FOXES, HEDGEHOGS AND AIRWAVES

Edward Carr ends his piece about polymaths with a plaintive observation:

Isaiah Berlin once divided thinkers into two types. Foxes, he wrote, know many things; whereas hedgehogs know one big thing. The foxes used to roam free across the hills. Today the hedgehogs rule.

(This is Berlin's take on an epigram by Archilochus, as one reader observes.) This morning Carr rued this state of affairs on Andrew Marr's Start of the Week radio show (yes, that Andrew Marr, he of the soothing, radio-show baritone and perhaps a polymath of sorts himself). He considered the question: How is it that in a time of more learning and wider access to education, we have so few polymaths?

Though we've cobbled together a list of living polymaths, this is certainly an era of specialisation. Part of the problem, Carr suggests, is that our fields of knowledge are so expansive that it takes years just to reach the frontier. This wasn't an issue back when gentlemen scholars were fiddling with microscopes and counting stars. They got to invent things like safety lamps. Now keeping up in any single discipline is a full-time job, one that perhaps pre-empts brilliance in unrelated fields (for most people). And specialists are prickly, defending their territory with jargon and passive-aggressive name-calling.

Few want to think of themselves as a hedgehog. Foxes are much sexier in their omnivorous prowling. Yet isn't our era of monomaths a product of our democratic access to education? Should we really rue a time of greater knowledge, even if the consequence is less intellectual promiscuity? Listen to this conversation and let us know what you think.

~ EMILY BOBROW

Picture credit: hellochris (via Flickr)