The Polymath: Unlocking the Power of Human Versatility

by Waqas Ahmed

  Art and Culture

  Whether through ‘high culture’ or ‘popular culture’ (T.S. Eliot saw them both as important to the formation of a ‘complete culture’), through hip hop, theatre, poetry, film, novels, music, or children’s stories, polymathy ought to be a more celebrated state of the human condition. A rather surprising fact is that polymaths (as with polymathy as an idea) have seldom been explored through depiction in artistic productions and literary works.

  For example, while polymaths serve as perfect muses for artistic and literary exploration — their lives being the most interesting, adventurous, inspiring and multifaceted of any — remarkably, very few (if any) of the extraordinary polymaths mentioned in this book are depicted in any mainstream (or even independent) film. There is certainly no shortage of appetite by filmmakers to depict adventurous, genius, even polymathic fictional characters such as Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, Jason Bourne, Will Hunting, Forrest Gump and MacGyver. So it is baffling why Hollywood or any other mainstream cinema establishment has not used the true lives of Imhotep, Aristotle, Shen Kuo, da Vinci, Franklin, Goethe, Ibn Khaldun, or other notable polymaths as the basis for their screenplays, even though each would surely provide a truly fascinating, inspiring and entertaining story.

  A Hollywood blockbuster following the epic life of Richard Francis Burton starring Eric Banna and produced by Edward Zwick, or Will Smith starring as Paul Robeson in a Spike Lee ‘Joint,’ or perhaps Tom Hanks starring as F. Story Musgrave in a Forrest Gump/Apollo 13-style adventure drama would most certainly be widely appealing productions. Surely, a Majid Majidi film depicting Omar Khayyam’s exploits, a Werner Herzog film on Rudolf Steiner’s multidimensional mind or a Mani Ratnam production depicting the many facets of Rabindranath Tagore would have the makings for exhilarating entertainment as well as a captivating educational experience. It would be a way of exposing a different way of being, without having to resort to fiction.

  Today, with governments and corporations largely favouring narrow-focused ‘specialists,’ it is independent patrons who tend to recognise, encourage and actively support polymaths. Indeed, some of the greatest patrons of enterprise today remain individuals, namely wealthy philanthropists and enthusiasts who are in many cases themselves polymathic — the likes of Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Elon Musk and Nathan Myhrvold. As autonomous, free-doing entrepreneurs (as opposed to shackled government officials and mechanistic corporate executives), they are more likely to appreciate the power and potential of individual variety, and are able to support the polymath at will, without the need to adhere to existing customs and processes.

  In the world of art and culture, Nasser D. Khalili — ‘the modern day Medici’ who is himself referred to by many as a polymath — is supporting a number of interdisciplinary projects in art, culture, education and business, including an initiative with the Commonwealth which seeks to encourage open-mindedness and maximise the many-sided potential of youth across developing countries.

  Education

  Earlier, we examined why the current education system is where it is. By way of summary, Ken Robinson highlights some of the main factors:

  In academic education, specialisation is in part a result of an understanding that knowledge is only derived through the process of deductive reasoning and evidence. This inevitably sidelines other areas in the cultural sphere like the arts. This has been accelerated by the growth of mass education systems in the 19th century. Factories needed certain cognitive skills, hence the importance given to maths and English. If you combine this idea of knowledge with the need to produce a more compliant and conformist workforce, then you get an education system that has a particular view of intelligence, but also one in which emotion and expression are neglected. Over the same period, we have the emergence of psychiatry, psychoanalysis and economic theory, all of which derived from that way of seeing the world.

  Establishing the Purpose of Learning

  Knowledge is power — for some, the power to subjugate; for others, to liberate. This is why the pursuit of knowledge — otherwise known as ‘education’ — has been given such great importance in the history of societies. For much of human history, the purpose of education was to enhance one’s moral character, increase one’s ability to contribute positively to humanity, as well as to prepare oneself optimally for the realities of day-to-day life. Confucians saw education as a means to improving moral character; Hindus and Muslims saw it as means to know the Divine; prehistoric hunter-gatherers saw it as a means to survive in a hostile, adverse climate. Aristotle said that children should be educated not only because the given subject might be ‘useful,’ but simply because education is something good in itself.

  Somewhere along the line, because of the prevalence of social Darwinist attitudes and the predominance of the capitalist paradigm, education came to be seen primarily (and sometimes exclusively) as a means to greater materialistic and social status. Our current institutions and culture have forced us to rely on education as a value-adding process after which we sell ourselves to employers who can be reassured of our ability to contribute to their success. That ‘value’ is most often judged by how ‘specialised’ we are. In that sense, education has become a tool to attain stability and status.

  But today, perhaps we need to re-evaluate the real purpose of learning. How can you decide where to place yourself in this world without developing a fuller, more complete understanding of it? Urgently needed today is an education system which encourages curiosity (by encouraging autonomy), unity (by encouraging holistic, contextualised learning) and creativity (by not forcing monomathic specialisation upon the multitalented). Polymath and educationalist Hamlet Isakhanli believes in creating a learning environment that encourages multiple talents and interests. ‘In reality, no student is ever interested in just one field; he/she has a circle of interests encompassing several fields and hobbies. It is necessary to create the opportunity for him/her to display abilities in these fields.’

  With this, however, come some important questions to ask ourselves: why are we even seeking knowledge? What does ‘learning’ or ‘education’ mean to us? What is our idea of accomplishment, happiness, fulfilment and success? As it stands, we have been told to prepare for a job — one too that is likely to soon be automated! Importantly, we must be clear and honest from the onset what our idea of ‘knowledge’ actually is. Too many of us are on autopilot, relying upon society to tell us what we ought to be learning and why. Once such reflection has taken place, a true hunger to acquire as well as share knowledge will naturally develop within.

  Encouraging Creative Autonomy

  Kids prosper best with a broad curriculum that celebrates their various talents.

  — Ken Robinson

  We assume that our education system has come a long way since tribal, ‘outdated’ ways of learning, but maybe we need to revisit some of those traditional ideas. Polymath and anthropologist Jared Diamond has shown through his studies that the educational process in many traditional, tribal societies, despite being completely different to the modern Western system, often allows for the free development of such roundedness in a way that prepares individuals for the sheer variety of life. He observed tribal education systems in Papua New Guinea: ‘no formal instruction and memorizing here, no classes, no exams, no cultural sites (schools) in which packages of knowledge, abstracted from their context, are transmitted from one person to another.’ ‘Knowledge’ in traditional education, he observes, is ‘inseparable from social life.’

  This is important as children need to be able to relate to the significance and utility of what is being taught — they need to understand the real value of the skill and knowledge that is being transferred to them so that they may be able to utilise it as a tool to better understand (and survive in) the world around them. The transcendence into various ‘fields’ would thus come naturally. Some modern school systems such as the one developed by Italian physician Maria Montessori do reflect such
an educational philosophy.

  Indeed, much can be learned about the importance of childplay to creativity and general life-preparation from the unconstrained upbringing of children in traditional, tribal societies. Parents in modern societies, overprotective of their children’s safety, curtail exploration and child autonomy in general. Jared Diamond’s studies into traditional societies such as the Aka Pygmy Firaha Indians and Martu of Western Australia shows that an educational framework consisting of multi-age playgroups, creative toy-making and real-life apprenticeship allow for an environment where ‘there is no separation between education and play’ and produces a very tough, creative and resilient youth ‘who do not believe anyone owes them anything.’

  This approach allows curiosity in a child to reign free, and confirms educationalist Ken Robinson’s proclamation that ‘if you can light the spark of curiosity in a child, they will learn without any further assistance.’ As such, individuality too is promoted. If one can import such elements of such creative autonomy into modern societies, it would result in a more polymathic childhood development. In allowing the ‘Conventional Mind’ to revert to its primordial instincts or as Robert Greene refers to it, the ‘Original Mind,’ such an education would allow the adult to remain close to his innately creative, curious disposition throughout his life.

  Nurturing All-Rounders

  Education is the ability to perceive the hidden connections between phenomena.

  — Václav Havel,

  Czech playwright and statesman

  According to Confucius’ educational philosophy, as articulated in The Great Learning, one must treat education as an intricate, interrelated system within which one must strive for balance. No one aspect of learning is isolated from the other, he contended, and failure to cultivate a single aspect of one’s learning will lead to the failure of learning as a whole.

  Fast-forward a couple of millennia. In his inaugural lecture at the University of Jena, Goethe’s friend Fredrich Schiller promoted the notion of Bildung (a broad-based education that formed part of the general development of the student) as opposed to Ausbildung (specialist education preparing students for a specific vocation). Nietzsche, a later member of this movement, warned of the growth of specialisation, which he said caused scholars to lose perspective of the whole. He argued that the specialist ‘will never reach his proper height, the height from which he can survey, look around and look down.’

  Another important member of the same movement, the polymath and explorer Alexander von Humboldt, introduced the notion of Wissenschaft, which connotes the all-round development of the individual and the need to cultivate the whole personality rather than just the mind. The purpose of the university, Humboldt insisted, should therefore be to ‘lay open the whole body of knowledge and expound both the principles and foundations of all knowledge.’ Many of the leading German intellectuals in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries such as Hegel and Kant were also proponents of such holistic education. Karl Marx too specifically proposed a ‘many-sided education’ in order to nurture the multiple facets of youth in his Communist Manifesto.

  In the twentieth century, a new educational movement, or ‘social pedagogy’ evolved in which teachers were trained to treat the child as a whole person and support his or her overall development. There are schools today that do follow (or at least attempt to follow) such an educational model based on holistic teaching and learning. Some have embedded this ethos into their curriculum; the Waldorf Schools, for example, were set up by Rudolf Steiner to foster intellectual, practical and artistic learning as well as to develop a social and spiritual consciousness. The Krishnamurti Schools (founded by Steiner’s contemporary and fellow theosophist J. Krishnamurti) follow a similar philosophy, as do the Isha schools founded by mystic and modern polymath Sadhguru. How interesting that schools founded on spiritual foundations are pioneering this approach.

  Whatever the school’s curriculum, schoolteachers (many of whom are themselves generalists) can themselves potentially play an important role in fostering polymathy in schools. Hamlet Isakhanli suggests a scenario:

  It is possible to take a student who understands the natural sciences well and teach him/her to listen to music, remind him/her of simple elements of mathematical and physical theories about sound and harmony, work on the connections between poetry and music, dive into music history, and maybe even give him/her projects in the same vein like writing a composition.

  We mustn’t forget that different children develop or exhibit different talents at different stages of the learning process. ‘I know kids who are much better than other kids at the same age in different disciplines, or at different times of the day, or better in smaller groups than in large groups, and sometimes they want to go on their own,’ says Ken Robinson.

  Polymath Nathan Myhrvold, who recognised that the educational system has the intrinsic characteristics of a factory with quality control (in the form of standardised curriculum and testing) and a goal to graduate as many students as possible with an acceptable level of education, decided to design a customary education system for his twins.

  As you might expect, it was a lot more varied in both subjects and teaching styles than schools typically provide. They did attend a strong school in Seattle for a while, but we also arranged for a university professor to give them private lessons in areas like biology where they excelled. We took lots of family trips tied to their coursework —a visit to the Greek islands where the Odyssey was set, for example. And for one year they attended an unconventional farm-based school in Vermont where all the students work the farm and have a lot of classes outdoors. Obviously this approach is more eclectic—not to mention involved and expensive — than many families would like. But I do think that it’s smart to give kids broad exposure to the varied ways of life open to them while also feeding any passions or talents they show early on.

  General Studies, long discredited as a valid A-Level subject, should be taught, within which the context and relevance of each subject in the curriculum ought to be emphasised — how they all relate to each other and why they are relevant to the student’s own life. If set out in this way, General Studies ought to become the most important subject in the curriculum.

  In any case, students should be rewarded for their roundedness. They should be assessed according to the diversity of their competence, not just their competence and knowledge within each respective subject. Moreover, even if the ultimate goal is to specialise, there ought, as psychologists Gutman and Schoon suggest, to be an extended moratorium on specialisation where students can spend more time exploring their talents and interests.

  A ‘Higher’ Education

  Given the pyramidal specialisation structure of most modern education systems, maintaining the diversity of learning within higher education is an enormous challenge. A reversion back to some older models of higher education from different periods and civilisations might be useful. The Taxila University (in modern-day Pakistan), the oldest in the world, ensured that the adult student was equally well trained in fields as diverse as medicine, law and military sciences as well as elephant lore, archery and hunting. Universities and institutions of higher education in the Muslim world have traditionally been centres for polymathic learning, providing a holistic educational experience — with Al Azhar in Cairo and Qum in Iran being fine examples. In Europe, the term ‘university,’ originating as it does from the Latin universitas (meaning ‘universal’ or ‘whole’), implies that even (or especially) higher education should encompass a full spectrum of learning for each student. Indeed, these early medieval universities had the studia generalia as their curriculum.

  Today, however, lifelong specialists are being manufactured to order as they have been for almost two centuries. As every individual’s natural disposition is a multifaceted, multidimensional one (demonstrated frequently throughout this book), should it not in theory be easier to ‘manufacture’ a polymath than a specialist? Santiago Ramón
y Cajal, the first-ever Nobel laureate in Medicine/Physiology and the founding father of modern neuroscience (and a celebrated artist in his own right), testified to the benefits of a rounded, multi-field education:

  A good deal more worthy of preference by the clear-sighted teacher will be those students who are somewhat more headstrong, contemptuous of first place, insensible to the inducements of vanity, and who being endowed with an abundance of restless imagination, spend their energy in the pursuit of literature, art, philosophy and all the recreations of the mind and body. To him who observes them from afar, it appears as though they are scattering and dissipating their energies, while in reality, they are channelling and strengthening them. . . .

  The closest the modern curriculum comes to the polymathic structure of the medieval universities is the modern liberal arts system — widespread in the United States but less so elsewhere. Originating in Europe, it is today defined according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, as a ‘college or university curriculum aimed at imparting general knowledge and developing general intellectual capacities, in contrast to a professional, vocational, or technical curriculum.’

  With ‘liberal,’ in Latin meaning ‘worthy of a free person,’ its aim is to stay free of the dogma that surrounds early specialisation. This is as true for the scholar as for the student. When Douglas Hofstadter told Harvard professor E.O. Wilson about two polymathic professors who were based at liberal arts colleges, Wilson responded with the following (paraphrased):

  Yes, marvellous thinkers and teachers like that are much more likely to be found in smaller liberal-arts colleges than at fancy Ivy League universities, which always hire only ‘cutting-edge’ people who have no interest in deep ideas, but are simply supernarrow ‘world-class’ specialists in some tiny discipline. Harvard is chock-full of these ‘world-class’ folks, but if someone asked me where their child could get a true education, I would always recommend a small (liberal arts) college rather than an elite place like Harvard, which is far too snobby and trendy. You can get plenty of prestige from going to Harvard, but you won’t get nearly as good an education.