2018-02-23 18:58:03 +00:00
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---
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created_at: '2014-07-05T21:02:24.000Z'
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title: The Last Days of the Polymath (2009)
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url: http://www.moreintelligentlife.com/content/edward-carr/last-days-polymath
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author: _pius
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points: 65
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story_text: ''
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comment_text:
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num_comments: 19
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story_id:
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story_title:
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story_url:
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parent_id:
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created_at_i: 1404594144
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_tags:
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- story
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- author__pius
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- story_7992934
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objectID: '7992934'
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---
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2018-03-03 09:35:28 +00:00
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**Carl Djerassi can** remember the moment when he became a writer. It
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was 1993, he was a professor of chemistry at Stanford University in
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California and he had already written books about science and about his
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life as one of the inventors of the Pill. Now he wanted to write a
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literary novel about writers’ insecurities, with a central character
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loosely modelled on Norman Mailer, Philip Roth and Gore Vidal.
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2018-02-23 18:19:40 +00:00
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2018-03-03 09:35:28 +00:00
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His wife, Diane Middlebrook, thought it was a ridiculous idea. She was
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also a professor—of literature. “She admired the fact that I was a
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scientist who also wrote,” Djerassi says. He remembers her telling him,
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“‘You’ve been writing about a world that writers know little about.
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You’re writing the real truth inside of almost a closed tribe. But there
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are tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people who know more
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about writing than you do. I advise you not to do this.’”
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2018-02-23 18:19:40 +00:00
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2018-03-03 09:35:28 +00:00
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Even at 85, slight and snowy-haired, Djerassi is a determined man. You
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sense his need to prove that he can, he will prevail. Sitting in his
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London flat, he leans forward to fix me with his hazel eyes. “I said,
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‘ok. I’m not going to show it to you till I finish. And if I find a
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publisher then I’ll give it to you.’ ”
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2018-02-23 18:19:40 +00:00
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2018-03-03 09:35:28 +00:00
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Eventually Djerassi got the bound galleys of his book. “We were leaving
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San Francisco for London for our usual summer and I said ‘Look, would
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you read this now?’ She said, ‘Sure, on the plane.’ So my wife sits next
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to me and of course I sit and look over. And I still remember, I had a
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Trollope, 700 pages long, and I couldn’t read anything because I wanted
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to see her expression.”
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Diane Middlebrook died of cancer in 2007 and, as Djerassi speaks, her
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presence grows stronger. By the end it is as if there are three of us in
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the room. “She was always a fantastic reader,” he says. “She read fast
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and continuously. And suddenly you hear the snap of the book closing,
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like a thunder clap. And I looked at her, and she then looked at me.
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She always used to call me, not ‘Carl’ or ‘Darling’, she used to call me
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‘Chemist’ in a dear, affectionate sort of way. It was always ‘Chemist’.
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And she said, ‘Chemist, this is good’.”
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Carl Djerassi is a polymath. Strictly speaking that means he is someone
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who knows a lot about a lot. But Djerassi also passes a sterner test: he
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can do a lot, too. As a chemist (synthesising cortisone and helping
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invent the Pill); an art collector (he assembled one of the world’s
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largest collections of works by Paul Klee); and an author (19 books and
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plays), he has accomplished more than enough for one lifetime.
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His latest book, “Four Jews on Parnassus”, is an imagined series of
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debates between Theodor Adorno, Arnold Schönberg, Walter Benjamin and
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Gershom Scholem, which touches on art, music, philosophy and Jewish
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identity. In itself, the book is an exercise in polymathy. At a reading
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in the Austrian Cultural Forum in London this summer, complete with
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Schönberg’s songs and four actors, including Djerassi himself, it drew
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a good crowd and bewitched them for an hour and a half. Sitting down
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with the book the next day, I found it sharp, funny, mannered and
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dazzlingly erudite—sometimes, like a bumptious student, too erudite for
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its own good. I enjoy Djerassi’s writing, though not everyone will. But
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even his critics would admit that he really is more than “a scientist
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who writes”.
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The word “polymath” teeters somewhere between Leonardo da Vinci and
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Stephen Fry. Embracing both one of history’s great intellects and a
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brainy actor, writer, director and TV personality, it is at once
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presumptuous and banal. Djerassi doesn’t want much to do with it.
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“Nowadays people that are called polymaths are dabblers—are dabblers
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in many different areas,” he says. “I aspire to be an intellectual
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polygamist. And I deliberately use that metaphor to provoke with its
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sexual allusion and to point out the real difference to me between
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polygamy and promiscuity."
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“To me, promiscuity is a way of flitting around. Polygamy, serious
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polygamy, is where you have various marriages and each of them is
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important. And in the ideal polygamy I suspect there’s no number one
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wife and no number six wife. You have a deep connection with each
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person.”
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Djerassi is right to be suspicious of flitting. We all know a gifted
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person who cannot stick at anything. In his book “Casanova: A Study in
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Self-Portraiture” Stefan Zweig describes an extreme case:
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\[Casanova\] excelled in mathematics no less than in philosophy. He was
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a competent theologian, preaching his first sermon in a Venetian church
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when he was not yet 16 years old. As a violinist, he earned his daily
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bread for a whole year in the San Samuele theatre. When he was 18 he
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became doctor of laws at the University of Padua—though down to the
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present day the Casanovists are still disputing whether the degree was
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genuine or spurious...He was well informed in chemistry, medicine,
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history, philosophy, literature, and, above all, in the more lucrative
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(because perplexing) sciences of astrology and alchemy...As universal
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dilettante, indeed, he was perfect, knowing an incredible amount of all
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the arts and all the sciences; but he lacked one thing, and this lack
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made it impossible for him to become truly productive. He lacked will,
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resolution, patience.
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Mindful of that sort of promiscuity, I asked my colleagues to suggest
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living polymaths of the polygamous sort—doers, not dabblers. One test I
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imposed was breadth. A scientist who composes operas and writes novels
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is more of a polymath than a novelist who can turn out a play or a
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painter who can sculpt. For Djerassi, influence is essential too. “It
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means that your polymath activities have passed a certain quality
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control that is exerted within each field by the competition. If they
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accept you at their level, then I think you have reached that state
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rather than just dabbling.” They mentioned a score of names—Djerassi was
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prominent among them. Others included Jared Diamond, Noam Chomsky,
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Umberto Eco, Brian Eno, Michael Frayn and Oliver Sacks.
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It is an impressive list, by anyone’s standards. You can find
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scientists, writers, actors, artists—the whole range of human
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creativity. Even so, what struck me most strongly was how poorly today’s
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polymaths compare with the polymaths of the past.
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In the first half of 1802 a physician and scientist called Thomas Young
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gave a series of 50 lectures at London’s new Royal Institution, arranged
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into subjects like “Mechanics” and “Hydrodynamics”. By the end, says
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Young’s biographer Andrew Robinson, he had pretty much laid out the sum
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of scientific knowledge. Robinson called his book “The Last Man Who Knew
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Everything".
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Young’s achievements are staggering. He smashed Newtonian orthodoxy by
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showing that light is a wave, not just a particle; he described how the
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eye can vary its focus; and he proposed the three-colour theory of
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vision. In materials science, engineers dealing with elasticity still
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talk about Young’s modulus; in linguistics, Young studied the grammar
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and vocabulary of 400 or so languages and coined the term
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“Indo-European”; in Egyptology, Jean-François Champollion drew on his
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work to decode the Rosetta stone. Young even tinkered around with life
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insurance.
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When Young was alive the world contained about a billion people. Few of
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them were literate and fewer still had the chance to experiment on the
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nature of light or to examine the Rosetta stone. Today the planet teems
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with 6.7 billion minds. Never have so many been taught to read and write
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and think, and then been free to choose what they would do with their
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lives. The electronic age has broken the shackles of knowledge. Never
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has it been easier to find something out, or to get someone to explain
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it to you.
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Yet as human learning has flowered, the man or woman who does great
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things in many fields has become a rare species. Young was hardly
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Aristotle, but his capacity to do important work in such a range of
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fields startled his contemporaries and today seems quite bewildering.
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The dead cast a large shadow but, even allowing for that, the 21st
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century has no one to match Michelangelo, who was a poet as well as a
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sculptor, an architect and a painter. It has no Alexander von Humboldt,
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who towered over early-19th-century geography and science. And no
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Leibniz, who invented calculus at the same time as Newton and also wrote
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on technology, philosophy, biology, politics and just about everything
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else.
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Although you may be able to think of a few living polymaths who rival
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the breadth of Young’s knowledge, not one of them begins to rival the
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breadth of his achievements. Over the past 200 years the nature of
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intellectual endeavour has changed profoundly. The polymaths of old were
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one-brain universities. These days you count as a polymath if you excel
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at one thing and go on to write a decent book about another.
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Young was just 29 when he gave his lectures at the Royal Institution.
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Back in the early 19th century you could grasp a field with a little
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reading and a ready wit. But the distinction between the dabbling and
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doing is more demanding these days, because breaking new ground is so
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much harder. There is so much further to trek through other researchers’
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territory before you can find a patch of unploughed earth of your own.
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Even the best scientists have to make that journey. Benjamin Jones, of
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the Kellogg School of Management near Chicago, looked at the careers of
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Nobel laureates. Slightly under half of them did their path-breaking
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work in their 30s, a smattering in their 20s—Einstein, at 26, was
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unusually precocious. Yet when the laureates of 1998 did their seminal
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research, they were typically six years older than the laureates of 1873
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had been. It was the same with great inventors.
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Once you have reached the vanguard, you have to work harder to stay
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there, especially in the sciences. So many scientists are publishing
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research in each specialism that merely to keep up with the reading is a
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full-time job. “The frontier of knowledge is getting longer,” says
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Professor Martin Rees, the president of the Royal Society, where Young
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was a leading light for over three decades. “It is impossible now for
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anyone to focus on more than one part at a time.”
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Specialisation is hard on polymaths. Every moment devoted to one area is
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a moment less to give over to something else. Researchers are focused on
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narrower areas of work. In the sciences this means that you often need
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to put together a team to do anything useful. Most scientific papers
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have more than one author; papers in some disciplines have 20 or 30.
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Only a fool sets out to cure cancer, Rees says. You need to concentrate
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on some detail—while remembering the big question you are ultimately
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trying to answer. “These days”, he says, “no scientist makes a unique
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contribution.”
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It is not only the explosion of knowledge that puts polymaths at a
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disadvantage, but also the vast increase in the number of specialists
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and experts in every field. This is because the learning that creates
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would-be polymaths creates monomaths too and in overwhelming numbers. If
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you have a multitude who give their lives to a specialism, their
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combined knowledge will drown out even a gifted generalist. And while
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the polymath tries to take possession of a second expertise in some
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distant discipline, his or her first expertise is being colonised by
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someone else.
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The arts are more forgiving than the sciences. Rees is reminded of a
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remark by Peter Medawar, the zoologist, who pointed out that, after
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finishing a draft of “Siegfried” in 1857, Wagner was able to put the
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opera aside for 12 years before setting out to complete his Ring Cycle
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with “Götterdämmerung”. A scientist would have had to worry about a
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rival stealing his thunder. But nobody else was about to compose the
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destruction of Valhalla.
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Perhaps that explains why would-be polymaths these days so often turn to
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writing books. Yet, as Richard Posner has discovered, even that is often
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enemy territory.
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Unlike France, America and Britain don’t tend to encourage public
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intellectuals. But if they did, Richard Posner would be their
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standard-bearer. Posner’s day job is as an appeals-court judge in
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Chicago—a career founded upon his reputation as America’s pre-eminent
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thinker on anti-trust law. But Posner is not just a lawyer. In his spare
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time he has written on sex, security, politics, Hegel, Homeric society,
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medieval Iceland and a whole lot more. The Wall Street Journal once
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called him a “one-man think-tank”.
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Posner thinks like a polymath. “I’m impatient and I’m restless,” he
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says, in a matter-of-fact way. “After I graduated from law school, I
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worked first in government for six years. I enjoyed it but I didn’t
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really want to make a career of that. I went into teaching without any
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great sense of commitment, but I couldn’t think of anything else. But
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gradually I lost interest, as the 1970s wore on, I became involved in
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consulting. So when the judgeship came along in 1981—quite out of the
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blue—I was happy to take that. I just kind of slid into law. It is sort
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of the default career choice in the United States.”
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Posner first made his name as a monomath. “I had a very big intellectual
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commitment for many years to anti-trust law. I wrote a lot about that.”
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Eventually, though, the polymath rose to the surface and he put
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anti-trust behind him. “I just got bored with it, I think the field
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slowed down—it happens with fields,” he says. These days most people
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cling to their expertise; Posner talks about it as if he were trading in
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an old car.
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After he became immersed in the intellectual life of the University of
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Chicago, Posner started to apply insights from economics to a broad
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range of subjects. In his book “Sex and Reason”, written in 1990, he
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used economics to explain a part of life that specialist lawyers and
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economists had tended to think was beyond their reach. To take a simple
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example, the AIDS epidemic made gay sex unavoidably more costly, either
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because of the risk of disease or of switching to safe sex. It therefore
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reduced the amount of gay sex—and, by the same mechanism, cut the number
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of illegitimate births and increased the number of legitimate ones.
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The book was a success because Posner had the field pretty much to
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himself. “Sometimes one goes into a new area and there hasn’t been much
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done in it and then you are a little ahead of the curve,” he says. Even
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then, the monomaths were in hot pursuit. “After a while there is so much
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in it that you don’t know what you’re going to do. Since 1990 the field
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has become extremely crowded because of specialisation and not very
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attractive.” Time to move on.
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The monomaths do not only swarm over a specialism, they also play dirty.
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In each new area that Posner picks—policy or science—the experts start
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to erect barricades. “Even in relatively soft fields, specialists tend
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to develop a specialised vocabulary which creates barriers to entry,”
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Posner says with his economic hat pulled down over his head.
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“Specialists want to fend off the generalists. They may also want to
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convince themselves that what they are doing is really very difficult
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and challenging. One of the ways they do that is to develop what they
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regard a rigorous methodology—often mathematical.
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“The specialist will always be able to nail the generalists by pointing
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out that they don’t use the vocabulary quite right and they make
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mistakes that an insider would never make. It’s a defence mechanism.
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They don’t like people invading their turf, especially outsiders
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criticising insiders. So if I make mistakes about this economic
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situation, it doesn’t really bother me tremendously. It’s not my field.
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I can make mistakes. On the other hand for me to be criticising someone
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whose whole career is committed to a particular outlook and method and
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so on, that is very painful.”
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For a polymath, the charge of dabbling never lies far below the surface.
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“With the amount of information that’s around, if you really want to
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understand your topic thoroughly then, yes, you have to specialise,”
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says Chris Leek, the chairman of British Mensa, a club for people who
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score well on IQ tests. “And if you want to speak with authority, then
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it’s important to be seen to specialise.”
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That is why modern institutions tend to exclude polymaths, he says.
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“It’s very hard to show yourself as a polymath in the current
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academic climate. If you’ve got someone interested in going across
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departments, spending part of the time in physics and part of the time
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elsewhere, their colleagues are going to kick them out. They’re not
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contributing fully to any single department. OK, every so often you’re
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going to get a huge benefit, but from day to day, where the universities
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are making appointments, they want the focus in one field.”
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Britain goes out of its way to create monomaths, by asking students aged
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15 to choose just three or four subjects to study at A-level. Djerassi
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thinks this is a mistake. “There’ll be students here at age 16 or 17 who
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are much better than many Americans at French or maths or something, but
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abysmally ignorant in another area,” he says. “We really preach
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intellectual monogamy more and more in this day and age. That’s by
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necessity, but we’re overdoing it. And what we really ought to do is
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start with intellectual polygamy.”
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Djerassi has also suffered in his own work because of monomaths’
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hostility, especially as a playwright. “They always keep crying out ‘the
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co-inventor, father, the mother of the Pill’,” he growls. “Without
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having any knowledge about the play, they start with it. As if it’s got
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anything to do with it.” Djerassi thinks that this means he has to work
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harder to promote his work. “No agent has ever been interested in me.
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They want 29-year-old Irish playwrights, not 86-year-old expatriates.” A
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trace of bitterness creeps into his voice, but he concedes: “If I were
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an agent I’d feel the same way.”
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Overwhelmed by specialists and attacked by experts as dilettantes, it is
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amazing that there are any polymaths at all. How do they manage?
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Alexander McCall Smith is a natural writer. “I just have to do it,” he
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says. “I suppose I write four novels a year now, which I don’t have to
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do. In one sense, that is breaking all the rules in publishing: you’re
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only meant to write one, but I write four, sometimes five. But I just
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feel that I have got to do it and I enjoy it greatly. I suppose I am
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very fortunate. The way I work is I go into a trance and write. I don’t
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have to sit there and think: it happens. It just comes, so I am very,
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very lucky.”
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These days McCall Smith is best-known as the man behind “The No. 1
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Ladies’ Detective Agency”. But his first career, as a university
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professor, was eminent in its own right. “My interest was medical law.
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That, I suppose, was cross-disciplinary. You had to be able to
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understand the scientific issues and the medical issues, but you just
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had to have a sound lay understanding of them. So, for example, I worked
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as a member of the Human Genetics Commission for a while. And that meant
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I had to go off and make sure that I understood what the issues in
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genetics were.”
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He is also musical—though in a dabbling way. “I play wind instruments,
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but I don’t play them very well,” he says. “My wife and I set up an
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orchestra, which is called the Really Terrible Orchestra, and indeed
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that is absolutely accurate. Virtually everybody I know is better at
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music than I am.”
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McCall Smith is a polymath by necessity. He wrote while he was an
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academic, producing fiction, about 30 children’s books, short stories
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and plays for radio. He paid a price. “I probably would have made more
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of my academic career had I not had another interest, I think, yes.
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Academia requires a lot of commitment, so I suppose I could have done
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more.” But, speaking to him, I don’t think he had a choice.
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Circumstance also played its part. McCall Smith was able to write
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because university life allowed it. “It would have been different had I
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been somebody who practised commercial law in a law firm, for instance.
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That wouldn’t be compatible with doing anything else. If you were a
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futures trader or something like that—there are some jobs where the
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pressure is so intense that it must be very difficult to have any energy
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by the time you come home at night.”
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Posner could become a polymath because he has a unifying set of ideas.
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“A lot of this work is economic theory in new areas. So applying a
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method to a new field is not the same thing as mastering multiple
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fields. To achieve mastery in unrelated areas in an age of
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specialisation is exceedingly difficult. On the other hand, to take a
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technique that can be applied to a variety of substantive fields is not
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as difficult. So if I write about the economics of old age and the
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economics of sex and the economics of the national security and
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intelligence services, I am not mastering the field. I am not becoming a
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sociologist, or a psychiatrist or what have you.”
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Djerassi could become a polymath because he has had two careers, one
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after the other—he did his science and, having made a fortune, he
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concentrated on his writing. He was helped by his wife. “She was a very
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sophisticated writer and an extremely tough critic and she managed to
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divorce affection from criticism. She thought ‘this is terrible’ or
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‘this is clichéd’.” He also has ambition and the willpower of someone
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on borrowed time. At 62 he was diagnosed with cancer. “Suddenly, from
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one day to another, I didn’t even know what my life expectancy would be
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before I got the pathology back after the operation. And I remember
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being very depressed and afterwards I didn’t want to talk to anyone.” He
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said to himself, “‘Gee, now if I’d known five years earlier it would
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come out that I’d have cancer and be told I’d live for another few
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years, would I live a different life?’ And I said, ‘Absolutely’.”
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Not all polymaths find their way. Andrew Robinson, Young’s biographer,
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gives the example of Michael Ventris, who died aged 34, having tried to
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satisfy both his urge to be an architect and also his fascination with
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codes. Ventris was the first to make sense of Linear B, an early Greek
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script, but he could not apply himself as successfully to architecture.
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“With Michael Ventris, the polymathy gradually destroyed him,” Robinson
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says. “He was famous for cracking Linear B, but I believe he was
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depressed. Architecture was not enough. He was a logician. Linear B took
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him over. He couldn’t reach the standard he had set in another field, he
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couldn’t do justice to his own gifts, he couldn’t let it all go and give
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it up.”
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Robinson thinks that Young also ran up against his limits. “Young
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understood after 1814 that he couldn’t carry on with serious medicine.
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He could have pursued it but even then it was clear that he wouldn’t be
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taken seriously. People love a sole genius with tunnel vision—a focus,”
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Robinson says. Darwin spent several years thinking about barnacles. But
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because Young’s work was in so many different fields, he was accused of
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being a dilettante. “Polymaths are disconcerting,” Robinson says.
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“People feel they are trespassing.”
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Even Leonardo warned against being spread thin. The other day Robinson
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came across one of his late notebooks, in which he had written, “Like a
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kingdom divided, which rushes to its doom, the mind that engages in
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subjects of too great variety becomes confused and weakened.”
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In an age of specialists, does it matter that generalists no longer
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thrive? The world is hardly short of knowledge. Countless books are
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written, canvases painted and songs recorded. A torrent of research is
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pouring out. A new orthodoxy, popularised by Malcolm Gladwell, sees
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obsessive focus as the key that unlocks genius.
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Just knowing about a lot of things has never been easier. Never before
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have dabblers been so free to paddle along the shore and dip into the
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first rock pool that catches the eye. If you have an urge to take off
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your shoes and test the water, countless specialists are ready to hold
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your hand.
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And yet you will never get very deep. Depth is for monomaths—which is
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why experts so often seem to miss what really matters. Specialisation
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|
has made the study of English so sterile that students lose much of the
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joy in reading great literature for its own sake. A generation of
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mathematically inclined economists neglected many of Keynes’s insights
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about the Depression because he put them into words. For decades
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economists sweated over fiendish mathematical equations, only to be
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brought down to earth by the credit crunch: Keynes’s well-turned phrases
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had come back to life.
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Part of my regret at the scarcity of polymaths is sentimental. Polymaths
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were the product of a particular time, when great learning was a mark of
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distinction and few people had money and leisure. Their moment has
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passed, like great houses or the horse-drawn carriage. The world may
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well be a better place for the specialisation that has come along
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instead. The pity is that progress has to come at a price. Civilisation
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has put up fences that people can no longer leap across; a certain type
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of mind is worth less. The choices modern life imposes are duller, more
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cramped.
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The question is whether their loss has affected the course of human
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thought. Polymaths possess something that monomaths do not. Time and
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again, innovations come from a fresh eye or from another discipline.
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|
Most scientists devote their careers to solving the everyday problems in
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|
their specialism. Everyone knows what they are and it takes ingenuity
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|
and perseverance to crack them. But breakthroughs—the sort of idea that
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|
opens up whole sets of new problems—often come from other fields. The
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|
work in the early 20th century that showed how nerves work and, later,
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|
how DNA is structured originally came from a marriage of physics and
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|
biology. Today, Einstein’s old employer, the Institute for Advanced
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|
Study at Princeton, is laid out especially so that different disciplines
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rub shoulders. I suspect that it is a poor substitute.
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Isaiah Berlin once divided thinkers into two types. Foxes, he wrote,
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know many things; whereas hedgehogs know one big thing. The foxes used
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to roam free across the hills. Today the hedgehogs rule.
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