Polymath vs Specialist
For me, a polymath is someone who is interested and pursues a wide variety of subjects. Contrary to a specialist or monomath, who is interested and pursues minimum subjects.
Buckminster Fuller in his work, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth thought the birth of a specialist was the doing of the great pirates who asked their created primitive king to gather young men of talent and say to each, ‘But each of you must mind your own business or off go your heads. I’m the only one who minds everybody’s business.’
…And the development of the bright ones into specialists gave the king very great brain power, and made him and his kingdom the most powerful in the land and thus, secretly and greatly, advantaged his patron Pirate in the world competition with the other Great Pirates.
Further he describes the importance of polymathic thinking:
One of humanity’s prime drives is to understand and be understood. All other living creatures are designed for highly specialized tasks. Man seems unique as the comprehensive comprehender and coordinator of local universe affairs. If the total scheme of nature required man to be a specialist she would have made him so by having him born with one eye and a microscope attached to it.
I referenced RBF as I wanted to provide context by quoting someone who I believe is one of the best examples of a polymath. His works speak for themselves, are of diverse nature and are based on his Metaphysical, Ethical, Scientific, Technological, Historical, Futuristic, Economic, Political, Environmental, Efficient and Innovative thinking. This proves he was someone who was both interested and pursued a wide variety of subjects.
He provided a fictional historical narrative on the birth and reason of specialization. I don’t think it’s far from the reality. Specialized people are clearly important for people who themselves pursue general thinking.
I elsewhere (https://medium.com/@ades_abcd/why-we-shouldnt-memorize-memorization-in-the-age-of-pocket-computers-80a51b8f4cb6) wrote about memorization and learning where I mentioned how memorizers are prefered by people who employ as they prove their worth in obedience and intellectual capacity-to-follow. The same applies to specialized people. They are patronized and promoted by the prevalent power.
The powerful are ones who control the most, both in terms of depth and width. So, naturally the system is polymathic. And since they have to control a large amount of area (the whole), they will need trusted mechanisms to fully control the parts. Those parts workers are specialists. This is why specialization is encouraged.
The specialists are highly rewarded by the system that employs them. Both materially and in terms of prestige. This is what lures a lot of young people. But what they forget is, if you specialize you work for others, if you generalize you can work for yourself.
Now moving onto the other part dealing with polymathic thinking.
The food options we humans have, the desires and wills we have among ourselves, the kinds of variety of things our body organs can do, all are testimony to the fact that we are creatures evolved for polymathic thinking and doing. Our mind itself is the biggest testimony of that. The sheer ability for variety in us is astounding and unfound in any other creatures.
But we humans failed so miserably in the control and maintenance of social-political powers that it has resulted in a part of our own self being responsible for the downfall of most of us.
Our inability and failure to destroy The P-Willers: (https://medium.com/@ades_abcd/the-three-wills-272fbb1255a1), resulted in the birth and success of the specialist, which seems like a pragmatic necessity today. But it is pragmatic only because we all have collectively failed to manage and organize our socio-political power.
Polymathic thinking is a very tedious and complex ability to have. The reason being the same. It is discouraged while specialization is encouraged and rewarded. We have lost the ability thanks to the system that itself is polymathic.
All this has resulted in polymathic thinking becoming difficult as even for those of us who like to pursue it, there aren’t enough examples for guidance and inspiration. Our education systems were devised in a way to produce specialists, as they clearly define distinctions not only through various ‘subjects’ which are to be approached differently, but also through the variety in teachers who teach them. All this has taken away general thinking from us.
Today, the process of specialization has gone deeper and deeper, resulting in experts who, if asked something apart from their subject, frown as if they have been asked to donate a million dollars.
Gone are the days of Plato and Aristotle, who were interested and worked on a crazy amount of subject matters. Considering the society and technologies in their times, it’s not only not-amazing that they made mistakes, but it is also not-amazing that they thought better and deeper in each of the wide areas than any of the specialists we have today do on their area. Especially, considering the amount of resources today’s specialists have at their disposal. But what they most importantly did was influence the future.
Persia in its heyday, having been heavily influenced by Aristotle’s works, produced polymaths such as Ibn Rushd, Ibn-Sina, al-Jazari, Khayyam, among many.
Similarly, the Renaissance period in Europe, which was heavily influenced by the Persians produced polymaths such as DaVinci, Michelangelo and Galileo among many. I consider Shakespeare a polymath too.
This influence rubbed into Enlightenment thinkers with polymathic quality such as Newton, Leibnitz and Hooke which in turn inspired polymathic thinkers of proto-Romanticism, Romanticism and German legacy like Goethe, Schiller, Lichtenberg, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche right upto 20th century German thinker such as Einstein, and people such as Schrodinger, Arthur C. Clarke. In Franklin and Jefferson, and later in Buckminster Fuller, Isaac Asimov(?), Richard Feynman, the US also produced important polymathic thinkers. We do have a lot of polymathic thinkers shaping things today.
The purpose behind mentioning all these names is to prove that polymathic thinkers are the ones who deliver the actual goods and take humanity forward not by kilometers but by light-years.
Once again I would like to mention that all this is due to humanity’s fatal incapacity — to organize and manage socio-political power.
This is where one might say — The Powerful ones can also be polymathic. What about all those great billionaires and their huge companies that control everything? Your idea is stupid, unreasonable and flawed!
To which I would like to say:
The modern billionaires are not polymathic, they are just greedy! To be polymathic you have to be interested in the subjects. I don’t think they are interested in anything else other than lust and power. They can be called ‘polygreeds’.
I would like to wrap this up by talking about the difficulty in polymathic thinking.
Viewing things polymathically that have already been brutally segregated through years of education and propaganda is very difficult.
You catch one, the other bites,
you run to hold that, the other flies!
But I think we can learn lessons from Nature as nature quite surely is a good polymath. Look at how nature has tried to balance everything. Yes at times few parts suffer and things aren’t apt, but on the general scheme of things nature has balanced pretty well. But when it comes to the biggest polymath — it has to be the Universe.
Polymathic thinking has always contributed greatly to human history. I think the birth of philosophical thinking is due to polymathic thinking as it made people go wider and wider, further and further. Philosophy is a method to arrange all that through concepts.
Conception of the one-god Universe is also an example of polymathic thinking. As mentioned above, one of the challenges of polymathic thinking is to not let go of one while you are in pursuit of the other. A single god was a perfect concept as it allowed the ancients to envelop everything into a singularity, such that indulging in one particular didn’t seem completely distinct from the particular previously dealt with.
I would like to conclude by sharing a line I devised which I find very useful whenever I want to jump around here and there:
Stop selecting, start balancing.
