The Polymath: Unlocking the Power of Human Versatility

by Waqas Ahmed

  The way ‘work’ is perceived today owes much to a particular philosophy that has dominated Western society for over four hundred years. The Protestant work ethic holds the belief that work is toil — something we would rather not be doing but that we know we must do, nevertheless, because therein lies salvation: there is a virtue in its accomplishment. It is this mindset that, according to author of History of Work Richard Donkin, ‘leaves no confusion about work, because work is categorised, pigeonholed and defined.’ As a result, the notion of work enshrined in the minds of most today is: the activity in which one spends the majority of one’s time and which results in the financial remuneration required to survive and accumulate. It is time to finally challenge this assumption.

  Survival

  ‘There is a serious snag in the specialist way of life,’ Desmond Morris said in his bestseller, The Naked Ape, which compares human and animal behaviour. ‘Everything is fine as long as the special survival device works, but if the environment undergoes a major change the specialist is left stranded.’ So, for example, the koala subsists almost entirely on eucalyptus leaves and only survives within a certain climate, specifically in the woodlands of Eastern Australia. It is a specialist which sleeps for up to twenty hours a day. The raccoon, on the other hand, is a generalist. Its operational intelligence allows it to have a natural range that includes most of North and Central America, and it is an omnivorous animal that can eat berries, insects, eggs and small animals. The raccoons are well populated whereas the koala is becoming endangered. The point is that when conditions change, species with a wider range of capacities and better flexibility are able to adapt, while narrow-focused specialists, faced with little or no option, become vulnerable to extinction. The principle applies equally to humans. In fact as Morris insists, the ‘naked ape’ (i.e. the human) is the most non-specialised, adaptive, opportunistic animal of all.

  Today, a misconception that specialisation is a necessity for survival prevails as the dominant narrative. It is a narrative based on the questionable premise that we as humans are inherently competitive. Prior to the modern Western paradigm, other world views (such as the African Ubuntu philosophy — ‘I am because we are’) focused on the co-operative, cohesive side of man, which nineteenth-century Russian evolutionist Peter Kropotkin and more recently genome expert Matt Ridley confirmed is just as deep-rooted a part of human nature as individualistic selfishness might be. Polymaths were generally less driven by competition than by an inner drive to develop the ‘self, and that too not necessarily vis-à-vis, or at the expense of another.

  The Malthusian idea that population is outgrowing resources, coupled with Herbert Spencer’s Social Darwinism and the notion of the ‘survival of the fittest’ have contributed greatly toward the creation of an ultra-competitive mindset which in turn has manifested in the exploitative culture fostered by colonialism and was subsequently popularised by many large corporations. In fact, it is the culture of excessive competition that has catalysed the division of labour and propagated the myth of the ‘specialist,’ leading to the growth of specialisation. It has created a culture of people protecting ideas rather than connecting them, which of course has led to further specialisation.

  So the prevailing assumption — not just today but in many societies throughout history — is that a sustainable income or economic security can only be secured with one specialist occupation at a time. Professionally, the pursuit of more than one job, field or interest has become synonymous with financial suicide. A negative stigma has been attached to the non-specialist, whose ‘time-wasting activity’ is perceived to come at the expense of his livelihood. Demeaning the polymath as a financially doomed creature is a practice entrenched in the proverbial linguistics of many of the world’s cultures.

  Let’s take common sayings in Eastern Europe, for example: the Poles refer to the budding polymath as someone with ‘seven trades, the eighth one — poverty,’ the Estonians ‘nine trades, the tenth one — hunger,’ while in Czech Republic they say ‘nine crafts, tenth comes misery,’ and in Lithuania that, ‘when you have nine trades, then your tenth one is starvation.’ This can also be found in East Asian cultures: the Koreans say, ‘a man of twelve talents has nothing to eat for dinner’ and the Japanese refer to the polymath as ‘skilful but poor.’ Even societies that produced some of the greatest polymaths think the same: the Greeks say, ‘he who knows a lot of crafts lives in an empty house’ and the Italians, the descendants of da Vinci, Michelangelo, Alberti and Bernini, have come to see this breed as being ‘expert of everything, master of none.’ While the above idioms are translated from their native languages, in which the meaning is most likely more nuanced, the underlying idea is the same as the ‘jack of all trades, master of none’ and is indicative of the ongoing cynicism surrounding the polymath’s ability to survive, accumulate and provide.

  This notion needs serious revision. Occupational diversification, which is a common mark of the polymath is actually often the surest means to survival. During a tough economic climate, people feel extremely vulnerable if their particular field is shrinking in its need for a workforce. As Yuval Noah Harari concludes in his recent book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, adaptability to inevitable career changes will be an essential survival strategy for the coming decades. So a more diverse range of skills means that the individual is confident of their capacity to obtain employment in a range of fields. This can give the individual a greater sense of empowerment which ultimately leads to greater productivity and efficiency. Education ought therefore to be focused on developing skills that can be applied to more than one domain or at the very least be transferable, particularly as what one might specialise in today could be out of date tomorrow, given the economically, politically and technologically volatile times in which we presently find ourselves.

  Just as countries (economies) are realising that specialisation in one economic sector is unwise and diversification is the best policy, individuals ought to understand this, too. Moreover an individual’s polymathy can have a substantial economic benefit for society at large. Princeton economist Ed Glaeser studied specialisation and diversity in urban city labour markets and concluded that it is greater diversity (rather than specialisation) of labour that leads to economic growth, simply because there can be more skills and knowledge spillover between industries. This is important because having a diverse set of skills mean that the labour market can appropriately respond to market demands according to the changing needs of the economy, especially if education is to continue to be hooked up to economic success.

  Moreover, the ‘job for life’ model is becoming extinct. The threat of redundancy is increasing and chances of promotion decreasing. Work in business or the arts rarely provides a sure income. Careers (and therefore financial security) in sports and military are especially short-lived. And those professions traditionally considered stable are no longer so. After twenty five years of experience as a careers adviser, Katherine Brooks concludes that one specialist occupation is simply not sufficient for one’s economic security. Multiple careers, she suggests, are not a luxury but a necessity, especially in current times. ‘The chaos of today’s job market means job seekers must be flexible and adopt their talents to a variety of settings. In this economy, you really can’t focus on just one career plan. You need to consider plans B, C and maybe even D, simultaneously. You need to consider a variety of Possible Lives.’ It is wise, it seems, to place eggs in many baskets. Specialise at your peril.

  Twenty-First-Century Complexity

  Beyond plain survival, specialisation also hinders our ability to develop intellectually and spiritually. That is, it restricts or obscures our understanding of reality, which is not simple black and white, but inconceivably complex. Long-assumed dichotomies (church vs. state, religion vs. reason, good vs. evil, communism vs. capitalism, civilised vs. barbarians, unity vs. multiplicity, micro vs. macro, right brain vs. left brain, science vs. art and so on) are all in fact constr
ucts which derive from a particularly Western experience and understanding of the world. Other cultures have their own dichotomies, just as they have their own professional and intellectual fields. They group aspects of our reality differently, according to their own understandings (even if many, like the Yin-Yang, are more holistic in their approach to knowledge and duality).

  As astronaut Story Musgrave observed from space, ‘nature only draws curves. Man draws lines.’ The obsessive compartmentalisation of knowledge into ‘fields,’ as with false dichotomies, is a misguided simplification of the world; it constricts a truer understanding of it. As French philosopher and father of complexity theory Edgar Morin said, key realities often slip through the cracks between artificially created ‘disciplines,’ just as meaning too often gets ‘lost in translation’ when interpreting from one language to another. A language, like a field, is a compartmentalised prism through which we perceive reality — it does not represent the whole of reality itself.

  In the West, such compartmentalisation is the legacy of a particular intellectual methodology. In desperate pursuit of a perfect ‘order,’ scientists and philosophers (particularly since Descartes in the West) reduced the inherent complexity of our reality to simplicity, using mathematics and reductive thinking to ‘disintegrate beings and things.’ This led to the hyper-specialisation of society as a whole. As Morin said, ‘hyper-specialisation tore up and fragmented the complex fabric of reality, and led to the belief that the fragmentation inflicted on reality was reality itself.’ According to psychiatrist and author of The Divided Brain, Iain McGilchrist, hyper-specialised societies through history correlate with paradigms that had an overwhelming focus on left brain thinking (the hemisphere responsible for structural, linear formations). In his thesis, he describes the type of society that such a mindset typically creates:

  . . . an increased specialisation and technicalisation of knowledge . . . one would expect a sort of dismissive attitude to anything outside its limited focus . . . philosophically, the world would be marked by fragmentation, appearing to its inhabitants as if a collection of bits and pieces apparently randomly thrown together . . . creating a technologically driven and bureaucratically administered society.

  This is of course an apt description of how things largely are today. The excessive fragmentation of knowledge caused by cognitive, social and educational conditioning through history is today taken to a new level by the twenty-first-century phenomenon known as the ‘Information Explosion’ — a conundrum or ‘anxiety’ caused by the unprecedented rise in available information and the difficulty in managing and understanding it.

  Today, the increasing complexity of our world has caused humankind to isolate its various aspects in order to develop a better understanding of each of them through the Cartesian technique of deduction. This culture of ‘field isolationism’ reached its peak after the European Enlightenment (exemplified by Diderot’s Encyclopaedia, which codified knowledge, although ironically not by Diderot himself who was a polymath), and has since been projected across the world via the colonial influence, manifesting in the ongoing specialisation of students, scholars and industrial workers (all practically trained to operate like soulless machines).

  Morin reminded us of the fact that ‘the cosmos is not a perfect machine but a process of simultaneous organization and disorganization.’ Indeed, life in the twenty-first century has revealed to us the level of this complexity, and the modern mind must train itself to better comprehend it. Unfortunately our current educational systems do not equip us sufficiently for this challenge, as explained earlier. Cognitive scientist and educationalist Rand Spiro reminds us that ‘most of life is in fact not learning multiplication tables or basic physics . . . most of life is dealing with complex or ill-structured domains which do require adaptive flexibility. This is more the norm than the exception in everyday life.’ Spiro is against schema theory (the psychological process that groups information into categories) and instead proposes a cognitive flexibility theory (CFT), which recognises domains as being complex and ‘ill-structured’ (as opposed to simply defined worlds of their own with clear parameters) therefore demanding a certain flexibility (or polymathy) to understand. Unfortunately, both simplicity and complexity have been used by the political, commercial and intellectual elite variously as conceptual tools to keep lay people in a state of ignorance.

  Philosophically, the polymathic mindset allows for a bigger, rounded, interconnected picture of the world, serving as an antidote to the disjointed way in which most people (both laymen and so-called intellectuals) currently view it. Polymath and philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr expresses an urgent need for such thinkers:

  The existence of polymaths (or lack thereof) has very important social consequences. No society can live and survive without the vision of the whole. The polymath renders a service that is absolutely essential for the survival of a civilisation in the long term. So rather than ‘poo-pooing’ polymaths like modern culture seems to do, we should always be thankful to God that there are some people who are able to be polymaths. Otherwise everything will become separate from each other like organs of a body with no integrating principle, without which the body will fall apart.

  Machine Intelligence and the Relevance of Humans

  How is the human mind — conditioned as it is to think one-dimensionally — to grasp such complexity? Instead of developing methods of nurturing itself to become better equipped for this challenge, the human mind seems at present to be preoccupied with building machines for this purpose.

  No doubt great progress is being made in this area. Artificial intelligence (AI) can already beat humans in most mind-challenging games such as chess, backgammon, quiz contests and scrabble. IBM’s Watson has been developed using complex evolutionary algorithms, allowing it to learn organically and making its learning process more human-like. Moreover, ‘whole-brain emulation’ or ‘mind uploading’ is a programme focused on building intelligent software through scanning and closely modelling the computational structure of the biological brain. It is an ongoing project that promises to have profound consequences for machine intelligence.

  Human level machine intelligence — when machines pass the so-called Turing Test — is predicted by most AI researchers to be achieved within the twenty-first century. Some would forecast its arrival within the next twenty years. And then, there’s the point at which machines will greatly exceed the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest. Presently, machine intelligence is only domain-specific, but ultimately, according to Neil Bostrom of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, these ‘super-intelligent’ systems will have a superhuman level of general intelligence. Ray Kurzweil refers to this point as the technological ‘singularity.’

  So what will be the implications of this for humans? One thing that is already happening is job automation. According to research by Frey and Osborne at Oxford which assesses 702 occupations and their probability of being computerised in the coming decades, 47 percent of all American jobs are at risk. Historian and futurist Harari puts it well: ‘the nineteenth century created the working class, the coming century will create the “useless class” — billions with no military or economic function. Giving meaning to their lives will be the big challenge of the future.’ So instead of being inadequate, expensive, dispensable machine substitutes, humans would find meaning in their own lives (and society will find meaning in them) if they focused on establishing their own, irreplaceable human uniqueness. Such uniqueness is the mark of the polymath.

  If humans were typewriters, we’d have become obsolete a long time ago. Even if we were the latest iPhone, we’d be dispensable within a couple of years. If, however, we were a Bach symphony, a Van Gogh painting or a Shakespearean play, then we’d stand the test of time. But what if humans — the creators of both technology and art — were even more elevated creations than both? What if we were inimitable, indispensable? Instead of trying to become super-effective
machines like the ones we’ve created, what if we recognised our nature as being an infinitely nuanced emergent system, a sublime work of art and, perhaps, a spiritual being all in one?

  AI will eventually release us from the burden of accumulating and sorting information. It will conquer the domain of technical specialisation. The relevance of the biological mind to the future of knowledge must then be to use the multifarious knowledges — combine, curate, fuse and connect them — to formulate a uniquely human wisdom and understanding. As leading neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis insists, the human brain is simply too unpredictable to be imitable. ‘No Turing machine can predict what a brain will do. . . we will absorb technology as part of us, technology will never absorb us; it’s simply impossible.’ Knowing this, we ought to realise that regardless of the prospects of superintelligence, the human mind is indisputably meaningful to life — if only we can rediscover its uniqueness.

  Could a machine in the future produce a work like da Vinci’s Notebooks, Ibn Sina’s Kitab al Shifa or Marx’s Das Capital? Could it build an organisation like Apple or inspire a movement like Black Consciousness? These initiatives were inspired by art, spirituality and social justice — and unless humans learn to be able to code such inimitable, enigmatic and transcendent elements of the human mind into machine programmes, humans will always retain their unique value.