Certain Habits

This is a personal blog on a personal website, and a pretty late entrant into the genre. I’ve thought for years that I really ought to have a place on the web to do … I don’t know, something. But every time building a personal site began to climb to the top of my agenda, the project foundered on the question of what the site should be about.

I know that’s a strange sort of question for a personal site. After all, a personal site should be about oneself, right?

The challenge, though, is that most personal sites I have encountered over the years are focused on one, or at most, two things. There are some great personal photography sites. There are some great personal cooking sites. And travel, books, religion, politics, art, sports, and other areas of interest.

But every time I planned a personal site, I wondered: which of my interests should it focus on? Then it would occur to me that a single subject site would be misleading; you might think I’m one dimensional. And really, how boring would that be?

What convinced me to finally do a personal site was, ironically, the inspiration for this URL. If there’s an idea behind Certain Habits—and while is this all still very experimental, I do think there is an idea at work here—it is that belief that a person can be passionate about, and pursue excellence in, diverse endeavors. Put even more strongly, I believe that developing excellence in diverse areas strengthens skills in one’s “primary” work. And interests in diverse fields is becoming more important as the pace of change—technological and otherwise—accelerates. Innovation comes from the places we least expect.

But perhaps I’m being too optimistic.

Edward Carr argues in “The Intelligent Life” that we are in “The Last Days of the Polymath”.

He has a point. It’s more difficult today to make a meaningful contribution in any field. Ours is a world ruled by specialists. They may advance our knowledge, but they do it rapidly, in very small, methodical steps, in very narrow areas. To reach the boundaries of a specialty so that you can make a contribution requires years of single-minded dedication and focus that excludes dabbling in, much less mastery of, unrelated fields.

Moreover, academic life is stacked against generalists. Everything from politics to specialized domain language to the perfection demanded before one accepted as an authority discourage people to even attempt the polymaths’ path. There’s nothing like being dismissed by specialists with a snear … and not understanding, exactly, the barb buried in that snear.

While it’s hard to imagine today anyone rising to the level of a “man (or woman) who knows everything there is to know” (something that at one time was said of Aristotle, Leonardo DaVinci, Goethe, and Robert Young, to name a few) Carr does point to several remaining polymaths. How do they do it?

• Alexander McCall Smith was able to be geneticist, lawyer and philospher and yet still pursue a writing career because academic life gave him the time and freedom to do so;
• Robert Posner can explore diverse fields because he has a philosophical worldview and analytical framework (economics) that unites his explorations; and
• Carl Djerassi could pursue both medical research and a career as writer, playwright, theologian and philosopher because he has had two careers in sequence, one after the other.

The polymath’s path is a risky one. A person of some talent who sets out, intent on becoming a polymath, might flit from subject to subject and spend an entire life without accomplishing anything important. When a polymath makes a contribution, it is usually through a breakthrough only possible through diversity of thought (see, for example, the profile of Luca Turin in the excellent Emperor of Scent). But these innovations are rare. As Tolstoy (and later Isiah Berlin) recognized, the hedgehog often accomplishes more than the fox. Plus, as Carr quotes Peter Robinson of saying, “Polymaths are disconcerting. People feel they are trespassing.”

I admire the hedgehogs immensely. In some ways I think I’d be happier as a hedgehog. Having many interests, I often feel I should be doing something else, whatever it is I’m doing. Still, I can’t help it. I look at the world around me in slack-jawed wonder. The world is too interesting, with too much to do and too much to learn and too much opportunity to explore. How can I do just one thing?

Carr in the end laments the sterility of monomath expertise:

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.

And Carr wonders if we’ve lost anything more significant.

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 20^th 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.

While Carr in the end sounds a defeatist note, lamenting the loss of polymaths, even as he claims that loss is inevitable, I can’t help but think there remains opportunity for attainment in multiple disciplines.

Perhaps Carr’s perspective is distorted by his focus on the sciences and the professions. I suspect he might find more diverse contributions from entrepreneurs, makers, engineers, or inventors. The kind of genius Carr describes is rare. But the very same forces that discourage diversity of interest in the sciences or academia may have channeled the kind of genius Carr admires into other endeavors, where their genius is freer to flourish … and better compensated.