The death of the polymath

Why we need to know a little about a lot

“I fear we are witnessing the ‘death of expertise’,” writes Tom Nichols in a 2014 article. “A Google-fueled, Wikipedia-based, blog-sodden collapse of any division between professionals and laymen, students and teachers, knowers and wonderers—in other words, between those of any achievement in an area and those with none at all.” In this article (and later in book form), Nichols, a professor and international affairs expert, does not lament the death of expertise itself, but rather the loss of public trust in experts in a wide variety of fields. At the time of his writing, the burgeoning anti-vaccination movement served as a prime example of this phenomenon. If Nichols could have foreseen the world of today six years ago—a world of raging wildfires, corrupt and inept governments, and nearly eradicated diseases on the rise once again, all arising in part from a loss of faith in experts—he wouldn’t have been able to believe how right he was.  

It is ironic that Nichols’ article was published in The Federalist, a staunchly conservative American publication whose most popular articles tackle subjects such as the Democrats’ “Anti-Gun Law Frenzy,” and make statements like “Every Time Democrats Talk, I Want To Vote For Trump Twice.” Still, 2014 was a simpler time, if only due to the fact that an unqualified, racist liar (other adjectives omitted for space) had not yet ascended to the most powerful office in the world. If the expert was dying in 2014, they were definitively killed in November 2016. By now, their corpse is practically on public display.  

The death of the expert is old news. I would now like to focus on a different breed of endangered intellectual, one whose potential demise would exacerbate the already established mistrust of facts and evidence. I am speaking of the polymath, more often known by the terms “Renaissance Man” or “Jack-of-All-Trades.” If an expert is someone who possesses a lot of knowledge in a very narrow field, a polymath is one possessing basic (but very real) knowledge on a wide variety of subjects. In a bygone era, we as a public expected our journalists, pundits, and politicians to be polymaths to a certain degree. Those responsible for reporting, analyzing, and especially legislating the decisions that govern the lives of millions were expected to have a developed understanding of the background information that went into these decisions. Short of devouring treatises on quantum mechanics or contemplating the meaning of life, these figures were merely expected to be generally well-read, well-informed, and sufficiently logical. 

These requirements seem to have become laxer in recent years, to the point where it has become difficult to differentiate between one who knows a little bit and one who knows nothing at all. There is, after all, no accreditation for being a polymath, no equivalent to the expert’s PhD. Polymaths are no less important, however. As human knowledge across all disciplines grows increasingly specialized, we can no longer expect even the average educated person to be able to grasp the most fundamental details of countless fields of study. The polymath is an essential intermediary between the expert and the layperson, one who is informed and competent enough to receive the information provided to them by the expert while being compelling and accessible enough to disseminate it to the greater public in palatable terms. The death of expertise is in many ways the death of the polymath. Without them, specialized knowledge remains locked in the so-called “ivory towers” of universities and research institutes—dead, if only because it is useless to everyone. 

Let’s take a look at a real example in the form of climate change. Though we have known for decades that human actions are causing changes to the global climate that could lead us to disaster, only recently have many begun to realize the significance of this threat, accepting it as a potential “climate apocalypse.” This realization is due, in part, to the work of a 17-year-old climate activist from Sweden. It was not enough that 97 percent of actively publishing climate scientists agreed that climate change was primarily caused by humans. Instead, it took Greta Thunberg to adapt a less digestible message into one that resonated with people and struck real fear into their hearts. Is this the work of a polymath? Certainly: in order for Greta Thunberg to have turned a climate emergency into a global movement, she would have required an equal understanding of the rudiments of climate science, sociology, and even rhetoric. We can by no means call her an expert in any of these fields, but she possesses enough knowledge from each to make it useful when deployed in service of a public goal. 

But part of what has made Thunberg so exceptional is that she’s exactly that: exceptional. We come across a public figure who accepts facts at face value and champions them through a determined voice and a good social media campaign and we feel like we’re seeing a rare species in the wild. The facts are the most important part. There are plenty of people out there with a podcast and an opinion—too many, in fact—but far fewer with true knowledge on their side. Instead of the knowledge of experts handed down to us by those who have taken the time to understand it, much of the content provided by news outlets emphasizes the voices of those whose ideas are loud and sensational. A wealth of opinions has led to a dearth of facts, so it’s no wonder that trust in expertise has dwindled in recent years. Blame the rise of populism or global economic insecurity, but it’s far more straightforward to realize that the process by which expertise is shared with the general population is broken, missing a crucial piece without which it cannot function. The polymath is necessary for the diffusion of knowledge. Without the polymath, knowledge remains the domain of the elite, and everyone else grows understandably resentful and mistrustful. Without the polymath, we are all worse off.