The Polymath: Unlocking the Power of Human Versatility
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THE POLYMATH
Unlocking the Power of Human Versatility
WAQĀS AHMED
WILEY
This edition first published 2018
© 2018 Waqās Ahmed
Registered office
John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, United Kingdom
Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data is Available:
ISBN 9781119508489 (hardback)
ISBN 9781119508519 (ePub)
ISBN 9781119508526 (ePDF)
Cover design: Wiley
Cover Image: © FineArt/Alamy Stock Photo
Contents
Prologue — Marking 500 Years Since the Death of Leonardo Da Vinci, the Archetypical Polymath
Preface
Chapter 1 — Introduction
Chapter 2 — A Timeless People
Patronage
Laymen
Women
The ‘Other’
Encouragement
The Myth of the ‘Specialist’
Chapter 3 — Shapers of Our World
Leaders
King-makers
Revolutionaries
Intellectuals
Educators
Mystics
Explorers
Scientists
Artists
Entrepreneurs
Humanitarians
Chapter 4 — The Cult of Specialisation
The Evolution of Specialisation
The Modern Education Crisis
Employee Disillusionment
Work-Life Imbalance
Survival
Twenty-First-Century Complexity
Machine Intelligence and the Relevance of Humans
Chapter 5 — Reconditioning the Mind
Individuality
Curiosity
Intelligence
Versatility
Creativity
Unity
Chapter 6 — An Alternative System
Society
Education
Occupation
Programming Our Future
Chapter 7 — Twenty-First-Century Polymaths
A Vanguard of Disruptors
Conversations with Living Polymaths
Chapter 8 — Owners of Our Future
Polymathy Through Time and Space
Prologue
—
Marking 500 Years Since the Death of Leonardo Da Vinci, the Archetypical Polymath
Leonardo, the uomo universale (universal man), is most people’s idea of a polymath.
Painting, sculpture, architecture, stage design, music, military and civil engineering, mathematics, statics, dynamics, optics, anatomy, geology, botany and zoology — Leonardo pursued most of these at a level that warrants mention in any history of these subjects. Professionals in many of these fields see Leonardo in themselves, claiming him for their ideal.
It is entirely appropriate that the cover of Waqās Ahmed’s The Polymath should be Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man, the outstretched figure inscribed in a square and circle, based on The Ten Books on Architecture by Vitruvius. It is Leonardo’s visual hymn to the essential oneness of human beings, the world and the cosmos. It is often used opportunistically in advertising and elsewhere to endow something routine with apparent profundity. Here, however, it is central to Ahmed’s endeavour.
Given how we now classify and compartmentalise intellectual and practical pursuits, we tend to see Leonardo’s diversity. He saw unity. The unity was that of the fundamental organisation of the physical world, which fell under the embrace of ‘the principles of mathematics, that is to say number and measure — termed arithmetic and geometry, which deal with discontinuous and continuous qualities with the utmost truth.’ Behind the myriad diversity of forms in nature lay a set of coherent and consistent laws about how form fitted function in the context of natural law. These universal laws could be extrapolated from behaviours of light, the motion of solids and fluids, the mechanics of the human body and from every phenomenon that involved action, either as a process or as a result. As an example, he saw the vortex motion of water as expressive of the same rules as the curling of hair. We now assign the former to dynamics, the latter to statics. He saw across boundaries that we now use to separate branches of knowledge. My personal discovery of Leonardo’s unity is recounted in my recent Living with Leonardo, which tells of a personal journey that began with a degree in science and culminated in the world’s most expensive work of art, the Saviour of the Cosmos.
Leonardo’s mathematical polymathy was of a particular kind, but I do think it likely that most polymaths see more unity in their diversity than we can readily discern. They are better at seeing relationships, analogies, commonalities, affinities, relevancies, underlying causalities, structural unities. It is of course difficult in our modern world for an artist to work as a professional engineer — something that was accepted in the Renaissance, even if uncommon. Any polymath today cannot but be aware of the jealously guarded professional boundaries that need be crossed. Institutional structures, erected most diligently in the nineteenth century, leave no doubt where these boundaries are. They are designed to keep outsiders out and insiders in. Massive bodies of professional knowledge certify the status the specialists, supported by forests of jargon and barricades of acronyms. The high demands of modern disciplines are real but they are also serve as protective ramparts against everyone who does not belong.
Polymathy in modern societies runs the risk of shallowness and amateurism. We are aware of the stigma that a polymath is a ‘jack of all trades and a master of none.’ But there is an older expanded version, ‘A jack of all trades is a master of none, but often better than a master of one.’ So many of the great innovations in the arts and sciences arose when outside wisdom was brought to bear on a discipline that had become complacent in its own criteria. Biology in the era of DNA was reformed by the arrival of physicists and chemists. Copernicus’s sixteenth-century revolution was driven as much by concepts of beauty as innovatory observation. In 1905 Einstein wrote with eloquent brevity about a vision of space, time and energy, founded upon radical intuition, rather than undertaking a comprehensive review of what was right and wrong in modern astronomy and physics as then constituted. He was an insider who managed to stand outside.
There is of course a danger in conquering someone else’s territory without due respect and humility. I see this with Leonardo studies. Modern professionals in, say, engineering, assume they can solve the problem of understanding Leonardo through their privileged and narrowly focussed knowledge, transposing Leonardo into the modern world as ‘a man ahead of his time.’ The result is distortion. Something similar occurred when the artist David Hockney claimed that painters have long used optical devices to assist their depiction of nature — an idea with which I have much sympathy. This opened the door to experts in modern optics, not least in lenses, who had scant interest in the nature of early optical instruments and what the business of picture-making was like at the time. In characterising the past, we need to be alert to the arrogance of the present.
True polymathy involves a unique and improbable blend of incorrigible ambition, undeterability, imagination, openness, and humility. It cannot be the same as it was in Leonardo’s day. However the principle of seeing something as if it were something else — seeing it as belonging in other than its normal conceptual place — is more vital now than ever if we are to nurture the cultures of mutual understanding that are necessary for the survival of the human race.
Emeritus Professor of the History of Art, Oxford University
Preface
A mind that is stretched by new experiences can never go back to its old dimensions.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
My interest is in the pursuit of the optimal life. That is, in developing a mind and experiencing a life that is the richest it can be. So while this book proposes a new way of thinking, it also sets out a new way of being human, a new way of living — different from that which has been set out for you as ‘normal’ by forces that claim to know better. It calls for an extraction of the soul from the current paradigm, like an astral projection, and a visit to the realms of history and possibility. It must all begin by living the conscious, mindful life, by switching the mind on to think more often and more effectively — about the objects and their connections, the whole and the particular, the philosophical and the practical — so that you can become all you can be: the complete you.
I was not commissioned to write this. It was purely a personal intellectual odyssey until recently when I realised it became too important a thing not to share with the world. As such, work on it was woven between a range of experiences — physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual and otherwise — each giving me a unique insight into the topic at hand.
After all, you are what you experience. Each and every thought, emotion and inflow of knowledge will either subtly or fundamentally impact your perspective on any given thing over time. This is not just intuitive speculation, but a neuroscientific fact. Your evolving nature manifests in your connectome — the complex, ever-changing circuitry unique to each brain. As such, I was both proactive and reactive in researching and writing this book. I didn’t ‘immerse’ myself in the subject, except for intermittent periods. Complete immersion would have risked the sort of narrow-minded specialisation that this book ultimately seeks to challenge. Conscious of this, I allowed the knowledge from all other facets of my life over a five-year period to fuse, clash and connect with pre-existing material in my mind. Hence I remained open as to my approach, structure, content and conclusion, until the very end.
I saw the Butterfly Effect in action as each thought, idea or fact fundamentally altered the position and nature (or even existence) of previous ones. I came to understand the dynamic fluidity of ideas and opinions. I did not begin with a thesis and look to post-rationalise, as is the common method. Instead, from start to finish, this book was an exploratory adventure that, at any given point, revealed extraordinary — at times transformational — insights about the mind and the world.
The past five years have thus provided me with much more of ‘an education’ than my entire school-university life. It was during this period, in my late twenties, that I wrote most of this book. I was never unconscious of the immense responsibility that came with it being the first-ever book in the English language on the subject. The insights I include in these pages are thus from a wide range of experiential and intellectual sources; comprising the words of prophets, sages, scientists, historians, philosophers, artists, polymaths and — through scripture — God himself. Having a young, limited mind, I rely heavily on such wisdom — my endeavour was to curate, synthesise and communicate.
As they read through the book, some critics may be eager to identify my method of inquiry with something they’re familiar with so they ‘know where I’m coming from’ — is he a traditional postmodernist, or perhaps a Nietzschean perspectivist? Is he employing the philosophy of Daoist Zhuangzi or the Jainist Anekantavada? Is he from the school of Ibn Khaldun or Al Ghazali? The answer is simultaneously all of the above, and neither. Like postmodernism, my thought is not an easy beast to pin down, but unlike it, it acknowledges the possibility of Truth or Ultimate Reality and recognises the multiple ways of pursuing and experiencing it. In this way, I am not indirectly demeaning other cultures and world views by reducing them to mere mental constructs, as most postmodernists, orientalists and materialists do. Indeed if this book does anything of worth, it encourages people to see ideas (and indeed individuals) as hybrid, nuanced, multi-faceted constructs in their own right rather than as automatic members of pre-existing categories.
For a true exploration of the topic, given its wondrous nuances, I knew it was as important to be a futurist as much as an historian, a mystic as much as a rationalist, a storyteller as much as a scholar, a doer as much as a thinker. I recruited whatever methods and tools I felt were necessary. The raison d’être of this book is as much the provocation of thought as it is a call to action. So I urge you, the reader, to immerse yourself in the world that the book seeks to create for you, to reflect seriously on its content, integrate it into your existing knowledge, assess its applicability and relevance to your own life, thereby storing it in the long-term memory, ready for use in future thinking. This is the process of internalisation, without which knowledge fails its most important role: to enrich the mind.
This book has certainly given me a blueprint for what little there may be left of my future. Anyone that knows me can see that I live my life according to the thinking and lifestyle outlined in these pages; my work in various fields have both influenced and been influenced by the process of writing it. But this is no longer about me. Of much greater importance is your readiness to commence your journey to self-actualisation. And if this book contributes even an atom’s weight to that preparation, then all the credit is God’s and only the shortcomings are my own.
I’m well aware that after publishing this book I may often come back to it a different man, with different insights, at various points of my life. If I were to revisit this book having learnt Mandarin, lived with a Samoan clan, studied zoology, learnt to play the lute and competed in a triathlon, I’m sure my insights would be different, if not more evolved. At the point at which I have significantly more to add or amend, I may look at revising this work, or building on its ideas in a separate volume — or perhaps someone better qualified will do me the honour.
The sheer complexity of this subject implies that its investigation must be an ongoing pursuit rather than a mission accomplished. As Leonardo da Vinci said: ‘art is never finished, only abandoned.’ In the same vein — while by no means with the same authority, nor for a moment considering this a work of art — I’m letting this go for now.
Waqās Ahmed
October 2018
Chapter 1
—
Introduction
She was black. And poor. Still she rose remarkably from a life of discrimination and abuse in 1950s America to become a key figure in the civil rights movement. She was at the heart of the struggle, a prominent campaign organiser who worked for both Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X prior to each of their assassinations. Even after the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964, this young radical would continue to be at the forefront of the fight for social justice and women’s rights.
Her continuing interest in social causes led her to take a job as a globe-trotting journalist, first for The Arab Observer in Cairo and then the Ghanaian Times in Accra. Extensive travels allowed her to satisfy her linguistic curiosity, and she would come to know a variety of European, Middle Eastern and West African languages. By the end of her life, she was considered an eminent historian of African-American affairs, with 30 honorary doctorates and a professorship at a major American university.
Accomplishment in politics, journalism, history and languages is a familiar, albeit impressive, career route. But what if I told you that the same young lady was also a professional Calypso dancer, a Tony Award-nominated theatre actress and an acclaimed film director who also happened to write a Pulitzer Prize-nominated screenplay? And all these accomplishments are not even what she’s most famous for.
Ultimately, she was known as a literary giant — an outstandingly popular and critically acclaimed poet, playwright and novelist with 30 bestselling titles of fiction and nonfiction to her name. She published several volumes of poetry, for which
she was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and were especially popular among African American women, which have also been recited to mark key events in modern history such as the inauguration of a U.S. president, the death of Michael Jackson and the 50th anniversary of the United Nations. But it is her autobiography — published in several volumes — that is arguably her most important work, and is considered a significant contribution to the understanding of African American experience in the twentieth century. And yes, we’re still speaking of the same lady!
In awe of her accomplishments, I contacted her requesting an interview for this book. To my dismay, she passed away shortly after. Known to us as the great Maya Angelou, this poetess, playwright, author, singer, composer, dancer, actor, filmmaker, journalist, polyglot, historian and activist was a breed of multifaceted human that is now worryingly in danger of becoming extinct: the polymath.
This book is about the full realisation of human potential. As such, it calls for a revolution of the mind, led by an age-old species of human known as polymaths, sometimes (although erroneously) referred to as “Renaissance men.” The most concise way to define them is:
Humans of exceptional versatility, who excel in multiple, seemingly unrelated fields.
That’s the superficial definition. Put differently, polymaths are multi-dimensional minds that pursue optimal performance and self-actualisation in its most complete, rounded sense. Having such a mindset, they reject lifelong specialisation and instead tend to pursue various objectives that might seem disparate to the onlooker — simultaneously or in succession; via thought and/or action. The inimitable complexity of their minds and lives are what makes them uniquely human. As such, they have shaped our past and will own our future. This book explains how.
While one might be able to argue a certain neurobiological distinction to standard Homo sapiens (we now know there is a correlation between behaviour, personality and the size and structure of the brain) the reference to a ‘species’ or ‘breed’ in this context is largely metaphorical. So who actually qualifies as a polymath? Although there are many versatile people who operate — to varying extents and with mixed success — in different fields, the point at which the versatile operator, or the dabbling dilettante, becomes a true polymath depends on the level of accomplishment or mastery attained in each field taken with the sheer variety of fields altogether.