The Polymath: Unlocking the Power of Human Versatility

by Waqas Ahmed

  Chapter 4

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  The Cult of Specialisation

  Fast-forward to the twenty-first century. In the stylish yet frantic environs of the Canary Wharf building in London, I bumped into Zack, a contemporary from my high school over a decade earlier. He was on the descending escalator, impeccably dressed, his shoulders slumped, eyes drooping with exhaustion, one hand held by his trouser pocket and the other half-clenching his backpack. As soon as I recognised him from the floor below, I decided to remain at the foot of his escalator intending to surprise him. I had time for a flashback.

  Every school has a Zack or two. The type that shines in every subject of the curriculum, produces mind-blowing artwork, plays various musical instruments with ease, takes the lead roles in the school plays and captains more than one of the sports teams. Zack was the archetypical schoolboy all-rounder everyone had high hopes for. Less than a decade on, back at the bottom of the escalator in the City, Zack tells me of his life since schoolboy stardom.

  He had read economics at a good university, followed by a master’s degree in accounting and finance, after which he completed a professional financial qualification and joined an investment bank in the City to become a derivatives researcher focusing on the luxury goods market. It wasn’t quite clear whether he was embarrassed or proud of working sixteen hour days. It all seemed rather impressive; but one thing struck me from our conversation. Zack had compromised all of his numerous other talents and interests — sport, art, music, science, drama, literature, languages, academia and current affairs — to micro-focus on something that was clearly far from his lifelong passion or dream. This compromise was inadvertent. Indeed, derivative researching was in all probability a bigger earner than your average job; but somehow I doubted that to be the sole reason. After congratulating him on his apparent success, I wandered home thinking about why things had turned out the way they had for Zack.

  It soon became crystal clear. Zack’s story was not uncommon; it was in fact the norm. Our Western system — together with the majority of the world that seems bent on imitating it — imperceptibly forces us to ‘specialise’ as we get older. For example Britain: 10 GCSEs, four A Levels, one bachelor’s degree, a more specialised masters degree, an even more specialised job, within which everyone is further encouraged to find and nurture their own speciality — so much so that any additional pursuits enhance the risk of compromising this speciality. That is one route; the other is more merciless. Leave school with limited or no qualifications, find a ‘trade,’ find a job related to it, achieve a competence at it and thereafter rely on it for survival and stability throughout life. However steep, it seems our lives assume the shape of pyramids. Sitting atop this pyramid, we are often secure but rarely fulfilled.

  Sadly, we are living under a perilous illusion. We have been programmed to assume that lifelong, exclusive dedication to one fragmented aspect of life is the only way to pursue truth, identity or even a livelihood. This is a myth, if there ever was one. We fail to understand that this one aspect of the world has been broken, or torn, from its family and packaged up as a world of its own, with clear and stringent boundaries. If this ‘field’ is not forced upon us (as it is for most people around the world) then the necessity to choose one, inhabit it and close ourselves within its confines as soon as possible certainly is. Who forces us? Parents, educational institutions, employers, governments or even society itself, which has evolved to perpetuate fragmentation and hyperspecialisation in all areas of life.

  Like the ‘invisible hand,’ it has become a force of its own, promoted and sustained by those whom it serves most. In this sense, hyper-specialisation has become an ideology, and likewise propagated to the masses as the ‘obvious way things are done.’ To emancipate ourselves from this outdated mode of being and thinking, it is important to first be conscious of how and why we ever became such a hyper-specialised society in the first place.

  The Evolution of Specialisation

  Are we wired to be ‘specialists’? Many scientists maintain that the human brain has evolved in a way that focuses on surviving rather than thriving. In doing so, it has developed a mechanism through which all things in the world that are not directly related to immediate survival are automatically elbowed out of the thinking process. ‘The brain is a machine assembled not to understand itself, but to survive,’ biologist and ‘Darwin’s successor’ E.O. Wilson insists. ‘Because these two ends are basically different, the mind unaided by factual knowledge from science sees the world only in little pieces. It throws a spotlight on those portions of the world it must know in order to live to the next day, and surrenders the rest to darkness.’ This indicates that to specialise is indeed an innate cognitive tendency. But that’s only half the story — literally.

  Such microfocus is the work of mainly the left hemisphere of the brain, responsible for linear, reductive thinking (vis-à-vis the right, which is responsible for intuitive, creative and holistic thinking). Social systems that encourage left-brain thinking therefore develop a culture of reductive, narrow-focused specialisation. According to psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist, ‘habits of left hemisphere thinking will perpetuate themselves in the culture that they help to create, causing a positive feedback loop. I think that is where we now are.’ He says that the relation between the left hemisphere of the brain and specialisation as a phenomenon is ‘complex and mutually reinforcing, circular in nature.’ The extent to which left-brain thinking has been adopted and allowed to affect people’s approach to education, work and life in general is determined by a multiplicity of social, educational and ideological factors.

  Specialisation does, of course, have its place in society. Ibn Khaldun stressed the need for some form of orderly social organisation and observed that one individual, who needs to be fed and protected, cannot do all that is necessary to acquire, process and defend that food alone. Various tasks — manufacturing tools, processing food and so on — which become mutually beneficial are therefore split between a population in a way that segments society according to function. This causes interdependence and therefore social cohesion. It is this necessary segmentation of society — a kind of functionalism — that created a tendency to specialise in early humans.

  Since then, however, certain social systems and ideologies have generated circumstances and a culture which reinforce specialisation to secure the interests of those whom it serves. These include European feudalism (for both the peasant and landlord), African and Pacific tribalism (specialist tribal clans meant that your trade was predetermined according to your clan and ancestry), the Indian caste system (individuals inherited their ‘purpose of life,’ which in turn determined their profession) and most recently Western industrialisation, bureaucracy and corporate and academic specialisation (the ‘division of labour,’ which subsequently spread throughout the world which the West colonised).

  The philosophical origins of modern specialisation can be found in the post-Enlightenment Western intellectual paradigm which perceived the vastness of knowledge to be unmanageable as a whole. So a highly critical, reductionist approach to learning, pioneered by French philosopher René Descartes, steered the trend towards intellectual specialisation, which changed the nature of the polymath from earlier periods. This was acknowledged in the ‘gens de lettres’ article in Diderot’s Encyclopédie, which declared, ‘la science universelle n’est plus à la portée de l’homme’ (Universal knowledge is no longer within the reach of man). It marked what historian Peter Burke refers to as ‘an intellectual retreat [of the polymath] from knowledge in every field to knowledge in several fields.’ Charles van Doren in his History of Knowledge suggests another explanation for the rise of specialisation during the Enlightenment, which he said was linked with a disillusionment with polymathy following the Renaissance.

  The failure of the Renaissance to produce successful ‘Renaissance Men’ did not go unnoticed. If such men as Leonardo, Pico, Bacon and many others alm
ost as famous could not succeed in their presumed dream of knowing all there was to know about everything, then lesser men should not presume to try. The alternative became self-evident: achieve expertise in one field while others attained expertise in theirs. Much easier to accomplish, this course led to a more comfortable academic community. Now an authority in one field need compete only with experts in his field.

  The apparent futility of the situation led many intellectuals to claim a niche area which they felt was the only way in which they could develop a sense of identity, purpose — and in many cases a vocation. This reality, together with the exponential rise in the number of disciplines and sub-disciplines emerging as a result, caused what is now referred to as the ‘crisis of knowledge’ or ‘the information anxiety.’ Indeed one of the main intellectual projects of the Enlightenment was to ‘order, codify and classify information,’ which led to the rise of encyclopaedias.

  Intellectual specialisation by the 1800s thus became a reality and different disciplines of knowledge were being institutionalised in the form of academic departments at universities. The word ‘discipline’ — imported from the military notion of control or restraint — began to be used in the academic context to refer to the now tightly restrained intellectual domains. This model of knowledge management was being exported (much like the culture, education system, governance mechanisms and capitalist economy) to colonised lands, where it was fast becoming the norm. In Europe, the rise of amateur societies and specialised journals, together with the transformation of universities into research centres as well as teaching institutions in the nineteenth century further reinforced this movement. The compartmentalisation of knowledge was in full swing; with each compartment being monopolised by an ivory tower priest.

  Just as the end of the eighteenth century marked the beginning of intellectual specialisation in Europe and North America, the end of nineteenth century marked the beginning of professional or occupational specialisation worldwide. The growth of this phenomenon was catalysed by the establishment of two powerful institutions: the government bureaucracy and the corporation. These were brought about by imperialism and industrialisation respectively; both implemented a structure relying on the division of labour; and both were spread globally by a system of Western (European and then American) hegemony which sought to, in the words of Marx, create ‘a world after its own image.’

  Prominent thinkers, particularly the likes of Franz Kafka, Karl Marx and Max Weber famously commented on the specialisation (and therefore ‘dehumanisation’) of state bureaucrats and industrial workers. Marx saw the bureaucracy and the corporation as comparable counterparts — state and private versions of the same institutional concept — and remarked regretfully that they ‘converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage-labourers.’ His Alienation Theory explained how the specialised and repetitive nature of the production process causes workers to ‘become depressed spiritually and physically to the condition of a machine.’ The cause of specialisation, he contended, was a policy of the division of labour, which extended beyond the factory and became a social norm

  The division of labour serves upon, not only the economic, but every other sphere of society, and everywhere lays the foundation of that all engrossing system of specialising and sorting men, that development in a man of one single faculty at the expense of all other faculties.

  Weber, who theoretically favoured the bureaucracy as the most efficient form of organisation, nonetheless recognised its restricting impact on the individual. ‘Limitation to specialised work, with a renunciation of the Faustian universality of man which it invokes,’ he said ‘is a condition of any valuable work in the modern world.’ With the spread of European (particularly British) colonialism worldwide, this system of bureaucracy (and thus its division of labour) was exported to most of the colonies, most notably to India, Kenya, Malaysia, South Africa, Australia and of course, the Americas. While this form of specialised bureaucracy was specifically a European (and therefore a wider colonial) phenomenon in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we know that this was not always the case with state bureaucracies elsewhere and at different points in history. The bureaucrats of ancient tribal chiefdoms and Chinese imperial dynasties, for example, were renowned as generalists and many of them, such as Zhang Heng, Shen Kuo and Su Song, were indeed notable polymaths.

  The rise of the modern corporation in the late nineteenth century had profound effects on the nature of work and human lifestyle and therefore on the fate of the polymath. Initially established as private entities with Royal charters, they fast became trading and investing organisations that, after the 14th Amendment (designed originally to protect the rights of African American freed slaves), assumed the rights of the individual and became legally bound to put shareholder returns above anything else. They commercialised groundbreaking new technologies developed at the beginning of the twentieth century, such as the telephone, phonograph, electricity and aviation, and created a system of mass production — epitomised by the establishment of the Ford mass production car plant in 1913 and facilitated by the ‘Efficiency School’ of labour management pioneered by Frederick Taylor — ushering a new era in the mechanisation of labour and the rise of specialisation en masse.

  This was supported by the educational system, which catered for the resources needed by these economic forces and thus became key to facilitating and sustaining a specialised society. There is no better demonstration of this than Europe’s post-industrialisation education model. Before the twentieth century, particularly in Europe and the United States but also elsewhere, formal education was the privilege of a select few. Following the Industrial Revolution, a mass education system was introduced to meet the needs of industrial production. Unfortunately, though, the alienating nature of this widespread education came at the expense of intellectual unity, synthesis and, therefore, understanding.

  The curriculum was designed to produce factory labourers who could read instruction manuals at most, and specialise on one particular area of the production line. Subjects were therefore compartmentalised and taught in isolation from one another, with students themselves treated like products on a factory conveyor belt, receiving incremental input at different points along the process. Children were not encouraged to see the connections between these pockets of knowledge packaged as ‘curriculum subjects.’ British philosopher of education Alfred North Whitehead, who lived during the height of industrialised Britain, recognised that this approach to education was keeping children from understanding the relevance of each topic — both to their own lives, but also to the world at large. His concern was best summarised in the passage below:

  Instead of this single unity, we offer children Algebra, from which nothing follows; Geometry, from which nothing follows; Science, from which nothing follows; History, from which nothing follows; a couple of Languages, never mastered; and lastly, most dreary of all, Literature, represented by the plays of Shakespeare, with philological notes and short analyses of plot or character to be in substance committed to memory. Can such a list be said to represent Life, as it is known in the midst of the living of it? The best that can be said of it is, that it is a rapid table of contents which a deity might run over in his mind while he was thinking of creating a world, and has not yet determined how to put it together.

  By the turn of the twentieth century, then, the world’s three most influential institutions — academia, government and the corporation — had each adopted a stringent division of labour, establishing a new culture of hyper-specialisation in every sphere of life; a trend that would become the norm to the present day.

  Thanks to this laborious process of socio-psychological conditioning over millennia, coupled now with the seemingly exponential multiplication of information and a particular notion of ‘work’ in people’s minds, we have developed an excessively specialised society that seems bent on identifying people almost exclusively by their
‘trade,’ ‘occupation,’ or ‘field.’ At almost any social or professional gathering today, people are itching to form judgments based on this. There is an automatic compulsion to get to that decisive question: ‘So, what do you do?’ And they expect a straightforward answer.

  Psychologically, we find it easier to refer to someone as an ‘electrician’ than as ‘an electrician-musician-mother-of-six who was once a physician-athlete with a love for poetry.’ This is reflected in the way surnames have come to be in different societies. In Britain, for example, many modern surnames (such as Carpenter, Mason, Taylor, Harper, Smith, Piper, and so on) are the legacy of medieval feudalism where people were referred to by their trade or occupation, as was also the case in India (Bandukwala, ‘the weapons guy,’ or Lightwalla, ‘the electricity guy,’ and so on) and elsewhere. Stigmatisation is a cognitive tendency, often institutionalised into a social convention by the prevailing socioeconomic system.

  So once a stigma is attached to a person, it becomes extremely difficult for that person to convince the world that there are other, equally integral, facets to his life. Indeed he often has trouble convincing himself. People today feel compelled to place others in boxes, which they then firmly close and clearly label. For the labelled ones (which we all essentially become) it becomes extremely difficult to break out of the allocated box and attempt to enter another. Even if one is able to, people are very miserly with their labels; they rarely issue more than one. Artistic polymath Billy Childish, an acclaimed poet, novelist, painter and musician, spoke of ongoing attempts by society to try to pigeonhole him: