Wehumans are inherently curious creatures. For as long as we’ve been endowed with the faculties to do so, we’ve searched for understanding that is both tactical (who, what, when, where, and how) and existential (why).
Today, our education system decidedly favors the tactical over the existential because, as Waqas Ahmed describes in his excellent book, The Polymath:
Somewhere along the line, because of… 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 ‘specialized’ we are. In that sense, education has become a tool to attain stability and status.
There are two problems with this.
The first is that the Industrial model of education that still dominates demands specialization for increasingly complex tools, turning jack-of-all-trades into masters of one (if not masters of one fraction). This reduces our self-sufficiency and our ability to make connections between seemingly unrelated realms the way we did throughout history. The second is that nearly two centuries of specialization have resulted in a spectacularly complex world—far more than would’ve been possible if the acts of feeding, clothing and sheltering still demanded most of our hours. And as a result, more decisions are being made by people who decreasingly understand the scale and breadth of their decisions’ impacts, exponentially increasing the risk of things going cataclysmically wrong.
See: climate, economics, technology, and social systems.
Today, we outsource nearly all of life to third parties.
While the problems predate it, the Industrial Age supercharged our transformation into specialists, churning out young adults who were increasingly discouraged from openly exploring their worlds without preconceived outcomes (like “correct” answers or targeted application), and were pushed instead to choose a singular area of focus where, as Ahmed writes, they could distinguish themselves in the name of future economic gain and reputation.
Nicholaus Copernicus, a world-class polymath and the first human to realize the Universe didn’t physically revolve around the Earth, maligned the trend toward specialization among scientists some 400 years ago, as follows:
With them it is as though an artist were to gather the hands, feet, head, and other members for his images from diverse models, each part excellently drawn, but not related to a single body, and since they in no way match each other, the result would be a monster rather than man.
The human world is now full of economic, environmental, legal, industrial and technological “monsters”, as an increasingly specialized workforce tinkers with ever smaller components of an ever more complex set of problems, leaving fewer and fewer people able to broadly navigate our own inventions, in the dim hopes of synthesizing broad inputs in search of holistic insights to help us thrive.
As E.O. Wilson, a giant in several fields and the “heir” to Darwin, intuited:
We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom.
We used to call the people whose curiosity-fueled, open-ended and unrelated explorations led to nearly all human wisdom polymaths. And while every human is capable of polymathy, Ahmed argues, the Western educational paradigm has prevented nearly every student from fulfilling that potential, and turning “information” into “wisdom”, or insight.
Physical Ease, Intellectual Complexity
We would likely agree that living has become simpler for most. That is, we now outsource the creation and delivery of nearly everything we need or want in our lives, most of which we used to have to find or make ourselves, like food, clothing and shelter, to name just three. Securing resources used to take up most, if not all, of our hours. Today we employ a proxy army for that effort in the form of money. How we make money to pay for things drives how most of us choose to engage with the world, which we do by specializing in something we can charge others for, to complete the cycle of economic exchange.
“My legal advice for your plumbing services. Thanks for playing.”
Life is now mostly transactional, between people who have elected to engage in a specific piece of Project Human in the hopes that other people find their efforts useful enough for money to change hands. The logical form this takes is a population of highly selective experts.
As the old quip goes, “an expert is someone who knows more and more about less and less until they know absolutely everything about nothing.”
The trend toward hyper-specialization has only accelerated over time, introducing a level of complexity to life that has made it all but impossible to stand apart from the modern world and navigate it wisely.
Because the continued fragmentation in specialization further increases the complexity we face, sense-making is only getting worse, and farther out of reach, with time. We see signs of it everywhere, as polarization and hate crimes increase globally, while tolerance and compromise are heading in the opposite direction. This trend makes it imperative that we retool our education system to help us navigate the complexity of human institutions and their physical impacts on people and planet, while there’s a hospitable planet to defend.
We desperately need a new education model: one based on synthesis that encourages and rewards open-ended inquiry, exploration, experimentation, discourse, empathy, communications, collaboration, critical thinking, deduction and creative enterprise. That is, a system that builds on the fact that knowledge is no longer held in ivory towers but on the Internet, and focuses on teaching us both how to navigate it and what to do with it.
Information is now everywhere. In fact, we are drowning in it.
It’s formally organized in general e-institutions like Academic Earth, Khan Academy, One Day University, University of the People, W3Schools, Udemy, TeacherTube, EdX and its subsidiary, MOOC.org, among others. It’s hosted at topic-focused learning sites like TED (and TEDx), MasterClass, the recently closed Rebel Wisdom, and SpeakEasy. It’s aggregated in open-source global repositories like Wikipedia, YouTube and Vimeo, which have replaced the library for a digital age. It’s housed in pragmatic how-to tutorials not only at YouTube and Vimeo, but at sites like eHow, TikTok and Instructables. And it’s ubiquitous on digital news and literary sites, including every major media outlet, social media site and publishing platform (like Medium itself).
Not one of these things existed before the turn of the millennium. Most are a mere decade old.
In a sense, the entire Internet now exists to connect resources and people, and in a very short time, it has become the driving force of the global economy.
So, what to do with all that data?
Enter the Polymath
I’ve written at least twice before about the mythic polymath. None of those pieces garnered much traction, which I assumed was because the word seems highbrow, or elite, and seems superfluous to everyday concerns people have when they’re “just trying to make a buck”.
I started one of those pieces with a joke that still makes me laugh:
The Austrian satirist Karl Kraus once quipped, “I had a terrible vision: I saw an encyclopedia walk up to a polymath and open him up.”
It’s funny because it hit the nail on the head about what polymaths are: encyclopedic in their knowledge across seemingly unrelated topics, yet unlike our old knowledge sources, polymaths stitch threads of information together to create insights.
Having just finished Ahmed’s book, I thought I’d try again to communicate not only how polymaths invented the world, but why polymathy is our best hope of—and perhaps only path toward—saving us from the cataclysmic impacts our own voluntary blinders, through a retooling of our prevailing systems of education.
As Persian polymath and scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr warned:
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 civilization in the long term… otherwise everything will become separate from each other like organs of a body with no integrating principle, without which the body will fall apart.
Nasr sounds a lot like Copernicus.
E.O. Wilson had much to add:
Only fluency across the [disciplinary] boundaries will provide a clear view of the world as it really is, not as seen through the lens of ideologies and religious dogmas or commanded by myopic response to immediate need. A balanced perspective cannot be acquired by studying disciplines in pieces but through pursuit of the consilience among them.
Why is this important? Why isn’t it good enough to become the expert in HTML, CDOs, the tax code, H1-Bs, or any other acronymic human creation? It’s because anything isolated and linear is at risk of being automated very, very soon.
Opining on the pragmatic application of a polymathic education—how it helps individuals in the near term, in an economic capacity—Anders Sandberg, from Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute (yup; this exists) has a similar advice:
At least for the next few decades, until machines become smarter than humans, the human polymath will be very important to society. Jobs that can be crisply defined are threatened by automation. Jobs that are hard to define are actually pretty safe. Polymaths are obviously the latter… Not only are they good at doing the jobs that don’t have a proper description, but they are, moreover, good at inventing such jobs.
We sorely need an education paradigm that prioritizes the creation of broad thinkers, and teaches them to apply the discoveries they make to solving deep problems.
A New Education
Ahmed and I share an optimism about every individual’s innate polymathic ability. There will always be outliers, the likes of Aristotle, da Vinci, Newton, Epicurus, Kuo, Tagore, Parks, Franklin, Carver, Alberti and Edison, among countless others. But much as Newton said “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants,” we are all part of the puzzle. Each and every discovery, widget and insight contributes to the collective reach of humanity.
The idea, then, isn’t to stop creating things, or going about our business or even education. To the contrary, it is to enhance learning by broadening it, so that we can, in fact, “reach further” by connecting disparate threads.
It is to create contextual understanding of any given thing to other things. It is to encourage the exploration of connections.
As polymath and scholar Iain McGilchrist said:
“Nothing is what it is except in the context in which it is situated. Take it out and it changes its nature.”
Philosopher Edgar Morin refers to this as “blind intelligence.”
Edward de Bono, who created the term “lateral thinking”, critiqued existing educational institutions for not teaching thinking, and that it was only through deduction, synthesis and application that information becomes knowledge.
To the pursuit of these skillsets, we must add the important quality of skepticism: the humble knowledge that there is far more that we don’t know than we know; and that anything known is no more than an imperfect means toward greater understanding, because it, too, is incomplete… or even dead wrong.
Leonardo da Vinci himself said:
“The greatest deception men suffer from is their own opinions.”
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who named the concept of “flow” or “flow state”, referred to creative people like polymaths as being multitudes rather than individuals.
It’s a beautiful image.
One of the most illuminating parts of Ahmed’s book, for me, is when he highlights what neuroscientists are discovering about the distinct roles of each brain hemisphere—divisions that McGilchrist dubs The Master and his Emissary, in his eponymous book.
“During a creative moment, the left hemisphere barely reacts but the right becomes more active, showing a striking increase in gamma waves. Brain cells on the left hemisphere have short dendrites, useful for pulling in information from nearby, but the cells on the right branch out much further and pull together distant unrelated ideas.”
Via our dendrites, it appears, our right-brained creative hemispheres make biologically shallow and broad connections across distinct areas of the brain, while our analytical left-brained hemispheres are limited in their reach, drawing instead on nearby—and related—data.
If nothing else, this speaks to the need for our educational institutions to amplify right-brain creativity, to develop the “ideas, analogies, patterns and perspectives from outside the domain you are working on” that cognitive psychologist Rand Spiro cites as foundational to the development of future polymaths.
Putting Humpty Dumpty Back Together
If the Machine Age was about shattering the spherical holism of human understanding and activity into thousands of fragments—in service of targeted advancements and their monetization—the post-Industrial Information Age should be about putting Humpty Dumpty together again.
Our misguided subdivision of everything we touch and do has led us to make products and decisions that are ultimately harmful to ourselves. We parse what and how we eat, by looking at component nutrients, not whole foods and their relationships. “We treat diseases, not people,” as my late brother—a Harvard-trained doctor—once chastised his colleagues, leading to sub-standard outcomes in healing. We grow and harvest fragments of the world’s resources, ignoring how doing so destroys entire ecosystems. We we treat one another transactionally, rather than as complex human beings, reducing the richness of human community into transacted loneliness. And we rob ourselves of the sense-making apparatus to thrive, both as individuals and as a species, by teaching fragments, not synthesis.
It is high time for us to retake the mantle of polymathy through a retooling of our educational system, because the fact is that there is only one planet, and it acts invariably like the ecosystem that it is. It can’t do otherwise.
Every part of the planet and its constituent parts exerts an influence on every other part.
The invasion of Ukraine proved that there is only one economy, and it’s global. A market in Wuhan proved that there is only one microbiome, and it’s global. A rotating garbage patch three times the size of France (among many, many others) proves that there is only one waste stream, and it is global. Runaway cyclones, rainstorms, hurricanes, heat waves, wildfires, desertification, ocean acidification, colony collapse and melting ice caps the world over all prove that there is only one climate, and it is global. And a world-wide web where all of human knowledge and commerce now lives and interacts — one which despots in isolated places will do anything to limit — proves that there is only one community, and it is global.
And so, to solve global problems today, we need a global understanding of the world, and not only how to harness the individual components of an increasingly complex set of problems, but critically how those constituent pieces interact and impact potential outcomes, so that we might stand a chance of directing human effort toward favorable outcomes.
Final Thoughts
According to the late education expert Sir Ken Robinson, whose video Do Schools Kill Creativity is the most watched TED talk of all time, believes the current model of education:
“…is grossly outdated; it is still based on a model that Victorian Britain installed, which fostered a culture of ‘linearity, conformity and standardization,’ whereas today we are faced with a different world, one that is ‘organic, adaptable and diverse.’ This incongruence affects the students’ intellectual and professional prospects. So treating children like robots doesn’t even suit the twenty-first-century job market.”
Mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead called these ‘inert ideas’: “compartmentalized, fragmented information thrown at students at school without any unifying framework,” as Ahmed adds.
As a result, students are not only less able to make sense of how these fragments of knowledge transmitted to them in various classes are relevant to each other, but more importantly, how they are relevant to their own lives. There is simply no context and therefore no internalization.
So, what to do?
To reprise what I wrote earlier, we need an education model of synthesis—for children and adult learners, alike—that encourages and rewards something like the following learning sets:
- Open-ended inquiry and Cognitive Science
- Exploration and Experimentation
- Philosophy and History
- Discourse and Debate
- Empathy and Humanism
- Introspection and Reflection
- Collaboration and Social Organization
- Critical thinking and Deduction
- Sense-Making and Meaning
- Creative enterprise and The Arts
I’m sure there are many others.
There are rich sources of all of these things online. I provided links to a few dozen portals down which rabbit holes we could easily disappear, at length. The trick, of course, is in teaching children and adults alike how to navigate an infinite information stream, in service of sense-making.
All of us—not just the professionals we currently pay pittance to outsource our children’s education—are responsible for maximizing human potential in every person, at every age.
Educators, families, employers, service providers and lawmakers each have a role in aiming individual and collective energy toward sense-making and synthesis. Respectively, these groups are responsible for teaching and connecting toolsets (educators), establishing moral and ethical frameworks (families), advancing direct contributions to the living world (employers), distributing resources (service providers), and ensuring that equitable access and protections are encoded in law (lawmakers), to ensure that everyone has a chance to maximize their contribution to their and others’ thriving.
It’s time for us to reinvent education, learning from our own long-term history (to guide a new generation of polymaths) and our short-term past (to avoid repeating the negative impacts of fragmented human activity).
All the answers are there. We simply need to synthesize them.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:
White Fragility: Talking to White People About Racism | Escape the “Act Like a Man” Box | The Lack of Gentle Platonic Touch in Men’s Lives is a Killer | What We Talk About When We Talk About Men |
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