The Polymath: Unlocking the Power of Human Versatility

by Waqas Ahmed

  Navigating the Information Age

  He who learns but does not think is lost!

  — Confucius

  Having a clear vision of the whole is challenging, especially with the exceedingly vast amount of information now available. After all, we each take in some 100,000 words of information daily. The challenge is to be able to select that which may be of value to each of us and place things in the context of our lives specifically and the world at large in a way that matters to us. It is what Edward de Bono refers to as ‘thinking to create value.’ In this way, we all, to some extent, ought to become polymaths, for whom our entire world is our core field, and every aspect of existence that matters to it ought to be explored and used to understand it in its entirety.

  ‘We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom,’ says E.O. Wilson, one of today’s leading philosophers of science. ‘The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.’ Peter Burke, the world’s foremost expert on the evolution of polymathy in Europe, concludes the same:

  In an age of specialisation, generalists are needed more than ever before — not only for synthesis, to paint the bigger picture, but also for analysis, since it takes a polymath to ‘mind the gap’ and draw attention to the knowledges that may otherwise disappear into the spaces between disciplines, as they are currently defined and organised.

  French philosopher Edgar Morin, father of the Complexity Theory, said:

  We need a kind of thinking that reconnects that which is disjointed and compartmentalized, that which respects diversity as it recognizes unity, and that tries to discern interdependencies. We need a radical thinking (which gets to the root of problems), a multidimensional thinking, and an organizational or systems thinking.

  Schools and universities have traditionally been centres for the dissemination of knowledge — its transfer, that is, via lectures and books from the teacher to the student. But today, in the ‘information age’ information availability is no longer the problem; information navigation is the challenge of our times. ‘Because everyone has access to this tsunami of information it becomes really critical that we teach people how to navigate it,’ highlights Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia. ‘How do we know what to trust? A lot of people have not been taught these skills.’ Navigation requires thought, and as Edward de Bono points out, our current educational institutions do not fulfil the important role of teaching the indispensable skill of thinking. It is through thinking — the process that involves deduction, synthesis and application — that information becomes knowledge.

  Censorship today is not withholding information, but flooding you with information in a disjointed, random fashion. This either overwhelms and confuses us, or forces us to give up on understanding the whole, and focus on a specific. It can easily reinforce the closed-minded, narrow specialisation that our society already suffers from. ‘We’ve always been in pursuit of a global, universal Library since Babylon, Alexandria and so on,’ says psychologist Rand Spiro who focuses on multimedia education, ‘now we have it in the form of the internet, but unfortunately people are using it in a closed way to spare themselves the trouble of thinking . . . when in fact the web is very good at being able to find alternative views.’

  While this certainly encourages a culture of relative complacency, laziness and deprivation of human thinking (there is plenty of research to suggest this), its benefits can be infinitely greater if each individual is able to intelligently utilise it. ‘In the modern information age, one would think the chance to obtain information more quickly would call forth polymathy,’ says Hamlet Isakhanli, ‘[it] creates great opportunities for anyone who wants to learn many things.’ Indeed a burgeoning ‘ideas industry’ that includes conferences, web portals and podcasts that host a range of speakers from different fields (such as Idea City, Lift, Big Think, RSA, Intelligence Squared, Jo Rogan Experience, Tim Ferriss, London Real) play an important role in encouraging the expansion of mind and development of the self.

  Whether theoretical or experiential, information is readily available at our fingertips. One can learn almost anything: car mechanics, Polynesian philosophy, emergency survival, the history of Russian art, software troubleshooting, mobile phone engineering, Marxist economics, applied pharmacology, household plumbing. It is easy to ‘Wikihow’ or simply ‘Google’ almost anything. Web-based information, if sourced wisely, can allow for anyone to polymathise. Online sources such as YouTube (all sorts of videos imaginable), Khan Academy (tutorials on a range of subjects), TED (new ideas on a range of matters), the Edge (ideas from the West’s scientific elite), Wikipedia (which has 31 million articles in 267 different languages), not to mention the 5 million e-books available for free and every single newspaper and magazine being available online floods us with a tsunami of information.

  Yet educational institutions have not progressed from their centuries-old role relating to the collation and distribution (transfer) of knowledge in order to teach how best to organise, understand and use it. Critical thinking is needed equally, if not more, today than in the past in order to discern what information is needed, when, to what extent and in what context.

  Revolution

  According to the most commonly held narrative on human evolution, from two million to 10,000 years ago, the world was home, at one and the same time, to several human species: Homo neandethalensis, Homo erectus, Homo soloensis, Homo floresiensis, Homo rudolfensis, Homo ergaster and Homo sapiens. A cognitive revolution is what allowed sapiens to survive extinction vis-à-vis the other Homo genus. A large brain, the use of tools, superior learning abilities and complex social structures are what ensured the sustainability of the sapiens.

  This was the first cognitive revolution; the second has not yet taken place. There have of course been cultural and intellectual renaissances, such as in eleventh-century Cordoba, thirteenth-century Timbuktu, fifteenth-century Florence and eighteenth-century Paris (among many, many others). There have been technological breakthroughs and spiritual awakenings, as well as scientific, political and economic revolutions at different points over the last few millennia. But a cognitive revolution — one that alters the neurological structure of the brain to bring about a change in consciousness of an entire species — is yet to come. And it must come this century. Few would argue with the assessment that humankind is suffering from an existential crisis, which requires imminent resolution. And it is this age-old breed of human, the polymath, who will once again have to rise to the challenge.

  Chapter 6

  —

  An Alternative System

  The previous chapter proposed nothing less than a cognitive revolution — an emancipation of the Self from a policy of perpetual dehumanisation by the system. Ultimately though, the problem of specialisation is systemic and will thus require a systemic solution. So this section is for the attention of those in a position to influence the way we perceive and define society, education, work and, importantly, the future. Do we want a handful of polymaths in control of the future, or do we want to finally unleash the polymathic potential of all human beings?

  Society

  A Community of Minds

  One of the main reasons so many polymaths were produced by the great civilisations in history (aside from the fact that that is where human achievement was most likely to be recorded) is that most empires (such as the Ottoman, Roman and British) grew to include and assimilate peoples of various cultures, world views, languages and ideas. The diversity of social interaction that an individual would have engaged in would most definitely have triggered a process of social and intellectual hybridity. Ronald Burt concludes the same in his Social Origin of Good Ideas:

  People who live in the intersection of social worlds are at high risk of having good ideas. . . . People connected to otherwise segregated groups are more likely to be familiar with alternative ways of thi
nking and behaving which gives them the option of selecting and synthesizing alternatives.

  In his book The Difference, complexity theorist Scott Page reveals that, according to extensive research, progress and innovation may depend less on lone thinkers with high IQs than on diverse people working together and capitalising on their individuality. His work shows how groups that display a range of perspectives outperform groups of like-minded ‘experts.’ It is one of the reasons the jury is such an important part of the justice system — it allows for people from a randomly diverse range of backgrounds to come together, bring their perspectives to the case and combine it with others in order to arrive at a fresh insight, one that the highly trained, lifelong specialised lawyer alone would not be capable of having.

  This process, coined by Aristotle as the ‘wisdom of the crowd,’ is used in a variety of fields including journalism (to decide what gets included in the news), politics (such as the sortation in Athenian democracy), academia (interdisciplinary projects) and business (cross-domain advisory groups and ‘crowd-sourcing’ of ideas).

  The creative impact of diversity is not only applicable to groups. Diversity within a single mind (as opposed to a community of minds) can also have a similarly creative effect. Interactions with new cultures, new people, new ideas and new ways of thinking allow for individual minds to understand and fully appreciate the diversity of life at both the conscious and unconscious levels. And so the diversity of a group impacts on the diversity of one’s own individual thought processes, as well as vice versa. Cognitive scientist Rand Spiro talks about this ‘collaboration within and across minds’:

  What’s good for one is also good for the world, one bolsters the other . . . working in groups you hear different perspectives, which gives you as an individual different perspectives . . . then better suited, in turn, to work within groups . . . more tentacles, more possible points of connections. . . . You become better at ‘being a group unto yourself’ and thus engage in an internal dialogue from multiple perspectives.

  This process actually has a definitive physical impact on the brain — we now know that brain weight, cortical thickness and neural circuitry varies and changes according to the amount, type and nature of social interaction.

  Such enhancement of diversity in the individual then in turn allows for an exponential rise in the diversity of a society as a whole, forming a positive feedback loop. A multicultural, cosmopolitan environment that has a consistent and genuine inter-class, cross-field and cross-cultural interaction is therefore most likely to allow for hybridity amongst people, ideas and fields. It is an environment which naturally breeds polymathy, as long as the individual is allowed to have moments of introspection to internalise the diversity, as well as to manifest their inner diversity through outward expression.

  There are cases, however, whereby this reliance on groups has inhibited the individual’s propensity to polymathise. With the neoliberal economic doctrine emerging from the industrial age as the predominant socioeconomic system worldwide, the individual has been overtaken by the organisation — namely the corporation. Great personalities have been replaced by great companies as the movers and shakers of our world. The latter have grown to overtake the role and influence of the nation state (of the 100 largest economies in the world, most are now companies, not countries), with profound implications for polymathy at the individual (human) level. The corporation has humanised itself, possessing its own vision and mission as well as its own set of values, and having assumed its rights, has trespassed upon and eventually overwhelmed the realm of the individual.

  This, together with the exponential increase in knowledge (the ‘information explosion’) and the dehumanisation of man means that diversity, interdisciplinarity and multi-disciplinarity become a ‘team’ or organisational consideration rather than an individual one. Technologist Vinnie Mirchandani dedicated an entire book to applying the polymath analogy to the twenty-first-century corporation. It is the BPs and the GEs that are the ‘New Polymaths’; multinational companies that excel in multiple technologies and synthesise multiple talent pools from different sectors are today’s Leonardos and Ben Franklins, he contends.

  Care must be taken, therefore, especially in the corporate world, to ensure that the benefits of communal diversity flow both ways — from the individual to the community, as well as vice versa. We should not, as tech philosopher and polymath Jaron Lanier warns, glorify the collective at the expense of the individual.

  True Globalisation

  H.G. Wells, himself a polymath — a novelist, draughtsman, biologist and a writer on history and politics — developed the concept of the ‘World Brain’ back in 1936. Given his worldview, this was hardly surprising. ‘My particular line of country has always been generalisation and synthesis,’ he said. ‘I dislike isolated events and disconnected details.’ Wells’ ideas were always global in scale. He wrote a seminal history of the world, was a prominent member of the World Peace movement and joined the movement for a World Government after World War II. As an outspoken opponent of racism and classism, he was one of the few British intellectuals of his time who saw the world from outside the imperial prism and understood the importance of knowledge from various parts of the world; its contribution to history as well as its indispensability for future peace. He envisaged a genuinely diverse yet proportionately integrated world. A true globalisation.

  Twenty-first-century globalisation, which has to some extent facilitated the process of global hybridity by expanding and compiling the community of minds, has opened up many new worlds for the individual that would otherwise have been unimaginable. Today, such diverse interaction can come in many forms and via various platforms: Skype, email, Whatsapp, social media, blogs, discussion forums and so on — where minds from a variety of backgrounds come together to share and develop ideas. It is a space where, to quote science writer Matt Ridley, ‘ideas have sex.’ Ridley contends that real innovations in technology come from a collective brain; they depend on how well connected people are to each other. The internet therefore explains why we are undergoing such a golden age in technological innovation, he contends.

  But globalisation has proved to be both an opportunity and a threat to humankind, in equal measure. If understood and navigated properly, it can present an unparalleled opportunity for those with an insatiable curiosity to seek knowledge. It can be used as a force to polymathise society. The industrial revolution and imperialism brought with them a certain mentality — one of mechanistic linearity and reductionist specialisation. This mentality served its purpose in meeting the needs (for certain people at least) of that time. Today, living in a globally integrated information age, we require a totally different mentality — one that is fluid, holistic and interconnected. Each individual’s concerns are no longer singular and straightforward; they have become multifarious and complex.

  Most important, for globalisation to work as a catalyst of polymathic fertilisation, it must be real. One would assume (or at least hope) that in a ‘decolonialised’ and globalised twenty-first century, the Great Western Bias would have diminished. But it has not. Globalisation is not the proportionate fusion of all or many of the world’s cultures as its proponents claim, but instead has become the hugely disproportionate spread of the dominant culture, which today happens to be the Western one. This ought to be challenged. The danger is that such globalisation can cause the propagation of one or a few core ‘world languages’ (i.e. the official UN ones) into which everything has to be translated. Yet many works of history, literature and philosophy are possibly better available in other languages. The idea of a ‘global village’ is therefore illusory.

  Indigenous cultures, histories and philosophies around the world ought to be respected and taken more seriously — especially as many of them are intrinsically holistic and therefore polymathic by nature, making them perhaps more applicable to the current environment. They ought to be given a genuinely equal footing, not simply toke
nised when convenient. As the world globalises, there ought therefore to be a trend of learning various languages in order to achieve a truer understanding of numerous cultures and world views. Imagine how, for example, an Aztec account of Japanese history or Malian version of Polynesian philosophy or an Egyptian review of Chinese literature might not only reshape our conception of history, but also compel us to revise our present assumptions about so many things.

  With this in mind, what’s increasingly important is to have a global education in order to nurture a global mind. This means that children and young adults ought to be taught multiple languages (not only the obvious choices), and introduced to world literature, world cinema, world art and world philosophy in a way that treats knowledge from different societies as (at least potentially) equal. They should also have a world experience — travel, for instance, should be deeply ingrained in the curriculum.

  As the European upper classes during the Enlightenment underwent the Grand Tour, young adults today should feel compelled to embark on global adventures — especially as travel has become so much easier for many. The ‘gap year’ is important but not sufficient; it should be one part of a complete process of the global integration of a child. This is especially important for one’s polymathic development, because it broadens the mind, increases the hybridity of knowledge and experience, builds individuality and allows for exposure to different perspectives. UNESCO’s Global Citizenship Education (GCED) initiative, implemented by the Faith in the Commonwealth project, is an important step in this direction.