hn-classics/_stories/2009/7992934.md

---
created_at: '2014-07-05T21:02:24.000Z'
title: The Last Days of the Polymath (2009)
url: http://www.moreintelligentlife.com/content/edward-carr/last-days-polymath
author: _pius
points: 65
story_text: ''
comment_text: 
num_comments: 19
story_id: 
story_title: 
story_url: 
parent_id: 
created_at_i: 1404594144
_tags:
- story
- author__pius
- story_7992934
objectID: '7992934'
year: 2009

---
**Carl Djerassi can** remember the moment when he became a writer. It
was 1993, he was a professor of chemistry at Stanford University in
California and he had already written books about science and about his
life as one of the inventors of the Pill. Now he wanted to write a
literary novel about writers’ insecurities, with a central character
loosely modelled on Norman Mailer, Philip Roth and Gore Vidal.

His wife, Diane Middlebrook, thought it was a ridiculous idea. She was
also a professor—of literature. “She admired the fact that I was a
scientist who also wrote,” Djerassi says. He remembers her telling him,
“‘You’ve been writing about a world that writers know little about.
You’re writing the real truth inside of almost a closed tribe. But there
are tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people who know more
about writing than you do. I advise you not to do this.’”

Even at 85, slight and snowy-haired, Djerassi is a det­ermined man. You
sense his need to prove that he can, he will prevail. Sitting in his
London flat, he leans forward to fix me with his hazel eyes. “I said,
‘ok. I’m not going to show it to you till I finish. And if I find a
publisher then I’ll give it to you.’ ”

Eventually Djerassi got the bound galleys of his book. “We were leaving
San Francisco for London for our usual summer and I said ‘Look, would
you read this now?’ She said, ‘Sure, on the plane.’ So my wife sits next
to me and of course I sit and look over. And I still remember, I had a
Trollope, 700 pages long, and I couldn’t read anything because I wanted
to see her expression.”

Diane Middlebrook died of cancer in 2007 and, as Djerassi speaks, her
presence grows stronger. By the end it is as if there are three of us in
the room. “She was always a fantastic reader,” he says. “She read fast
and continuously. And suddenly you hear the snap of the book closing,
like a thunder clap. And I looked at her, and she then looked at me. 
She always used to call me, not ‘Carl’ or ‘Darling’, she used to call me
‘Chemist’ in a dear, affectionate sort of way. It was always ‘Chemist’.
And she said, ‘Chemist, this is good’.”

Carl Djerassi is a polymath. Strictly speaking that means he is someone
who knows a lot about a lot. But Djerassi also passes a sterner test: he
can do a lot, too. As a chemist (synthesising cortisone and helping
invent the Pill); an art collector (he assembled one of the world’s
largest collections of works by Paul Klee); and an author (19 books and
plays), he has accomplished more than enough for one lifetime.

His latest book, “Four Jews on Parnassus”, is an ima­gined series of
debates between Theodor Adorno, Arnold Schönberg, Walter Benjamin and
Gershom Scholem, which touches on art, music, philosophy and Jewish
identity. In itself, the book is an exercise in polymathy. At a reading
in the Austrian Cultural Forum in London this summer, complete with
Schönberg’s songs and four actors, including Djerassi himself, it drew
a good crowd and bewitched them for an hour and a half. Sitting down
with the book the next day, I found it sharp, funny, mannered and
dazzlingly erudite—sometimes, like a bumptious student, too erudite for
its own good. I enjoy Djerassi’s writing, though not everyone will. But
even his critics would admit that he really is more than “a scientist
who writes”.

The word “polymath” teeters somewhere between Leo­nardo da Vinci and
Stephen Fry. Embracing both one of history’s great intellects and a
brainy actor, writer, director and TV personality, it is at once
presumptuous and banal. Djerassi doesn’t want much to do with it.
“Nowadays people that are called polymaths are dabblers—are dabblers
in many different areas,” he says. “I aspire to be an intellectual
polygamist. And I deliberately use that metaphor to provoke with its
sexual allusion and to point out the real difference to me between
polygamy and promiscuity."

“To me, promiscuity is a way of flitting around. Polygamy, serious
polygamy, is where you have various marriages and each of them is
important. And in the ideal polygamy I suspect there’s no number one
wife and no number six wife. You have a deep connection with each
person.”

Djerassi is right to be suspicious of flitting. We all know a gifted
person who cannot stick at anything. In his book “Casanova: A Study in
Self-Portraiture” Stefan Zweig describes an extreme case:

\[Casanova\] excelled in mathematics no less than in philosophy. He was
a competent theologian, preaching his first sermon in a Venetian church
when he was not yet 16 years old. As a violinist, he earned his daily
bread for a whole year in the San Samuele theatre. When he was 18 he
became doctor of laws at the University of Padua—though down to the
present day the Casanovists are still disputing whether the degree was
genuine or spurious...He was well informed in chemistry, medicine,
history, philosophy, literature, and, above all, in the more lucrative
(because perplexing) sciences of astrology and alchemy...As universal
dilettante, indeed, he was perfect, knowing an incredible amount of all
the arts and all the sciences; but he lacked one thing, and this lack
made it impossible for him to become truly productive. He lacked will,
resolution, patience.

Mindful of that sort of promiscuity, I asked my colleagues to suggest
living polymaths of the polygamous sort—doers, not dabblers. One test I
imposed was breadth. A scientist who composes operas and writes novels
is more of a polymath than a novelist who can turn out a play or a
painter who can sculpt. For Djerassi, influence is essential too. “It
means that your polymath activities have passed a certain quality
control that is exerted within each field by the competition. If they
accept you at their level, then I think you have reached that state
rather than just dabbling.” They mentioned a score of names—Djerassi was
prominent among them. Others included Jared Diamond, Noam Chomsky,
Umberto Eco, Brian Eno, Michael Frayn and Oliver Sacks.

It is an impressive list, by anyone’s standards. You can find
scientists, writers, actors, artists—the whole range of human
creativity. Even so, what struck me most strongly was how poorly today’s
polymaths compare with the polymaths of the past.

In the first half of 1802 a physician and scientist called Thomas Young
gave a series of 50 lectures at London’s new Royal Institution, arranged
into subjects like “Mechanics” and “Hydro­dynamics”. By the end, says
Young’s biographer Andrew Robinson, he had pretty much laid out the sum
of scientific knowledge. Robinson called his book “The Last Man Who Knew
Everything".

Young’s achievements are staggering. He smashed Newtonian orthodoxy by
showing that light is a wave, not just a particle; he described how the
eye can vary its focus; and he proposed the three-colour theory of
vision. In materials science, engineers dealing with elasticity still
talk about Young’s modulus; in linguistics, Young studied the grammar
and voc­abulary of 400 or so languages and coined the term
“Indo-European”; in Egyptology, Jean-François Champollion drew on his
work to decode the Rosetta stone. Young even tinkered around with life
insurance.

When Young was alive the world contained about a billion people. Few of
them were literate and fewer still had the chance to experiment on the
nature of light or to examine the Rosetta stone. Today the planet teems
with 6.7 billion minds. Never have so many been taught to read and write
and think, and then been free to choose what they would do with their
lives. The electronic age has broken the shackles of knowledge. Never
has it been easier to find something out, or to get someone to explain
it to you.

Yet as human learning has flowered, the man or woman who does great
things in many fields has become a rare species. Young was hardly
Aristotle, but his capacity to do important work in such a range of
fields startled his contemporaries and today seems quite bewildering.
The dead cast a large shadow but, even allowing for that, the 21st
century has no one to match Michelangelo, who was a poet as well as a
sculptor, an architect and a painter. It has no Alexander von Humboldt,
who towered over early-19th-century geography and science. And no
Leibniz, who invented calculus at the same time as Newton and also wrote
on technology, philosophy, biology, politics and just about everything
else.

Although you may be able to think of a few living polymaths who rival
the breadth of Young’s knowledge, not one of them beg­ins to rival the
breadth of his achievements. Over the past 200 years the nature of
intellectual endeavour has changed profoundly. The polymaths of old were
one-brain universities. These days you count as a polymath if you excel
at one thing and go on to write a decent book about another.

Young was just 29 when he gave his lectures at the Royal Institution.
Back in the early 19th century you could grasp a field with a little
reading and a ready wit. But the distinction between the dabbling and
doing is more demanding these days, because breaking new ground is so
much harder. There is so much further to trek through other researchers’
territory before you can find a patch of unploughed earth of your own.

Even the best scientists have to make that journey. Benjamin Jones, of
the Kellogg School of Management near Chicago, looked at the careers of
Nobel laureates. Slightly under half of them did their path-breaking
work in their 30s, a smattering in their 20s—Einstein, at 26, was
unusually precocious. Yet when the laureates of 1998 did their seminal
research, they were typically six years older than the laureates of 1873
had been. It was the same with great inventors.

Once you have reached the vanguard, you have to work harder to stay
there, especially in the sciences. So many scientists are publishing
research in each specialism that merely to keep up with the reading is a
full-time job. “The frontier of knowledge is getting longer,” says
Professor Martin Rees, the president of the Royal Society, where Young
was a leading light for over three decades. “It is impossible now for
anyone to focus on more than one part at a time.”

Specialisation is hard on polymaths. Every moment devoted to one area is
a moment less to give over to something else. Researchers are focused on
narrower areas of work. In the sciences this means that you often need
to put together a team to do anything useful. Most scientific papers
have more than one author; papers in some disciplines have 20 or 30.
Only a fool sets out to cure cancer, Rees says. You need to concentrate
on some detail—while remembering the big question you are ultimately
trying to answer. “These days”, he says, “no scientist makes a unique
contribution.”

It is not only the explosion of knowledge that puts polymaths at a
disadvantage, but also the vast increase in the number of specialists
and experts in every field. This is because the learning that creates
would-be polymaths creates monomaths too and in overwhelming numbers. If
you have a multitude who give their lives to a specialism, their
combined knowledge will drown out even a gifted generalist. And while
the polymath tries to take possession of a second expertise in some
distant discipline, his or her first expertise is being colonised by
someone else.

The arts are more forgiving than the sciences. Rees is reminded of a
remark by Peter Medawar, the zoologist, who pointed out that, after
finishing a draft of “Siegfried” in 1857, Wagner was able to put the
opera aside for 12 years before setting out to complete his Ring Cycle
with “Götterdämmerung”. A scientist would have had to worry about a
rival stealing his thunder. But nobody else was about to compose the
destruction of Valhalla.

Perhaps that explains why would-be polymaths these days so often turn to
writing books. Yet, as Richard Posner has discovered, even that is often
enemy territory.

Unlike France, America and Britain don’t tend to encourage public
intellectuals. But if they did, Richard Posner would be their
standard-bearer. Posner’s day job is as an appeals-court judge in
Chicago—a career founded upon his reputation as America’s pre-eminent
thinker on anti-trust law. But Posner is not just a lawyer. In his spare
time he has written on sex, security, politics, Hegel, Homeric society,
medieval Iceland and a whole lot more. The Wall Street Journal once
called him a “one-man think-tank”.

Posner thinks like a polymath. “I’m impatient and I’m restless,” he
says, in a matter-of-fact way. “After I graduated from law school, I
worked first in government for six years. I enjoyed it but I didn’t
really want to make a career of that. I went into teaching without any
great sense of commitment, but I couldn’t think of anything else. But
gradually I lost int­erest, as the 1970s wore on, I became involved in
consulting. So when the judgeship came along in 1981—quite out of the
blue—I was happy to take that. I just kind of slid into law. It is sort
of the default career choice in the United States.”

Posner first made his name as a monomath. “I had a very big intellectual
commitment for many years to anti-trust law. I wrote a lot about that.”
Eventually, though, the polymath rose to the surface and he put
anti-trust behind him. “I just got bored with it, I think the field
slowed down—it happens with fields,” he says. These days most people
cling to their expertise; Posner talks about it as if he were trading in
an old car.

After he became immersed in the intellectual life of the University of
Chicago, Posner started to apply insights from economics to a broad
range of subjects. In his book “Sex and Reason”, written in 1990, he
used economics to explain a part of life that specialist lawyers and
economists had tended to think was beyond their reach. To take a simple
example, the AIDS epidemic made gay sex unavoidably more costly, either
because of the risk of disease or of switching to safe sex. It therefore
reduced the amount of gay sex—and, by the same mechanism, cut the number
of illegitimate births and inc­reased the number of legitimate ones.

The book was a success because Posner had the field pretty much to
himself. “Sometimes one goes into a new area and there hasn’t been much
done in it and then you are a little ahead of the curve,” he says. Even
then, the monomaths were in hot pursuit. “After a while there is so much
in it that you don’t know what you’re going to do. Since 1990 the field
has become extremely crowded because of specialisation and not very
attractive.” Time to move on.

The monomaths do not only swarm over a specialism, they also play dirty.
In each new area that Posner picks—policy or science—the experts start
to erect barricades. “Even in relatively soft fields, specialists tend
to develop a specialised vocabulary which creates barriers to entry,”
Posner says with his economic hat pulled down over his head.
“Specialists want to fend off the generalists. They may also want to
convince themselves that what they are doing is really very difficult
and challenging. One of the ways they do that is to develop what they
regard a rigorous methodology—often mathematical.

“The specialist will always be able to nail the generalists by pointing
out that they don’t use the vocabulary quite right and they make
mistakes that an insider would never make. It’s a defence mechanism.
They don’t like people invading their turf, especially outsiders
criticising insiders. So if I make mistakes about this economic
situation, it doesn’t really bother me tremendously. It’s not my field.
I can make mistakes. On the other hand for me to be criticising someone
whose whole career is committed to a particular outlook and method and
so on, that is very painful.”

For a polymath, the charge of dabbling never lies far below the surface.
“With the amount of information that’s around, if you really want to
understand your topic thoroughly then, yes, you have to specialise,”
says Chris Leek, the chairman of British Mensa, a club for people who
score well on IQ tests. “And if you want to speak with authority, then
it’s important to be seen to specialise.”

That is why modern institutions tend to exclude polymaths, he says.
“It’s very hard to show yourself as a polymath in the current
academic climate. If you’ve got someone interested in going across
departments, spending part of the time in physics and part of the time
elsewhere, their colleagues are going to kick them out. They’re not
contributing fully to any single department. OK, every so often you’re
going to get a huge benefit, but from day to day, where the universities
are making appointments, they want the focus in one field.”

Britain goes out of its way to create monomaths, by asking students aged
15 to choose just three or four subjects to study at A-level. Djerassi
thinks this is a mistake. “There’ll be students here at age 16 or 17 who
are much better than many Americans at French or maths or something, but
abysmally ignorant in another area,” he says. “We really preach
intellectual monogamy more and more in this day and age. That’s by
necessity, but we’re overdoing it. And what we really ought to do is
start with intellectual polygamy.”

Djerassi has also suffered in his own work because of monomaths’
hostility, especially as a playwright. “They always keep crying out ‘the
co-inventor, father, the mother of the Pill’,” he growls. “Without
having any knowledge about the play, they start with it. As if it’s got
anything to do with it.” Djerassi thinks that this means he has to work
harder to promote his work. “No agent has ever been interested in me.
They want 29-year-old Irish playwrights, not 86-year-old expatriates.” A
trace of bitterness creeps into his voice, but he concedes: “If I were
an agent I’d feel the same way.”

Overwhelmed by specialists and attacked by experts as dilettantes, it is
amazing that there are any polymaths at all. How do they manage?

Alexander McCall Smith is a natural writer. “I just have to do it,” he
says. “I suppose I write four novels a year now, which I don’t have to
do. In one sense, that is breaking all the rules in publishing: you’re
only meant to write one, but I write four, sometimes five. But I just
feel that I have got to do it and I enjoy it greatly. I suppose I am
very fortunate. The way I work is I go into a trance and write. I don’t
have to sit there and think: it happens. It just comes, so I am very,
very lucky.”

These days McCall Smith is best-known as the man behind “The No. 1
Ladies’ Detective Agency”. But his first career, as a university
professor, was eminent in its own right. “My interest was medical law.
That, I suppose, was cross-disciplinary. You had to be able to
understand the scientific issues and the medical issues, but you just
had to have a sound lay understanding of them. So, for example, I worked
as a member of the Human Genetics Commission for a while. And that meant
I had to go off and make sure that I understood what the issues in
genetics were.”

He is also musical—though in a dabbling way. “I play wind instruments,
but I don’t play them very well,” he says. “My wife and I set up an
orchestra, which is called the Really Terrible Orchestra, and indeed
that is absolutely accurate. Virtually everybody I know is better at
music than I am.”

McCall Smith is a polymath by necessity. He wrote while he was an
academic, producing fiction, about 30 children’s books, short stories
and plays for radio. He paid a price. “I probably would have made more
of my academic career had I not had another interest, I think, yes.
Academia requires a lot of commitment, so I suppose I could have done
more.” But, speaking to him, I don’t think he had a choice.

Circumstance also played its part. McCall Smith was able to write
because university life allowed it. “It would have been different had I
been somebody who practised commercial law in a law firm, for instance.
That wouldn’t be compatible with doing anything else. If you were a
futures trader or something like that—there are some jobs where the
pressure is so intense that it must be very difficult to have any energy
by the time you come home at night.”

Posner could become a polymath because he has a unifying set of ideas.
“A lot of this work is economic theory in new areas. So applying a
method to a new field is not the same thing as mastering multiple
fields. To achieve mastery in unrelated areas in an age of
specialisation is exceedingly difficult. On the other hand, to take a
technique that can be applied to a variety of substantive fields is not
as difficult. So if I write about the economics of old age and the
economics of sex and the economics of the national security and
intelligence services, I am not mastering the field. I am not becoming a
sociologist, or a psychiatrist or what have you.”

Djerassi could become a polymath because he has had two careers, one
after the other—he did his science and, having made a fortune, he
concentrated on his writing. He was helped by his wife. “She was a very
sophisticated writer and an extremely tough critic and she managed to
divorce affection from criticism. She thought ‘this is terrible’ or
‘this is clichéd’.” He also has ambition and the willpower of someone
on borrowed time. At 62 he was diagnosed with cancer. “Suddenly, from
one day to another, I didn’t even know what my life expectancy would be
before I got the pathology back after the operation. And I remember
being very depressed and afterwards I didn’t want to talk to anyone.” He
said to himself, “‘Gee, now if I’d known five years earlier it would
come out that I’d have cancer and be told I’d live for another few
years, would I live a different life?’ And I said, ‘Absolutely’.”

Not all polymaths find their way. Andrew Robinson, Young’s biographer,
gives the example of Michael Ventris, who died aged 34, having tried to
satisfy both his urge to be an architect and also his fascination with
codes. Ventris was the first to make sense of Linear B, an early Greek
script, but he could not apply himself as successfully to architecture.

“With Michael Ventris, the polymathy gradually des­troyed him,” Robinson
says. “He was famous for cracking Linear B, but I believe he was
depressed. Architecture was not enough. He was a logician. Linear B took
him over. He couldn’t reach the standard he had set in another field, he
couldn’t do justice to his own gifts, he couldn’t let it all go and give
it up.”

Robinson thinks that Young also ran up against his limits. “Young
understood after 1814 that he couldn’t carry on with serious medicine.
He could have pursued it but even then it was clear that he wouldn’t be
taken seriously. People love a sole genius with tunnel vision—a focus,”
Robinson says. Darwin spent several years thinking about barnacles. But
because Young’s work was in so many different fields, he was accused of
being a dilettante. “Polymaths are disconcerting,” Robinson says.
“People feel they are trespassing.”

Even Leonardo warned against being spread thin. The other day Robinson
came across one of his late notebooks, in which he had written, “Like a
kingdom divided, which rushes to its doom, the mind that engages in
subjects of too great variety becomes confused and weakened.”

In an age of specialists, does it matter that generalists no longer
thrive? The world is hardly short of knowledge. Countless books are
written, canvases painted and songs recorded. A torrent of research is
pouring out. A new orthodoxy, popularised by Malcolm Gladwell, sees
obsessive focus as the key that unlocks genius.

Just knowing about a lot of things has never been easier. Never before
have dabblers been so free to paddle along the shore and dip into the
first rock pool that catches the eye. If you have an urge to take off
your shoes and test the water, countless specialists are ready to hold
your hand.

And yet you will never get very deep. Depth is for monomaths—which is
why experts so often seem to miss what really matters. Specialisation
has made the study of English so sterile that students lose much of the
joy in reading great literature for its own sake. A generation of
mathematically inclined economists neglected many of  Keynes’s insights
about the Depression because he put them into words. For decades
economists sweated over fiendish mathematical equations, only to be
brought down to earth by the credit crunch: Keynes’s well-turned phrases
had come back to life.

Part of my regret at the scarcity of polymaths is sentimental. Polymaths
were the product of a particular time, when great learning was a mark of
distinction and few people had money and leisure. Their moment has
passed, like great houses or the horse-drawn carriage. The world may
well be a better place for the specialisation that has come along
instead. The pity is that progress has to come at a price. Civilisation
has put up fences that people can no longer leap across; a certain type
of mind is worth less. The choices modern life imposes are duller, more
cramped.

The question is whether their loss has affected the course of human
thought. Polymaths possess something that monomaths do not. Time and
again, innovations come from a fresh eye or from another discipline.
Most scientists devote their careers to solving the everyday problems in
their specialism. Everyone knows what they are and it takes ingenuity
and perseverance to crack them. But breakthroughs—the sort of idea that
opens up whole sets of new problems—often come from other fields. The
work in the early 20th century that showed how nerves work and, later,
how DNA is structured originally came from a marriage of physics and
biology. Today, Einstein’s old employer, the Institute for Advanced
Study at Princeton, is laid out especially so that different disciplines
rub shoulders. I suspect that it is a poor substitute.

Isaiah Berlin once divided thinkers into two types. Foxes, he wrote,
know many things; whereas hedgehogs know one big thing. The foxes used
to roam free across the hills. Today the hedgehogs rule.