Polymath postscript

On Tuesday I wrote about broadening my aspirations to possibly include more than just writing and art. Yesterday morning I started Googling “polymath” and what I found made me think I should add a postscript to Tuesday’s entry.

After reading a few articles and sifting through a number of book recommendations, I got a vague feeling of shame, as if I’d publicly confessed to wanting to be a plantation owner or a courtesan or some other futile, fantastical, long-obsolete career path. A 2009 article, “The Last Days of the Polymath,” made some very intelligent arguments about polymathy not being attainable anymore. Certainly, the article’s accompanying list of living polymaths wasn’t too stunning; not to belittle the achievements of those individuals, but they don’t seem to be in the same league as a Franklin or a Da Vinci. But then, that’s just what the article says: it’s not possible anymore. Learning is more specialized than ever, and it’s no longer possible (in many fields) for a layperson — even a brilliant and knowledgeable layperson — to come up with the kinds of discoveries that are now made by teams in labs. On the other hand, learning is also more accessible than ever before, so that there are more labs and more MFA programs and more everything than there used to be; it often feels like the individual without an institution doesn’t stand a chance.

There does seem to be a new cult of polymathy: there’s a book titled The New Polymath and USC actually has an Academy for Polymathic Study. I can’t figure out what the academy does, though, and the book is about IT. I wonder if this new polymathy is what I think of as applied — trying to cultivate cross-disciplinary thinking for the benefits it can offer — as opposed to a more organic polymathy that arises out of random inquiry (which is what I want to do).

I can’t help but think that while it may be true the old polymathy is dead (and has been so for decades if not centuries), the time is ripe for a new kind of polymath, and I don’t mean the stuff I wrote about in the previous paragraph. It’s all very well to write books and set up institutes, but this kind of genius can’t be taught, it has to be cultivated… because how can anyone else possibly know what will spark the individual’s insight? The thing about the old polymaths that fascinates me so much is that they were truly innovative thinkers; they had the kind of genius perspective with the power to change the world. I keep thinking of Steve Jobs, and how (so they say) he brought his own set of aesthetics and preferences to shift the direction of personal computing — and in so doing, actually changed the way we use devices and how they integrate into our lives. It seems very likely that the new generation of visionaries will be as intimately tied to technology as the old ones were to science: that way lie the new frontiers. And since there’s more capacity now for connectivity than ever before — both logistically (the internet makes everything instant and far-reaching) and thematically (we have all subjects at our disposal) — it stands to reason that the cross-disciplinary achievements of my generation will be of a completely different nature than the ones of the old polymaths.

So that’s my goal, then; not to become a polymath in the old sense but to figure out how to be a new polymath — and to figure out what that even is.