In my latest article for Discourse magazine, I take a look at the past, present, and future, of the "Renaissance Man." Here's an excerpt:
As Richard Dawkins once put it, “You could give Aristotle a tutorial”—not because each of us is individually more brilliant than the great Greek philosopher, but because our intellectual world has built cumulatively to a greater height than he could access. And although superstition and fraud are still regrettably commonplace, our atmosphere of knowledge has been purged of much of the nonsense that polluted even the great minds of Aristotle’s day. Thus there’s a sense in which each of us is a Renaissance man or woman without even realizing it. Within a few minutes, any person with access to the internet can learn more about a bird, or Rachmaninoff—or about how to fix a broken dryer or carburetor—than da Vinci or Jefferson was likely to learn in a year. The internet and other technological resources have democratized the uomo universale into the popolo universale.
But that’s true, of course, only if we choose to take advantage of it. There’s a kind of moral hazard in the bounty of our knowledge: It can become an excuse—even a subconscious one—for intellectual laziness. The ready availability of such a rich body of research and art makes it easy to take it for granted, and to devote our energies elsewhere, confident that if a question comes up, we can “just Google it.” That’s not necessarily a bad thing. On the contrary, being a Renaissance man or woman is energy-intensive, and the great advantage of intellectual specialization is that it’s more efficient to let doctors worry about treating cancer, engineers focus on building satellites, lawyers attend to the lawsuits—and to consult them only when one needs their expertise. But both specialization and intellectual sloth pose a threat to mental health no less than physical lethargy does to the body.
As the creators of the “liberal arts curriculum” knew, a broad exposure to ideas in a wide range of fields makes one more creative and insightful, particularly because it enables people to recognize patterns or similarities in different fields of study. When Darwin encountered Malthus’ “growth model”—a principle of economics—he realized that it held the seeds for an insight equally applicable to the world of biology. Today’s life sciences, in fact, owe their very origin to this “multidisciplinary” insight. It’s impossible to guess how many equally brilliant connections today’s researchers may be overlooking right now by not attending to what’s being said on the other end of campus.
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