The Polymath: Unlocking the Power of Human Versatility

by Waqas Ahmed

  What is required for the effective acquisition of both strategic and operational knowledge is a conscious state of alertness; awaking from the trance of passiveness, complacency and apathy into a state of complete cognitive sharpness. It is the use of optimal brain capacity, that is, the effective synchronicity of the right and left brain hemispheres as well as of the conscious and unconscious systems.

  For a start, general knowledge should not be seen as mere leisurely trivia. The correct general knowledge — that which has a practical value (utility) for the individual and is personal to him — is indispensable to the enhancement of day-to-day life, and indeed often a necessity for wider survival in an increasingly complex world. There are, of course, many things out of our control no matter how much we exercise an enquiring mind and seek to employ a self-sufficient lifestyle. We will never really reach the truth about everything surrounding our lives, nor will we be able to produce or manufacture all the tools we will need along the journey, as Ibn Khaldun reminded us in his fourteenth-century masterpiece, Muqqudimah.

  The impact of nature, for one, is something almost completely out of our control. A degree of interdependence is always inevitable and in certain contexts, desirable. However, each of us at the very least can enhance our knowledge of the fundamental aspects of our lives; the way organisations, nature, machines, economies, buildings and people in general work and affect us, for example, is important information. Better still, we must understand how these fit into and affect our own lives, in however direct or indirect a way. This means our knowledge of fields as diverse as economics, politics, science, philosophy, psychology, religion, history and mathematics ought to be ever increasing. The more knowledge we have, and the better we are able to bring together and apply it to fit our personal needs, the better informed our choices and decisions will be (whether made rationally or instinctively).

  But as Stephen Wolfram, polymath and designer of Mathematica, says, ‘you need a reason to learn about something.’ Often, the reason is simply life; or even existence. Simple facts such as the difference in substance between two painkillers, or the origins of the curry, the government policy on housing or the sexual philosophy of East Africa can, for instance, improve one’s mood, income, health, relationships and general performance. Complacency and ignorance, on the other hand, reduce our quality of life and withhold our ability to stay in control. Ignorance is a mythical bliss.

  Michel de Montaigne said, ‘the only learning I look for is that which tells me how to know myself, and teaches me how to die well and to live well.’ And this mindset is what made him a polymath. The parts of the world that can and do affect our lives are evidently multiple and multifarious. Hence so must our knowledge be. Driving a car, preparing a meal, operating a computer, loving our loved ones — these are all day-to-day endeavours that are very different, requiring different types of knowledge, cognitive skills and intelligence domains — all become unified to form a day in our lives. Yet we do not have any qualms in learning them because we accept that they facilitate our survival and enable us to live a better day. Why, then, is moving between academic and professional ‘fields’ seen as contentious?

  This small portfolio of essential knowledge and cognitive skills must be expanded to include other aspects of the world which commonly affect (or are at some point likely to affect) our lives. We must learn, for instance (at least the basic) skills of the lawyer, the accountant, the doctor, the handyman, the computer engineer, the entertainer, the soldier because legal, financial, medical, household, technical and survival challenges are typical in modern life. Otherwise we become complacent and rely on the luxury of having ‘experts,’ living unnecessarily at their mercy for even the most basic of problems. This can prove costly, both in the financial sense and otherwise. People may now be waking up to this: the increasing popularity of blogs such as Lifehacker, which aims to share day-to-day knowledge on a wide range of practical matters, demonstrates an appetite by people to enhance their knowledge for life.

  Intelligence

  A talented person is never just talented in one field.

  — Hamlet Isakhanli

  William Sidis was one of America’s best-known child prodigies. He is said to have had the highest IQ ever recorded — he could reportedly read the New York Times at 18 months and had taught himself eight languages (Latin, Greek, French, Russian, German, Hebrew, Turkish and Armenian) by the time he was 8. Because of his exceptional intelligence as a child, his father applied for his admission into Harvard University. Although initially rejected on the grounds of his age, he was accepted two years later at 11. He graduated summa cum laude at 16, even lectured on advanced mathematics and then went on to Harvard Law School. He later wrote on subjects as diverse as cosmology (suggesting alternative theories for thermodynamics in other regions of space), Native American history and anthropology (100,000 year history of the Americas in his The Tribes and the States), philology (he created a language called ‘Vandergood’) and transportation systems (he wrote a treatise on streetcar transfers). He became a popular celebrity, but constantly sought seclusion and privacy. He died at 52 but had both the potential and the intention to pursue many additional fields.

  Exceptional intelligence is the hallmark of a genius; and as Sidis’ case demonstrates, true genius is boundless. Psychologist Geoffrey White of Otago University discovered that ‘the typical genius surpasses the typical college graduate in range of interests and . . . in range of ability.’ Society tried to pigeonhole Sidis; first as a mathematician, then as a lawyer, then as a linguist, then as a historian — and each time he attempted to break out and pursued another field. As a result, he was labelled an eccentric. In truth, Sidis was a socially oppressed polymath. His story shows that even traditional intelligence of the IQ sort — the type that we typically, but sometimes erroneously, associate geniuses with — does have a correlation with the propensity to polymathise.

  This is confirmed by American psychologist Keith Simonton, who insists that an exceptionally high intelligence is strongly associated with the polymath: ‘IQ is associated not only with increased fame, but also with assets such as superior versatility. The higher the IQ, the more domains in which an individual can succeed.’ The reason, he says, is that ‘with more intellectual wherewithal, they could engage in more enterprises without risking the vitiating dissipation of the dilettante.’ That is, a person of superior intellectual capacity is able to distribute his or her intellectual resources to more domains more generously than someone of less intelligence, who is therefore less likely to make any significant contribution to multiple fields due to a limited allocation of intelligence to each pursuit. Marilyn vos Savant, once holder of the world’s highest IQ agrees: ‘I think a general intelligence relates highly to versatility.’

  Robert Plomin, professor of behavioural genetics at King’s College London, explains why this might be the case: ‘If you’re smarter, then you think more strategically, regardless of the role’ he says. ‘The idea is, if you’re very smart, then you play your cards better.’ According to Buzan’s Book of Genius, in which the ‘genius guru’ assesses the attributes of what he considers to be the top 100 greatest geniuses of all time, the link between polymathy and genius is startling. His top 20 geniuses all have above 90 percent polymathy scores; and moreover most of those with above 90 percent polymathy also have above 90 percent IQ. It is not clear how he made this calculation, but the overarching conclusion is that there is a strong correlation.

  But like curiosity, intelligence can either facilitate or hinder polymathy, depending on whether it steers the intellect vertically or horizontally. A higher intelligence can, for instance, imprison someone in one particular field if the intelligence is used to deduce and deconstruct rather than to explore and connect. In today’s society, this is the direction most encouraged. Intelligence is as effective for the pursuit of truth as it is to defend falsehood. It is as effective for widening the mind as it is to fortify a closed one. Alt
hough the natural inclination is for intelligence to be used across multiple domains — we know this because child prodigies like Sidis have always demonstrated brilliance in multiple fields if they were only allowed to — this is not encouraged in the current education and professional systems.

  General vs. Multiple Intelligences

  Human intelligence is multifaceted and multidimensional — it comes in many forms.

  — Ken Robinson

  Anna Maria van Schurman was exceptionally intelligent. A woman in a man’s world, she was known in the 18th-century Netherlands for her monumental work Whether a Christian Woman Should Be Educated and Other Writings from her Intellectual Circle, which made her one of the foremost feminist intellectuals of her time.

  She graduated with a degree in law from the University of Utrecht (she was the only female student at the university and attended lectures behind a veil). As a theologian, she produced many works including De vitae humanae termino, on the respective roles of God and the physician at the end of human life, and became a prominent member and writer for the newly emerging Labadie Protestant movement.

  Schurman was also an exceptionally multi-talented artist — an engraver, glassmaker, sculptor (wax, wood and ivory), portrait painter and calligrapher, with many of her works still in existence. She also had a flair for languages and was known to be proficient in 14, including Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Aramaic and Ethiopian. She also wrote poetry in a number of languages, and her compilation Opuscula hebraea, graeca, latina, gallica, prosaica et metrica (‘Little works in Hebrew, Greek, Latin and French, prose and poetry’) was widely read by scholars of the time.

  Schurman was clearly a woman of multiple talents. But did these derive from an extraordinarily high general intelligence, or did she simply have certain intelligences related to the areas she excelled in? A long debate as to whether intelligence is common to all fields (or cognitive tasks) or if there are multiple types of intelligence, each representing distinct cognitive abilities, has occupied psychologists for decades.

  The Theory of General Intelligence first appeared in the early twentieth century, developed by English psychologist Charles Spearman, who noted from his research that children’s performance ratings across school subjects that appeared unrelated were positively correlated. He reasoned that these correlations reflected the influence of an underlying general cognitive ability that entered into performance on all kinds of mental tests. He concluded that all cognitive performance could be conceptualised in terms of a single (core) general ability factor (which he labelled g) and a large number of narrow task-specific ability factors.

  This theory has subsequently been developed into a model that represents cognitive abilities as a three-level hierarchy, where there are a large number of narrow factors at the bottom of the hierarchy, a handful of broad, more general factors at the intermediate level, and at the apex a single factor, the g factor, which represents the variance common to all cognitive tasks. If this theory is right, it suggests that polymaths are individuals with an exceptional general intelligence, which in turn allows them to be versatile and excel in various (theoretically all) domains, even if they require different cognitive abilities. Moreover the diversity itself can enhance one’s general intelligence. According to a recent study at the University of Toronto, for example, IQ test scores of six-year-old children significantly improved after receiving drum lessons.

  The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (MI), pioneered by Howard Gardner in the 1980s, defied previous narratives on intelligence. Gardner argued that instead of there being an overarching general intelligence, there are actually various types of intelligence, all possessed by one individual but to varying degrees. He recognised that intelligence can come in various forms, not just in its traditional IQ form, and argued that various abilities of a person ought to be acknowledged and celebrated.

  His multiple intelligences include musical-rhythmic, visual-spatial, verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical and bodily-kinaesthetic. So for example if someone has high visual, musical, mathematical and kinaesthetic intelligences, they are in a strong position to be able to excel in music, art, mathematics and sports — whether concurrently or sequentially. ‘[Polymathy] is perfectly consistent with MI theory,’ Gardner insists. ‘Some people will be talented in several fields, others are not so fortunate.’

  Whether or not there are multiple intelligences, the point is that intelligence ought to be either used in its various forms or applied to various disciplines. Whatever the case, as Ken Robinson says, ‘Intelligence is much richer, more diverse, more nuanced and intriguing than we’re led to believe by many of our cultural conceptions.’

  Critical Thinking and Common Sense

  Muhammad al-Husaini Al Shirazi, a Grand Ayatollah from the Shi’a Islamic tradition in Iran, became one of the twentieth century’s most prolific authors (publishing over 1,200 works) and made substantial contributions to law, economics, theology, sociology, history, philosophy and politics. One might be able to imagine such a feat in the information age, but Shirazi operated at a time just before the internet was invented. How was he able to have something serious to say about such a wide variety of fields without having the knowledge of the world at his fingertips?

  Al Shirazi’s extraordinary ability to think critically superseded the need to have an in-depth knowledge on every single subject. Critical thinking is the systematic use of intelligence and reason to question assumptions and discover truth. It is putting pre-existing facts to the test of logic and evidence. Like curiosity and creativity, it is a trait that is universally applicable across all disciplines. Immanuel Kant argued that ‘reason’ functioned as an ultimate value which transcended disciplinary divisions and should be ‘free to evaluate everything.’

  Two millennia before Kant, Aristotle alluded to critical thinking as being the most potent feature of the polymath. He stressed the difference between two kinds of proficiency in a given field of study; one being a ‘scientific knowledge of the subject’ and the other being ‘an educational acquaintance with it.’ While the former is obvious — and for which curiosity and the acquisition of knowledge is required — the latter refers to the ability to ‘form a fair off-hand judgment as to the goodness or badness of the method used’ or a kind of common sense that can be applicable across all fields.

  This common sense is the essence of critical thinking. But if not used in the way Aristotle envisaged, the critical thinking approach also can lead to reductionist methods and cause perpetual specialisation. So he concluded that there is the need for a ‘man of universal education’ — the type that is ‘critical in all or nearly all branches of knowledge.’ He refers to the generalist who relies on a universally applicable critical thinking more than a deep knowledge to contribute to the understanding of multiple fields of knowledge. Of course Aristotle himself embodied this idea.

  Whatever the methods, a truly critical mind — such as possessed by Aristotle’s ‘man of universal education’ — can apply itself to almost any field. Ziauddin Sardar, a champion of critical thinking and himself a writer on many subjects, says such a method can allow any intelligent individual to penetrate so-called ‘specialist’ fields:

  Once the jargon, which is designed to mystify the outsiders, is stripped away one finds a methodology and a thought process which can be mastered by anyone who is determined to understand it. In this respect, the true intellectual is a polymath: his basic tool is a sharp mind and a transdisciplinary methodology which can lay bare any discipline, any subject, any segment of human knowledge.

  Polymaths do not take what so-called ‘experts’ say for granted. While they may not have had specialised knowledge in a given field, they are able to make best use of what limited experience and knowledge of the area they do have and employ their intelligence and critical thinking faculties to optimise their understanding of it. Furthermore, they recognise that the investigation into multiple perspectives (or fields) is the most
logical and intelligent path to empirical objectivity.

  Social and Emotional Intelligence

  Hide not your talents, they for use were made, What’s a sundial in the shade.

  — Benjamin Franklin

  Artificial Intelligence (AI) will soon pass the Turing Test, after which it may be able to outwit humans in establishing ‘common sense.’ But there are aspects of human intelligence that (so far at least) seem inimitable.

  Social Intelligence is the capacity to effectively navigate and negotiate complex social relationships and environments. Emotional intelligence is the capacity to be aware of, control and express one’s emotions, and to handle interpersonal relationships judiciously and empathetically. They are non-programmable ‘unique selling points,’ if you will, that give the human species a serious competitive advantage over computers. As Oxford researchers Frey and Osborne specified in their article The Future of Employment, ‘social and emotional intelligence cannot be automated but motor skills can more easily.’ Importantly for polymaths, these intelligences can (or at least ought to) be applied across multiple domains.

  Versatility

  What makes one versatile is a refusal to restrict one’s own interests.

  — Raymond Tallis

  American ‘million-dollar baby’ Juli Crockett has been an undefeated professional boxer, a playwright and theatre director, an ordained minister, lead singer/songwriter in a record-selling band, a Ph.D. scholar of philosophy and a business executive in an international corporation. Scottish Pakistani Azeem Ibrahim has been a soldier in the British Army, a financial entrepreneur listed on the Scots rich list, a Harvard scholar in political science, education adviser to the Pakistani government, founder of a theological think-tank, and patron of numerous humanitarian initiatives. Crockett and Ibrahim have each managed to excel rapidly in such distinctly separate fields because more than any other talent, they possess one core trait at an exceptional level: versatility.