Polymaths

Blah blah blah, let's romanticize the past, blah blah blah. It seems I can hardly keep up these days with the mountain of articles being written about how great things used to be. Or put another way "I am sitting in a chair - in the sky! And the guy in the chair next to me can't stop complaining that the new in-flight wifi isn't working fast enough."

Polymaths, or those who are good at lots of different subject matter, have been a mainstay of romantic history since historians decided da Vinci was the sole genius of the 15th century. Don't get me wrong, da Vinci was not only freakishly smart and I've loved reading several biographies about him, but he was not the only person doing amazing things in the time he did them. Nor was he the only multi-topic genius. But historians love to paint the past as way better than the present, and society loves to believe it. Just look at the incredulous expression on people's faces if you say to them "A-Rod is the greatest baseball player of all time" or "Albert Pujols is the best right-handed batter of all time." You get laughed at, because most people believe that some baseball player they never saw play was surely greater. Because history says so!

In terms of polymaths, there have been many throughout history. But people like Edward Carr are creating the myth that they cannot exist in today's society. He does so by making the assumption that a polymath can't simply know a lot about a lot, rather a polymath must be accomplished at a lot about a lot. I do not think this is true.

A polymath does not have to be the guy or girl that invents a new car engine, a writes a book about philosophy, studies martial arts, patents several molecules in chemistry, and then stars in a movie: you don't have to be accomplished at every subject you study in order to be a polymth.
You need simply understand several topics. The dictionary defines a polymath as "a person of great and varied learning"...not "a person of great and varied accomplishment."

Carr's argument that you have to be a deeply-read subject matter expert to add that subject to your list of polymaths is not true either. Many of histories polymaths (like the huge number of polymaths from East-Asia that Carr completely ignores in his article) were not widely read on certain subjects, but rather just knew what they had time to know.

To me the fundamental quality of a polymath is the ability to synergize two subjects to produce a new concept. Like Richard Posner, who applied economics to sexual risk assessment. Or Jared Diamond, who argues in his books that evolution and germs have large and noticeable effects on the political and military history of the European conquest of the globe in the 18th Century. Diamond does not have a Nobel in biology, nor a PhD in anthropology. He simply learned all he could about everything he could...and saw a connection where no one else did because of it.

It seems to me, then, that the monomaths Carr seems so afraid of are rather important. Without them, there is no subject matter for polymaths to learn. You could almost say that monomaths are like flowers, and polymaths are like bees...flitting from flower to flower, spreading pollen and making connections between otherwise isolated groups.
It seems to me that rather than romanticizing polymaths of the past, we should acknowledge that they polymaths were only seen as such through the lens of history. At the time, most were just considered brilliant scientists. Only once biographies are written, and the whole of that person's life is revealed do we see all the subjects into which the polymath dabbled. We need to first, relax about our world, and second, we need to acknowledge what exactly is the task of the polymath.

Perhaps we need to see that the purpose of the polymath is to be a manager. Perhaps the polymath is best used as a leader of an interdisciplinary team, able to create synergy between scientists who don't understand one another's fields at all. Rather than romanticizing the polymath as a lone genius who somehow figures everything out all on his or her own, we instead should seek out the people among us that are well-versed, but not totally immersed, in several subjects and use them as the creative brain of small groups. In a way, I guess I am saying that the study of science might be best organized like an animal's body. The specialists are the organs, the limbs, all really good at their one job, so good in fact that no other organ could replace them, but also so specialized that they could not change to another job. And inside the head of this "Science Animal" is the brain, not really doing any specific job - other than coordinating between the organs, and limbs, managing things from above, turning unrelated fields into a unified body of science.

Perhaps a stretched analogy of a polymath is wikipedia. Highly knowledgeable on everything, expert on nothing. Wikipedia is an resource for information, and one of its greatest functions is the links within articles to other articles, so that a curious daydreamer may find themselves thirty articles deep before they come back to reality. And yet, even wikipedia cannot spontaneously create itself. It needs dedicated subject matter experts to contribute to its total knowledge in order to function correctly.

In any case, to those out there who considered themselves polymaths until they read Carr's article telling them that you need to be a member of Mensa to be a polymath, I'm here to tell you that learning everything that you can about every subject you can will never harm you. And the accomplishment requirement is just absurd...in today's society, when people get Nobel Prizes for future accomplishments...the only person you should worry about pleasing is yourself.


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