brought to you by Apple and Google.
Anyway, it’s an interesting piece and it got me thinking of any Australian examples of the species.
Creatively, Nick Cave comes to mind for music, books, plays and the sexual awakening of Kylie Minogue (*correction in comment #2), as does Malcolm Turnbull in the fields of politics, law, merchant banking and bad polling. Others?
There is probably a serious argument to be made here about epistemology and its relationship to the Enlightenment, imperialism, modernity, patriarchy and spectacle. The notion of the polymath is very affirming of those categories – the man (for it’s always a man), centred, standing on the commanding heights of knowledge, a master (appropriate word) of many fields.
Anyhoo, alas we live in messy post-modern, post-imperial, world. Stephen Fry? A dilettante, perhaps? A person whose charming erudition nicely exposes the performative conceit of the idea of the polymath. Christopher Monkton would style himself as a polymath and that says a lot about the conservative ideology at its heart (and indeed about the links between those modernist categories in crisis and climate change denialism).
Wasn’t Mihael Hutchence responsible for the sexual awakening of our Kylie?
Further research has indicated you are indeed right, Fine. I have confused my dark rockstars and our Kylies awakenings. I really must spend more time reading the gossip mags at the checkout line.
Our PM, Kevin himself, would qualify better than Malcolm. Most pollies can talk on any topic at length. Rudd can talk sense on most issues in depth, at length and with width. He’s just a bit hard to listen to sometimes.
Most of our shock-jocks believe they are generalists. There are few real Jacks in the media but most are Jills at the ABC.
Aw, why not? K. rudd.
Ooh, I gotta take exception to the implication that Keynes preferred words to maths, and that this was a good thing. For a start, Keynes was a mathematician before he was an economist – his first major work was “A Treatise on Probability”.
It’s true that The General Theory is light on maths compared to Keynes’ other professional work but that’s exactly why it was long misunderstood. The Hicks/Samuelson mathematical interpretation of the General Theory became economic orthodoxy, and when that particular interpretation was fairly comprehensively refuted by events in the 1970s the whole of Keynes was thrown out.
Keynes in the General Theory seems to have followed his mentor Marshall’s famous method – develop your initial insight using maths (as the only way to develop a complex argument rigorously), translate it into words, then burn the maths and publish only the words. Had he kept the maths then the re-translation by Hicks would not have occurred and that particular interpetation of his work would probably not have become the orthodoxy. It didn’t help of course that Keynes was, like Marshall, a very persuasive writer.
Sorry, but to do serious economics you do need serious maths. mind you, though the maths is necessary it is very far from sufficient for good economics – which brings us back to your original point about the dilemma of depth versus breadth in learning. Learning the maths does narrow your view and makes it difficult to learn the rest.
PS – I think Nick Cave is much overrated. He needs singing lessons for one thing; at least Kylie could have taught him that in return. Still, his singing’s better than his writing.
I don’t know about his foxy boxing skills, but Con Kolivas used to be an anaesthetist by day and a linux kernel developer by night. Chances are some of his code ended up in a military drone
I don’t know how he managed to find the time for both but its probably one reason he eventually (mostly) gave up the latter.
Nick Shehadie and Marie Bashir, both of them.
Cognitive science is a fertile field for polymaths I reckon, because it is very multi-disciplinary.
Even though you can specialise in cognitive science, there is room for people who master a number of disciplines: computer science, mathematics, biology, neurology, psychology, statistics, philosophy. It allows for multi-skilling to become a specialisation.
Even though he might superficially look like a monomath because he is a cognitive scientist, I think after reading some of (for example) Douglas Hofstader’s work, I am more ok with calling him a polymath than some of the other names mentioned (Nick Cave!?!?). Oliver Sacks was a good example.
I would think that philosophers who look to work in philosophy of mind have very steep learning curves when it comes to psychology, and brain imaging and neuroscience. Similarly, I reckon many cognitive neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists would be stretching their minds in many directions – including learning some philosophy.
Phil says:
We are definitely in the age of pygmies rather than giants – personally, professionally and politically. And it shows in the general decline in creativity, most obviously in art but also in cutting edge science.
Think back to the World War-Cold War years and reflect that clash of the titans requires titans. And these giants were usually giants over a multitude of fields.
In personal endeavours we had the era of pioneers and large families, which is where the phrase “jack of all trades comes from”. You had to do all your own repairs and be an all-in-one counsellor, tailor, cook, builder, soldier etc. No way you can ring RACV or Harvey Norman if your appliances broke down.
In professional endeavours, the 1800-1900s was still the age of entrepreneurs, robber barons and industrial conglomerates. Names like Rockefeller, Ford, Agnelli, Sloan, Honda, Lever & Kitchen and yes, Packer. Gigantic companies with global reach, like IBM, Esso & GM. With “One Big Union” union leaders on a par. Gompers, Spence.
In the life of the mind the era of the polymaths gave us the monster-brains of Faraday, Mill, Weber, Schumpeter, Hayek, Popper, Marx, von Neumann, Graham Greene, Nabakov, Solzyhenitzen.
Musicians and artists had a streak of megalomania, but it paid off in the case of Wagner, Lennon-McCartney and so on. Coppola seems to be the last of the megalomaniacal film makers.
In the life of the body we had brilliant all-rounders like Keith Miller and Gary Sobers, Babe Zacharias, Jim Thorpe,
And in political sphere we actually had too many giants, De Gaulle, Churchill, Rooseveldt, but also Mao, Hitler & Stalin. This ended up in the Cult of Personality. But empires were built (pre-eminently the British), projects were completed (NASA, Snowy Mountains).
Nowadays our elites are pathetically small by comparison. Our families are smaller and self-centred. Our companies and careers are short-lived and chop/changed. Our states seem unable to embark on and deliver what should be fairly simple national programs (eg CPRS).
Just think of our political parties. Compare Menzies & Whitlam to Howard & Rudd.
We are the Hollow Men…
I think that there is always a need for generalists to complement the specialists, foxes to play with the hedgehogs, so I think the more interesting question is what role can/should they play in the current world. They obviously can’t drive forward entire multiple sciences like Da Vinci did. The breadth and depth of human knowledge is too much for that now.
In Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar (which deserves much more recognition than it receives) there’s a character whose profession is “Synthesist”. He spends his days reading widely through innumerable fields with enough understanding of each to see linkages with other disciplines that might be relevant. He then points out these linkages to corporations whom give him a fee and set their specialists to work.
Imagine this in the internet age. There’s less commercial considerations, but the blogger foxes are synthesising the work of others to provide new fields for hedgehogs. The specialists write the wikipedia pages, the generalists link them to aloow the specialists to write them some more.
In Brunner’s work the synthesist is a profession for dilletantes, and the idle middle class, somewhat similar to blogger’s reputations. But who cares, synthesis is fun.
Are you sure you really needed to correct yourself @3 Phil?
“A generation of mathematically inclined economists neglected many of Keynes’s insights about the Depression because he put them into words. For decades economists sweated over fiendish mathematical equations, only to be brought down to earth by the credit crunch: Keynes’s well-turned phrases had come back to life.”
This is definitely wrong. Keynes insights were formalised mathematically long ago. And the credit crunch was not a classically Keynesian shock anyway. Where Keynesianism has been revived is in shaping the optimal response to the shock. Paul Krugman, one of the economists leading the Keyensian charge has made consideral use of math in the work that earned him the Nobel Prize.
There is also the practical issue in life that the devil is in the detail.
For example, with very little depth of knowledge, one can come up with a target for carbon footprint reduction in an industry. Just do it!
However, getting into the detail and actually doing it, actually achieving something requires many people with that detailed knowledge of ‘how to do it’…and what if those people with that depth of knowledge say that some particular target cannot be achieved? What then?
The inch deep target setters tend to get a little frustrated.
Often that lack of depth is counter productive. For example, in Perth Watercorp contracted to purchase all the power for a desal plant from a wind farm. Great. However, when reporting emissions they can only use the network average figure. So absolutely no credit given. More credit to Watercorp that they pushed ahead regardless, but other boards might not be so enlightened. The lack of depth of knowledge of those who set up the reporting for the AGO missed it – not part of the broad canvas, eh?
Oh!Dear!All that fine reading at one site has rubbed off!Yes Rudd is a polymath,because someone was actually trying to say polymouth.Such are typos.And Professor Hawkins the man with the strange electronic voice is retiring.Me !Never!I now have to search through my history on the computer to see if I can find something that might help fight the ever expanding oil spill.
RG @ 12,
Another Brunner fan. Stand on Zanzibar, which I read when it first came out, so it was a verey long time ago, is surely one of the best science fiction books around.
There are some people that are good at doing in depth analysis to produce a detailed understanding of a narrow field. There are some people who are good at providing more understanding by seeing patterns within the narrow field. There are some people who are good at providing more understanding by bringing in information from outside the narrow field. There are also some people that are good at providing understandings that are good at finding patterns that link a number of fields.
Think of it as ranging from analysing to linking and synthesising. Or from very specialized to more generalized. Most of the scientists and engineers I have known that are considered leaders in their field can talk intellegently over a wide range of topics even though their leadership is restricted to a narrow field. However, in some of these cases the success comes partly from their ability to bring a broader perspective to their specialist area. The ability to think both narrowly and broadly is important.
The real issue we need to think about is to what extent our modern attitudes to education and competence testing are blocking the progress of the very people we need to to solve the hard problems. People like Einstein and DNA Watson would have been weeded out by the modern system. Keynes would have found it harder to make an impact now because a mathematician spruiking on economics would find it harder to get a hearing. These days employers are more able to recruit people with the exact skills and experience they think are needed for a job even though, in reality, they may get more value from employing a smart outsider rather than someone who has spent their life working in a narrow field.
We have got well past the point where one person can do all the above work over a wide range of fields. However, effective teams can bring together
Steve @ 10: I’d have to put V S Ramachandran in the box from the cognitive/neuroscientist bunch – he’s delivered probably the most frightfully interesting and mentally expanding seminar I’ve ever been to. Genuis applied with shockingly deceptive simplicity. Pinker I might one day put in this category too but I think he needs another decade to simmer.
Geoffrey Edelston http://www.geoffedelsten.com.au/medical-career/
How many careers? how many degrees?
The problem comes when either an issue becomes dominated by a particular specialist point of view or so many generalists that the analyis lacks depth.
Climate change action is a good example of the over domination of a group of specialists whose focus is the use of markets and price manipulation to drive changes. What is missing is the influence of both the overview and challenging by generalists who see more than this narrow group of answers as well the influence of specialists in other areas such as the use of regulation, subsidies and harnessing public opinion.
The consequence for climate change has been that the government has been able to paint opposition to ETS as opposition to action on climate change. Even someone as smart as Malcolm Turnbull has been sucked into the idea that all the opposition can do is suggest minor modifications instead of looking for beter ways of dealing with the signifcant opportuiities for reducing emissions.
Climate change is not the only area where particular specialist viewpoints have had too much influence. Economics seems to be particularly prone to this problem. For example, we had the Chigago school of economics convincing governments that it was all about money supply and small government. What was really needed was the specialist work of this school supplemented by specialist work that focussed on other solutions combined with broader, more general studies that looked at when it was appropriate to use the various tools.
And that, yer honour, was the precise moment I fell asleep and my car hit a procession of axe-griders.
Honestly, Phil, shouldn’t a cliched load of old tosh like that given you some pause?
John D, I agree mostly, but could I beg you to add to your list of required specialists those who can actually do something. We have a plethora of policy people, regulators – all of who are necessary, but I beg you please consider people who can actually put those policies into action. They are really short on the ground.
Part of the problem is that we’ve redefined expertise away from doing stuff to talking about doing stuff. So capable entertainers like Nick Cave get mentioned while competent but not particularly charismatic people like Feynman get left out. Yes, Nick Cave can entertain in a variety of formats. Gosh, wow and all that. What impresses me much more are people who can design, build and troubleshoot a wide range of disparate systems. Forget writing songs and books as disparate talents, give me both making a viable garden and building a decent bicycle. Both are system problems, both require quite different skill sets and both are practical problems that achieve useful ends. Entertaining people is useful and important but not critical the way science is.
At the risk of channelling Heinlein a good polymath would be the cliche capable all-rounder who can excel in more than one area. So not just build a community, farm and house but make outstanding contributions in more than one area related to that. If our man Nick Cave had also founded a company that made radically better solar hot water systems, for instance, I’d give him the second area of expertise. But being a creative entertainer only counts once.
I suspect the intention was for living Aussies but putting aside that minor technicality maybe General Monash?
Barry Jones?
Sir Mark Oliphant? A top level scientist who went on to engage in public discourse more broadly.
Douglass E Hofstadter springs to mind. I wish we had an Australian equivalent! Le Tombeau de Marot is one my all time fave books!
True polymaths are becoming increasingly rare, I agree. The one that comes to mind most readily for me is Marie Curie, with Nobel Prizes in both physics and chemistry. That’s pretty out there and amazing… but she’s also 100+ years ago. I doubt we’ll see someone pulling off Nobels in 2 different fields anytime soon. I think there is something to the criticism about overspecialization, which is really just the division of labour writ large. Way back when, Adam Smith had this to say on the division of labour WRT business and employees. I wonder if his comments are also true of intellectuals and academics:
The quotation is from Wealth of Nations, Book V, Ch 1.
By the time I hit late high school in the ACT in the 80s, most of the kids who were bound for university were either strong in maths/science OR humanities. I’m about to do High School again in French, and I notice that their late high school seems to be steamed into sciences versus the humanities.
“but [Casanova] lacked one thing, and this lack made it impossible for him to become truly productive. He lacked will, resolution, patience.”
I count that as 3 things he lacked … but then I was failymath.
What about Ramona Koval. Presenter of the book show on ABS and a microbiologist and geneticist. She went to the 2020 summit. Its sad how few people at the 2020 summit have mastered both a science and non science discipline.
Rather than identify individuals who are polymaths, I think it’s better to identify the developments that have served to discourage would be “Renaissance persons”. One of the obvious has been the triumph of bean counting in the management of academia. This has led to a transformation of universities from ivory towers in which elites were allowed to play while they sharpened their minds to factories that turn out people with limited vocational skill sets for the use of industry.
One of the things I still treasure from having been active in the Trotskyist left (that is so often ridiculed) was the experience of an intellectual culture that didn’t set boundaries between economics, history, philosophy, sociology and the natural sciences. I failed maths at Year 11 and economics is a discipline that has always appeared to me as a deep, dark and tangled wood inhabited by nasty people with calculators for eyes. Yet at least I was made to read Capital and to discuss it in depth and as a result I know a bit at least about what Ricardo and Adam Smith had to say.
What I’m getting at is that, apart from the odd individual that slips throught the cracks, the way in which knowledge is taught, the way in which research is funded and the purposes to which intellectual investigation is directed inevitably colour the results. The people who decide how academia is funded today want it to be a place and a process that produces stuff that they can make a buck out of. More generally they see universities as a place to train a skilled workforce. So you get a job as an academic, keep it and gain promotion by producing measurable product – quantity rather than quality. So what’s the point in being a polymath?
The difference with us Trots was and is that we read Capital and E.P. Thompson and Gramsci and Lucacz etc, not in order to add footnotes to the latest dissertation on a narrow speciality in the construction of body image in 19th Century postage stamps, but to get to grips with a world that needs to be changed.
If you look at history, and the history of ideas in particular, their are certain periods like 5th Century Athens, Islamic Spain in the 8th Century, Sung Dynasty China and 15th Century Florence when extraordinary flowerings of thought and invention have occured. Clearly it wasn’t something in the water. Something happened to fertilise the flowering of polymaths, just as our present enivironment encourages the proliferation of narrow specialisation, arcane bewilderment and the worst weed of the lot – managerialism.
Jared Diamond? Professor of medicine, expert in bird evolution, speaks 12 languages?
when you think about it most of us make very litle direct use of the things we learn’t at school or UNI. The really important things were more often learnt from reading, observing, furious argumants with those smartarse arts women and those good times when we managed to divert the teacher from what he was “supposed” to be teaching us.
The really important things we learn are the general things. Enthusiasm for on going learning, how to enjoy a changing world, how to handle new concepts, the history of thinking, how to learn, how to solve problems etc. If you get these right the specialist knowledge is easy.
I think you deliberately left out Fyodor there, Jack.
(Dostoyevsky.)
I think your premise, if true, that there are few polymathic people these days is not a reflection on human capacity these days but that the exponential growth of scientific knowledge and the prerequisite access to ever increasing scientific resources for research tends to precludes “one person” genius breakthroughs across science.
Clearly you haven’t been keeping up with string theory, inflationary theory after the big bang (not the James Bond theory of random neocon ejaculations btw) etc. Let alone the recent techniques and science of detecting various bodies in the universe (ie exoplanets).
As for political “genius” I’d agree that it was a matter of time only that the USA elected a class A moron, and that a foul weasel like Howard would be elected in this country.
(*Sigh* if only Kenneth Grahame were still alive)
“I’d agree that it was a matter of time only that the USA elected a class A moron…”
A matter of ‘time’? Atsa’matta you? We elect class A morons *constantly*. The 19th century is littered with them; so is the 20th, really, if you try to screen out all the international momentum that put folks on the world stage who really just belonged backstage at home, keeping the fire-lanes clear during the grammar school-auditorium Christmas pageant.
Mister Jemmy Madison and his kooky pals more or less assumed the constant eternal presence of crooks, ninnies, and class A morons in the political system… the US constitution can be profitably viewed as a method for child-proofing an entire country. In a way it’s the whole idea, really. Unfortunately, even these measures haven’t been sufficient, to such a sorry pass have we come. Oh well. Good luck with the next one.
Was thinking more post WW2 j_p_z. There were creepy ones like Nixon and slimy ones like Clinton, but they weren’t morons by any stretch.
ttp://onegoodmove.org/1gm/1gmarchive/2006/01/frank_caliendo_1.html
Frank Caliendo–Bush could never lie like Clinton. (Starts about half way through the video.)
Einstein would survive the present system: he did his physics degree then worked in the Patents Office doing his thinking in his spare time. Working on Brownian motion, photoelectric effect (confirming quanta) and special relativity.
Very few researchers since since Newton had kick-started several new sciences. Einstein published those three papers in one year. Went on to pronounce on peace, politics, Nazism, etc. But was only a squeaky, amateurish violin player.
Newton got modern optics, mechanics and a theory of gravitation going, but it took him AGES. And Halley had to persuade him to publish the mechanics & gravitation; which Newton had to explain in clumsy old-fashioned maths, otherwise he’d have needed to explain calculus too (a new type of maths he and Leibnitz co-invented).
Newton later ran the Royal Mint and experimented in alchemy. Polymath? Probably, but an inadequate human being. Never a Steven Fry/Vlad Nabokov/Clive James entertainer or humourist.
Leibnitz a polymath: maths and philosophy.
Monash? probably…
Barry Jones? more the dilettante… As Science Minister he explained to Parliament one day that the light from the 1987 supernova had arrived in our skies from the exploding star before it had left the star. Incorrect. Based on a misunderstanding of relativity?? A polymath would not have slipped up on that.
But it’s simply horrid the way they tease him on that ABC TV quiz show.
cheerio
& bravo Socrsatease for ‘failymath’
or JILLS of all trades ???
First Ausatralian woman to win a Nobel Prize,
masterly and widely acclaimed medical researcher
Prof Blackburn
Launceston, Melbourne, UK, California…..