The Comings and Goings of Polymathic Culture

As Featured in Belonging Again II.3, on Peter Burke, a Problematic Progress to One-Sidedness, and the Social Coordination Mechanism

Photo by George Kourounis

The Polymath by Peter Burke suggests that to speak of “polymaths” might be to speak not just of a “renaissance man” who is competent in many areas, but of an entire way of life, culture, and theory of education. Burke opens noting that many of the geniuses we recognize were expansive in their studies, but they end up ‘remembered […] for only one form or a few forms of their varied achievements’ (take how Leibniz is remembered many as a “philosopher” when he was also an expert on China).¹ This is a problem because it can create an impression that narrow specialization is the key to success, which can influence how we form schools and think about “a good education.” But what if instead genius in one field can emerge out of a profound and vast interrelation between many fields? What if we can gain a new insight in Physics not just because we studied Physics exclusively, but because we studied Physics, Philosophy, and Art? This isn’t to say specialization is bad or that it can’t lead to new thought, but that it might not be the only tool available to us in our intellectual toolkit. Also, to be polymathic doesn’t mean we equally study all interests and areas, or that we don’t in some areas primarily work through hands-on experimentation while in other fields we mostly read (there are distinctions), but it does suggest that even if mastery ultimately requires a more narrow-focus, creative breakthrough and insight might require a wider and more generalist exploration (Deirdre McCloskey speaks of “specialization while reading widely,” for example). Isn’t this a contradiction? We learn in Hegel contradiction is the start of thought.

I

Burke defines a polymath not just as someone who is simply interested in many things, but someone who has ‘mastered several disciplines,” which is a higher bar and also suggests why a polymath can bridge the “expert vs generalist”-distinction: the polymath has specialized in many fields (a reason perhaps why Burke often uses the language of “one-sided vs many-sided”). ‘A major concern in this study is the survival of polymaths in a culture of increasing specialization,’ Burke writes, suggesting that today we are mostly ‘unfavorable to polymaths,’ ironically perhaps in the name of wanting to honor and enable genius, which is a mistake that is easy to make if we misremember history as full of “specialist geniuses,” versus geniuses whose specialty emerged from a wider and interrelating intellectual spread.²

An ‘omnivorous curiosity’ defines the lives of Polymaths, which education should work to incubate (especially if AI might increase free time, for curiosity is useful when we have time).³ Aligning with Berlin’s famous distinction between “foxes and hedgehogs,” Burke writes: ‘[A] possible typology [which] distinguishes just two varieties of polymath, the centrifugal type, accumulating knowledge without worrying about connections, and the centripetal scholar, who has a vision of the unity of knowledge and tries to fit its different parts together in a grand systems.’⁴ I find this distinction useful, and I think many polymaths do indeed have a motivation for “gathering” great amounts of knowledge from many different fields, rather because they see it as a good in itself and/or because they ascribed to a possible “unity of knowledge” of some quality. Are there environments which better incubate one of these motivations or another like them which can lead to powerful curiosity? The “social coordination mechanism” (SCM) might help, especially one we deconstruct ‘the myth of the solitary genius’: Burke notes how many polymaths were parts of groups, writing that ‘[s]mall groups often stimulate the creativity of their members and some polymaths have become famous for the ideas that probably originated in groups discussions’ (which “trivia(l) education” can inhibit).⁵ But none of this potential might be realized if we don’t resist the idea that ‘polymaths are frauds’ and generalists shallow (a notion Burke shows is common in history), nor if those with wide-interests don’t overcome ‘Leonardo syndrome,’ which is ‘a dispersal of energy that shows itself in fascinating or brilliant projects that are abandoned or simply left unfinished.’⁶

Classical thinkers like Aristotle are often remembered as more polymathic, even if we do forget, beyond many philosophical fields, that he also studied ‘anatomy, physiology, natural history and zoology.’⁷ But as we approach modernity, the acknowledgment of wide-learning fades, even though Burke points out that polymathic tendencies persist through time. Why? Well, it might be because our school system becomes more specialized after the Industrial Revolution, and we naturally seek an account of history that suggests this is a legitimate and justified focus (the line between “history” and “myth” is thin, a line which moderns out of self-interest might stress is thick), but regardless the last polymath we might acknowledge is Leibniz, though even he might get ‘squeeze[d] […] into [a] single field[].’⁸ Our impression can be that as we move from Aristotle to say 2025, the number of polymaths and generalists drops off, which can create the impression that the loss of polymaths is progressive. “There are less polymaths because we are smarter and more advanced” can be the lesson, making it seem like the SCM or any stress on the generalist is a regression. Burke however shows polymaths have always been with us, and the polymathic is a defining characteristic and culture of many of our greatest minds. Even if there is an important place for narrow specialization, Burke’s work helps complicate the history so that we can’t easily see a movement from the generalist to the specialist as a movement of intellectual progress, a reading which could also help justify a myth that grounds modern schooling and “trivia(l) education” that favors narrowing and training for Capital markets (heading us toward a Techno-Cthulhu, as Mikey Downs discusses). To avoid this assumption, and also paradoxically to help specialization if it in fact can profoundly emerge from interrelations between fields, we should study Peter Burke.

We might see past thinkers like Plato and Aristotle as “picking all the low-hanging fruit,” while we today must pick fruit from higher branches, a notion that indirectly suggests we do harder and more advanced work. If accompanied by a culture of specialization, this notion can suggest specialization is “harder work” and hence more noble. An ethic can then form against generalization, suggesting that the many-sided thinker does less and easier work than the focused, narrower thinker, and there’s certainly truth to the notion that we should make a point to acknowledge the researcher who slowly, patiently, and thanklessly gathers small bits of data for scientific and technological advancement (perhaps like Taleb claims we should have a holiday celebrating entrepreneurs, we need a holiday for disciplined researchers). Michael Strevens stresses this, author of The Knowledge Machine, and I agree; still, it seems the case that everyone easily works hard in different ways, and both wide-learning and narrow-learning can be used to avoid work and anxiety while garnering status. Perhaps past thinkers did have some “low-hanging fruit” to pick, but considering Burke, this possibility alone doesn’t determine if polymathic culture is advanced or not. Still, unfortunately, the impression can be that general-thinking and polymathic disposition correspondence with “low-hanging fruit” and is only a product of the times when there is low-hanging fruit to be picked, a window which naturally lessens with time. In a way, polymathic culture is then a kind of illusion that was made possible by a handicap of historic positioning, which is a handicap we don’t have today. If we want to do new work then, we must specialize and forgo wide-learning, for the benefits of “wide-learning” followed from historic luck. Thanks to Burke, we can help resist this interpretation (to the cultural benefit of the SCM).

History is not a story of a straight line from the polymath to the specialist, which can fit into a clean and problematic progressive narrative; rather, “history waves.” The acceptance of polymaths has historically ebbed and flowed, with different periods being more accepting of it than others: ‘seventeenth-century Europeans [(for example)] enjoyed an extended moment of freedom from the traditional suspicion of curiosity on one side and from the rise of the division of intellectual labor, which produced another climate that was — and remains — unfavorable to many-sidedness, on the other.’⁹ Perhaps the 19th and 20th centuries have been periods against many-sidedness, which now is starting to change to a 21st century more in favor of it (aided by the SCM)? Such a movement would have parallels in history, sometimes aligning with encounters with new peoples or civilizations, which were ‘powerful stimulus to curiosity’: this in mind, if the SCM is like a new “silk road,” it would be fitting for us to move in a polymath-favoring direction.¹⁰

II

Aligning with Randall Collins work, formations and cultures of “communities of learning” have also helped swing the pendulum to favor the polymathic, which the internet helps form and that we can think of as ‘an imagined community held together by correspondence between scholars living in different countries and on occasion divided by religion.’¹¹ Such intellectual community has taken many forms in history, but regardless they seem to help a society approve of the polymathic versus oppose it (which might swing back to favoring the specialist once the anxiety of being overwhelmed by information becomes too much, like when ‘[p]rinting, once viewed as a solution to the problem of information scarcity, had become a problem itself’).¹² It sometimes seems as if the quality of learning and education as a whole correlates with favorable attitudes toward polymaths, which if the case then a collapse in the quality of schools is best addressed not just through greater funding but through a cultural change which favors many-sidedness (the centrality of culture is a theme in O.G. Rose). Unless the decline of school-quality leads to the loss of polymaths? Fair, but perhaps the decline of school-quality is a result of there being less polymathic-favoring attitudes in it? Either way, accepting the polymathic seems a prudent step.

Burke does not argue that we see historic periods where the polymath is entirely abandoned, but that the polymath’s prominence goes in and out of the background. In the 18th century, for example, ‘[t]he ideal of many-sidedness was not abandoned […] but it was limited, lowering the bar over which candidates for the title had to jump.’¹³ There could still be ‘sparkling conversation in salons’ or the like, but cultural shifts occurred which made “A Polymathic Culture” less present (the connection between “polymath” and “culture” is one I think should be stressed).¹⁴ But a movement toward one-mindedness was not all bad: speaking of Comte, Burke wrote:

‘In France, Comte expressed ambivalence. He believed that the price of specialization was an inability to see what he called ‘the spirit of the whole,’ but also that specialization was necessary to progress and that a group would emerge who would specialize in generalities.’¹⁵

Burke claims Comte was right, but “the fullness of this movement” is perhaps still waiting for the SCM to be fully realized. To the degree people have become “specialists in generalization,” they lack a dynamic infrastructure for what Benedict Anderson called an ‘imagined community,’ which is possible where people share spaces and common material which they know (Dave at TU speaks of us being “fragmented and fractured” in this way too).¹⁶ This hinders the formation of networks needed for greater multiples of human capital, and also people of great learning can just feel alone with their learning, knowing that which they can’t share with others, self-stuck. This makes the polymathic path seem more like a mistake, seeing as specialists at least have a specialization they can find communities in or showcase more quantifiable expertise regarding. It then becomes plausible to people that they should buy into ‘the assumption that any claim to wide-ranging knowledge must be fraudulent, an assumption that seems increasingly obvious as the process of specialization accelerates.’¹⁷

Perhaps there is a “Polymathic Culture” in history, but alternatively, isn’t the polymath more a matter of personality, which can then invite us to ask if the polymathic is innate or taught? Polymaths do seem to have some traits in common, which might suggest nature more than nurture. ‘There may be a gene for curiosity,’ Burke considers, but personally I am not ready to say curiosity isn’t more universal than not (before we train it out of kids), unwilling to say it can’t be spread before a SCM.¹⁸ ‘Another important quality of at least some polymaths is the power of concentration, at an unconscious as well as a conscious level,’ which seems hard to gain today because of the internet which fragments focus, but again I do think the SCM can train concentration in training a mode of conversation that I think trains focus (as we discussed at Theory Underground on “Conversation vs Communication”).¹⁹ ‘A good memory is another great advantage,’ which seems threatened by algorithms, but then again might be trained by the SCM.²⁰ Burke also speaks of speed in ‘assimilat[ing] new kinds of information’ and the possession of ‘[a] vivid imagination,’ but these too are capacities I believe the SCM and an education that moves beyond the “trivia(l)” could indeed incubate.²¹ ²² At the very least, before the infrastructure we now have, I don’t think we have good reason to accept otherwise outright.

A particular capacity I would like to focus on for a moment is something Burke highlights when he writes that ‘polymaths constant draw analogies,’ which harkens back to our reflections in II.2 on Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander in their book, Surfaces and Essences.²³ We discussed how basically intelligibility and thinking is possible thanks to analogy, and the fact Polymaths so freely employ analogy suggests that they regularly train faculties deeply connected to thinking itself, which we argued in II.2 could be what the SCM also does. And if so, the SCM could train polymaths, for it’s possible the directionality could be from analogy to polymath, not just polymath to analogy. ‘In drawing analogies, polymaths have the advantage of personal acquaintance with different disciplines,’ which is to say an analogy lets us approach something new from a framework with which we are familiar, not only enabling entrance, but also possibly drawing new connections at the same time.²⁴ Specialization seems to lead to an antagonism toward analogy though, perhaps become analogy crosses domains that are thought best kept apart, which if a critical trainer of dynamic and creative genius, is a terrible mistake.

‘A good memory and lively imagination would be of little use to a polymath if he or she did not work hard to employ these qualities,’ suggesting the importance of energy.²⁵ Energy also matters for the polymath, pointing to why work at Theory Underground on timenergy is a piece of the puzzle for perhaps bringing around a new “Polymathic Culture,” as is focus on practices like Dialogos which seem to generate energy for participants, helping the hours pass like no time passes at all. Burke also discusses ‘restlessness,’ which can be good or bad, and a tendency for polymaths to be ‘nomadic,’ which I think describes many of the people attracted to the SCM.²⁶ Polymaths can also feel ‘a duty not to waste time,’ while also feeling a ‘drive[] for competition’ that is accompanied by a feeling of ‘play.’²⁷ ²⁸ This is an odd mixture, but one I personally think is accurate and that the SCM and a Childlike Education could incubate, for what Burke describes is something I see in young children (to which Deleuze seemed attuned).

Still, much of what Burke has described so far might primarily ‘belong in the realm of nature rather than nurture,’ which leads him to then considering ‘characteristics of polymaths [which] also require a [more clearly] cultural or social explanation,’ insights which might help us think matters of social and educational design.²⁹ Emphasizing an ‘ethic of frugality and hard work’ seems important, for this orientates people to sacrifice material condition for intellectual or spiritual condition, as might a feeling of being an exile “between worlds” contribute to people exploring new avenues (where “givens” have eroded).³⁰ Burke also notes a number of polymaths were educated at home, which the SCM better affords, and it’s possible ‘that education at home rather than school encourages a lack of respect for formal academic boundaries or even a lack of awareness of their existence,’ though Burke doesn’t push this point.³¹ Are these social and cultural descriptions ones that apply to our world of Global Pluralism? If so, a new infrastructure might be all we need to incubate a Polymathic Culture, though a lack of timenergy could still be a hanging factor depending on the quality of social coordination and results of AI, which Burke notes is important, seeing as ‘[p]olymaths also need the leisure to do their own work.’³² (Even ‘enforced leisure’ say out to sea or in prison have proved beneficial to polymaths.)³³

Social groups are also central for polymaths, as we’ve alluded to, which the SCM can help form: ‘[i]nformal discussion groups were and are one way to encourage interdisciplinarity.’³⁴ ‘Long before the term ‘interdisciplinarity’ was coined, the desire for general knowledge and wide-ranging discussion lead to the foundation of societies’ like we see online today at Philosophy Portal, Other Life, Theory Underground, etc., though perhaps until now with the SCM they lacked the infrastructure needed to be sustainable and able to spread.³⁵ Burke goes on to explore other social factors that define Polymathic Culture, providing reason to think that there are things we could do to increase the probability of Polymaths emerging. That all said, there are dangers in being a generalist, and so there is a danger in considering a polymathic culture. We must be careful to venture into many fields: for one, we mustn’t venture into other fields to avoid our unconscious or “The Real”; if we consider other fields, we need to let them humble us. Do they require us to use our hands? To take risk? To have skin in the game? Do we venture into new fields to be surprised or to extend our imperial domain? How we venture into new fields is a critical question, and just because people are “interested in many different things” isn’t necessarily beneficial if the motivations are off and/or there is lacking a culture of people to provide critique and feedback for one another to help people not end up in “indestructible maps” they cannot escape (in our age of unleashed “Pandora’s Rationality,” as discussed in The Map Is Indestructible), focused on problems that don’t matter, and/or lost in connections that don’t exist.

We have seemingly not had the infrastructure needed to sustain Polymathic Culture, and so perhaps it has always been “too early” — but the power it has exhibited even then (in its “events”) should give us hope for the human at this moment before our AI-Causer. We should also note that Polymathic Culture easily didn’t spread for good reason: it was limited to the wealthy, was restricted to certain nationalities and cultures, and also could have contributed to problematic class formations. Perhaps the infrastructure was not there for Polymathic Culture to avoid these mutations, but things could be different now with the SCM. And perhaps the polymathic is necessary if what Chris Cutrone calls “the dictatorship of the proletariat” were to prove possible and not autocannibalistic, as Andrew Parsons noted, but time will tell.

III

To suggest a need for a Polymathic Culture today to “spread Childhood,” perhaps conditions of a new Great Enrichment of McCloskey and Nordic Secret of Lene Andersen, is not to say that everyone needs to be a polymath, but that the polymath can help determine cultural blood-flow: if there isn’t enough polymathic subjectivity in the system, there could be societal clogs or heart failure. A critical mass of polymaths is needed, like Children, which could change the culture into being more receptive, incubating, and encouraging of self-teaching and self-motivation. What is needed at scale are more orientations like a “permission to be different” and “respect for wide-learning” than say everyone reading Hegel and architecture, but that is hard to imagine transpiring unless we change “trivia(l) education” so that subconscious associations against “intrinsic motivation” are deconstructed in favor of a new environment. On this point, I personally think we see in Polymathic Culture conditions of great abundance and “overflow” that people are positioned to catch and experience. Expertise seems to also emerge from out of an overflow of intersecting fields, not just be at the end of a narrow path of specialization that was chosen one year and followed at the exclusion of other fields for decades. This doesn’t mean specialization is bad or even noble, but it does suggest there are other ways of learning that we might want to consider if we live in a society where few people read and “life long learning” is hardly more than a catchphrase. We simply seem to lack a good way to motivate learning, and though specialization has a role, a “Polymathic Pedagogy” might be worth considering (especially if so much of our “address” depends on a move from “extrinsic motivation” to “intrinsic motivation”).

Also, if we must pick what we will study and focus on early in life, the chances of us picking what we could excel in is low. To increase the probability that people “happen upon” what they will have insight regarding, we need a culture where learning is “just in the air” and available to be “stumbled upon” and “overheard.” The internet and SCM can provide such “in the air,” but perhaps no more than to the degree average people use the online world for engaging in life-long learning themselves. But if ideas are “in the air” and people “come upon” something that catches them, there’s a greater chance this idea will feel “greater than them” and so not something they arbitrarily selected or chose from a personal preference. Nor does it feel forced upon us by a teacher who seems positioned to have to justify to us why we need to learn what the teacher presents, which could tempt the teacher to use threats and warnings about “not having a future.” This and a lack of something feeling “bigger than us” (like we are chosen versus choosing, to allude to Philip Rieff) can kill motivation, but a culture where ideas and learning are “in the air” doesn’t fall into these tendencies that weaken motivation. For Childhood, this is significant.

There is a mystery in why some people engage in self-teaching while others don’t, and it is possible that some of this has to do with how people relate to interests, subjects, material, and topic. Again channeling Rieff, it could be that topics which compel self-teaching could be ones that feel to “choose us more than we choose them,” and the possibility of this experience could be greatly multiplied if we live in a culture where ideas can be overhead and “stumbled upon.” “Happening upon” might be critical for self-teaching, and also might be a method where we benefit from “otherness” in our environment without falling into collective “Bestow Centrism,” as we discussed in II.1. There is an oddly mysterious moment where we just recognize something interesting in something perhaps never heard before, like Plato’s Meno, an “apprehension of nous” (as Jockin speaks on), which seems central for our humanity. Why or how this mysterious apprehension occurs seems difficult to quantify (both its strength and weakness), but the more vibrant and alive our environments (“living architecture,” as Nikos Salingaros put it with Jim Rutt), the greater the chance this occurs (though unfortunately utilitarianism and pragmaticism seem to have designed our environments, cities, etc. in the exact opposite direction, which then increases the likelihood that it seems utilitarianism is the right point of view: it benefits from the problem it causes). This said, if all that is being discussed here seems idealistic, that might be so because we place kids in stagnate classrooms at unmoving desks all day, which might train them to be less motivated, which then could make it seem as if motivated self-teaching at scale would be impossible—but this is a self-fulfilling prophecy, a self-inflicted enclosure that becomes “how it is.”

“High resolution experiences” might be a way to think of what we need, where we can be “grabbed” by something and undergo an experience of apprehension and nous mysteriously, awakening us to the existence of mystery and also a new way of being motivated: “choosing our interest” is not as powerful as being in an environment where interest can “pop out” at us. We might not like this because it seems wasteful with no guarantee of a good outcome, but we might learn from a study of polymaths that Newton had to waste time on theology and alchemy precisely so that he could create profound breakthroughs in Physics (the weird is part of the essential). Otherwise, Newton would not have created for himself a “vibrant life environment” where ideas could connect and feel “like they chose him,” which could have been necessary for him to have the motivation to do his work in Physics, perhaps driven by a feeling that “everything connected.” This notion risks madness, yes, but this might be a necessary risk that perhaps a Polymathic Culture must take and could socially better mitigate, not so readily leaving people alone and isolated with this feeling, seeing as people don’t always ask one another why they are learning something if it won’t get them a job (for example)…

Jung is famous for claiming that ideas have people more than people have ideas, and similarly I’m increasingly of the opinion that people don’t have motivation so much as motivation has people. We can’t simply “will” for ourselves to be motivated: motivation comes and goes mysteriously. I think it is profoundly environmental, which suggests why we have often resorted to “extrinsic motivation” in the surroundings of people. But the way an environment works on us (considering James K.A. Smith) is not the same was does a teacher, and this difference could help us understand why say “overhearing ideas” would be different for people than being told ideas directly for a test. The internet and SCM have ideas “wash over us” like a river from which we can pick out glimmers of gold that we “apprehend” while letting everything else pass by, changing our relation to what we take in. For it feels “to have come to us” versus us felt scared into learning it in fear of a bad future, or us picking it arbitrarily from a personal preference. We were in the right place at the right time. We “apprehended” (“nous”) something, which suggests a mystery for why, an “unknown that isn’t unknowable” that can draw us in. There is danger in this (a “Pynchon Risk”), but humans need danger to face.

IV

History is a story of more information and ideas becoming available, which would seem fitting to correlate with there being more polymaths, so why does history (in addition to our tendency to remember thinkers like Leibniz in a single category of say “philosopher”) seem to move in a direction of specialization? Where there is greater access to information, there could be more potential for the polymathic, and yet we arguably see an inverse relationship between polymaths and greater information. Why, and is this mismatch a reason we have not seen a greater human flourishing like might be possible? I think that’s reasonable to consider at least, making it important to wonder why the polymath seems more hurt by expansions of knowledge (though not always), which contributes to history seeming to be a story of society moving away from the polymathic toward specialization as the availability of information increases, which by extension can make it seem like specialization is a progressive step, when really it could be a self-defense mechanism against overload. Indeed, that’s what Burke tells us:

‘The principal response to th[e] explosion of knowledge was to specialize, thus reducing the amount of information that needed to be mastered. Specialization may be regarded as a kind of defense mechanism, a dyke against the deluge of information.’³⁶

A specialist is honored precisely for not venturing into many fields, and another advantage is that the specialist finds a way to avoid feeling always behind, always overwhelmed, and even lost. When there is ‘an explosion of knowledge,’ it is both ‘in the double sense of expansion and fragmentation,’ which is why increases in information make it bother easier and harder to be a polymath.³⁷ What is not known becomes “visible” and “at hand” to us, making it harder to live with not knowing it, which can both drive us to learn and also discourage us to try. Growths in knowledge and potential don’t always feel like growths.

Staring around 1850, bringing to my mind our internet age, Burke tells us that ‘[t]he invention of steam press, together with the use of cheaper paper made from wood pulp, reduced the price of books and journals and so encouraged them to proliferate, leading to what has been called the ‘second revolution of the book’ or ‘the flood of cheap print.’ ’³⁸ Changes in information technology, especially when costs fall, is a major factor in changing the availability of information, which could afford new polymathic potential — or not. AI is no doubt another “information explosion,” to which there could be another “reasonable temptation” to emphasize specialization (to mentally survive), but then again AI might be such an explosion that even specialization won’t feel to be enough, which could “saturate us” (alluding to Alex Ebert) into complete hopelessness or giving generalization a hard go. This could depend on to the degree people feel AI provides a way for us to organize all the information it simultaneously gives us access to, for Burke shows arising in history methods for information organization when faced with information explosions (‘[i]n the seventeenth century,’ for example, ‘one response to the first crisis of knowledge was to develop new methods of taking and filing notes’) — say like ChatGPT?³⁹ Perhaps, but again where there this an explosive “crisis of knowledge,” it is not given that a Polymathic Culture will emerge. If there are adequate “sorting mechanisms” for the information could be a key factor on if it does, as could be the presence of a culture that encourages “intrinsic motivation”; otherwise, the conditions for its possibility could be precisely conditions that lead to greater specialization (there is risk even if the soil is right).

The internet both invites the polymathic as it motivates specialization to survive possibility-overload, and where this overload cannot be processed well, the anxiety is likely to prove too great, leading both to narrowness and even “indestructible maps.” Through its unique combination of Zoom technology, recording, YouTube, and conversation, the SCM could be uniquely equipped to process vast amounts of information and complexity, increasing the odds that our information age leads in the direction of the polymathic versus the narrow. Through speaking, oral learning, modeling, etc., the SCM is a more advanced processing mechanism than just books and reading (not that these don’t have a critical role for people to have something to bring to the SCM), and the educational and “classroom” experience of the SCM is also better suited for the internet than the traditional models. Each human themselves can also be a sorting mechanism, enabled by the internet with a drive for self-learning, which is then complimented by further sorting in Dialogos and online discussion. This increases the quality of information sorting, the probability of insight and connection, as well as the formation of communities that further incubate self-motivation.

We spoke in II.2 on the importance of people learning and training “metajudgment” so that they could avoid “capture” of say Capital (A/A) in favor of Childhood (A/B), and another critical characteristic of the SCM is that it can train discernment. Whatever we watch or hear, we must judge, whereas when a teacher in a classroom is the main source of learning, arguably the whole point is that we don’t question what we are told but instead just memorize it. Even if the teacher is wrong, it’s what we are going to be tested on, so it is not the place to for us to critically examine the information; we just need to “take it in.” There is a risk of the internet being a source of infinite consumption and “taking it in,” yes, but paradoxically in the internet so “vividly” making content for the purpose of us consuming it, it can be easier to question, whereas a teacher in a classroom whose there precisely not to make us happy as consumers, can end up training us into passive consumption (a point which again suggests Ebert’s work on saturation). It is precisely for example because the SCM uses platforms that want to make consumers happy that we can be more conscious that we could be manipulated and mislead, motivating us to exercise our own faculties and judgment. There is nowhere in which judgment isn’t needed, including the classroom, and oddly the more “vivid” that is made to us, the more likely it is we begin training those facilities. We must (“plausible deniability” is gone).

Burke tells us that ‘specialization allowed [people] to keep their heads above water in the flood of information,’ and soon specialization also became a means for ‘what Pierre Bourdieu famously called ‘distinction.’ ’⁴⁰ If we are not going to just specialize and seek multi-mindedness, we must become more skilled and trained in judgment and discernment; otherwise, we might be better to stay in narrowness (“maps” could prove too great a challenge). But if “maps” are not an option without great consequence, before our AI-Causer, to extend humanity, we must try. (Land waits.)

V

So how is Polymathic Culture possible? Many polymaths arguably had time and access to many resources, exclusive conditions few have had but that the internet with “the social coordination mechanism” (SCM) might now afford to more people, especially if they don’t problematically associate learning with what you don’t do unless at a formal school and/or unless relevant for one’s job. Where people learn because learning is simply “what one does,” polymathic potential seems higher, and if that kind of orientation is what a vast number if not majority of our greatest thinkers have possessed, then a school system that educates people out of being polymathic into being narrow specialists is a system that trains us away from genius (and out of Voicecraft). Furthermore, the SCM is where an education is possible that might align with the kind of education that geniuses have had all the while, a historic reality which seems concealed by our tendency to only remember geniuses by one thing or in one field (as Burke stressed). This of course doesn’t mean there hasn’t been any genius or insight from non-polymathic individuals, but it is to say that a polymathic direction might get us more bang for our buck.

Voicecraft Dispatch | Conversational Alchemy

To close, Peter Burke warns that we are witnessing if not the extinction at least the endangerment of a particular kind of intellectual, mainly the Polymath, and if the Polymath has discreetly played a profound role in the development of humanity, one we might miss in how we remember history and our geniuses, this is a profound and even dangerous loss. The SCM could help recover this form of intellectual life, and perhaps the success of the SCM, and its potential to help us “extend humanity” versus have it replaced before our AI-Causer, will depend on to the degree we embrace polymathic culture. The pendulum is swinging, and it has swung back before: as Burke reminds us, ‘[s]pecialization was a response to the problem of overload, but it was soon or later perceived as a problem in itself. Hence the rise of a movement aimed at restoring the lost unity of knowledge.’⁴¹ There is hope, and when the pendulum has swung back, we have seen a polymathic emergence of many new disciplines and horizons of thought: Sociology, Anthropology, Computer Science, General Systems, Semiotics, and more.⁴² What new vistas might emerge this time, enabled by the SCM? Will be prepared to discern them?

.

.

.

Notes

¹Burke, Peter. The Polymath. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2020: 1.

²Burke, Peter. The Polymath. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2020: 5.

³Burke, Peter. The Polymath. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2020: 5.

⁴Burke, Peter. The Polymath. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2020: 6.

⁵Burke, Peter. The Polymath. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2020: 8.

⁶Burke, Peter. The Polymath. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2020: 8.

⁷Burke, Peter. The Polymath. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2020: 12.

⁸Burke, Peter. The Polymath. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2020: 65.

⁹Burke, Peter. The Polymath. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2020: 73.

¹⁰Burke, Peter. The Polymath. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2020: 74.

¹¹Burke, Peter. The Polymath. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2020: 74.

¹²Burke, Peter. The Polymath. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2020: 77.

¹³Burke, Peter. The Polymath. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2020: 86.

¹⁴Burke, Peter. The Polymath. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2020: 86.

¹⁵Burke, Peter. The Polymath. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2020: 126.

¹⁶Burke, Peter. The Polymath. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2020: 137.

¹⁷Burke, Peter. The Polymath. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2020: 169.

¹⁸Burke, Peter. The Polymath. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2020: 171.

¹⁹Burke, Peter. The Polymath. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2020: 172.

²⁰Burke, Peter. The Polymath. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2020: 173.

²¹Burke, Peter. The Polymath. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2020: 174.

²²Burke, Peter. The Polymath. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2020: 175.

²³Burke, Peter. The Polymath. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2020: 176.

²⁴Burke, Peter. The Polymath. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2020: 177.

²⁵Burke, Peter. The Polymath. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2020: 178.

²⁶Burke, Peter. The Polymath. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2020: 179.

²⁷Burke, Peter. The Polymath. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2020: 182.

²⁸Burke, Peter. The Polymath. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2020: 184.

²⁹Burke, Peter. The Polymath. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2020: 191.

³⁰Burke, Peter. The Polymath. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2020: 193.

³¹Burke, Peter. The Polymath. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2020: 196.

³²Burke, Peter. The Polymath. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2020: 199.

³³Burke, Peter. The Polymath. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2020: 201.

³⁴Burke, Peter. The Polymath. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2020: 216.

³⁵Burke, Peter. The Polymath. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2020: 217.

³⁶Burke, Peter. The Polymath. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2020: 130.

³⁷Burke, Peter. The Polymath. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2020: 128.

³⁸Burke, Peter. The Polymath. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2020: 128.

³⁹Burke, Peter. The Polymath. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2020: 129.

⁴⁰Burke, Peter. The Polymath. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2020: 141.

⁴¹Burke, Peter. The Polymath. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2020: 141.

⁴²See pages 153 through 160 of The Polymath by Peter Burke. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press.

.

.

.

For more, please visit O.G. Rose.com. Also, please subscribe to our YouTube channel and follow us on Instagram and Facebook.