The courage of the polymaths
Writing for Aeon magazine in an essay titled Penchants of the polymaths, Mariam Sabri informs us about four geniuses of the Muslim world.
This semester, my students are learning about four polymaths who shaped Islamic science: al-Biruni, Alhazen, Avicenna and al-Khwarizmi. Their circumstances could hardly have been more different: one wrote his way out of scarcity; one was held under house arrest for a decade; one distilled an era’s medical knowledge into a text that ruled European universities for 500 years; and the last worked at the largest research institution of his age. But each shared the same underlying instinct: to move freely between mathematics, medicine, astronomy, philosophy and poetry, testing one discipline’s assumptions against another’s. My classroom is in Pakistan, where students arrive eager to talk about disruption and employability, but rarely about breadth. I want them to see, through these four lives, that this kind of expansiveness isn’t a luxury for stable times; it has produced some of the most enduring breakthroughs in the history of science.
I wish Mariam good luck in inspiring a new generation of students to follow in the footsteps of those remarkable thinkers.
What I would add to Mariam’s account is the word “courage”, which is a necessary quality of character in keeping culture open to the possibility of genius.
The polymath has courage in that they are prepared to move outside the comfort zone of any given specialisation. They have the audacity to draw linkages that others do not discern, not as a matter of superior intellect but as a result of trying in earnest. By “polymath” I apply the term in its original meaning, the one who has knowledge of many things, without implying that such a person is necessarily a genius.
I write from a position of experience as a polymath myself. My skills are well below those of the aforementioned geniuses. I have not achieved anything remarkable in any of the fields I have delved into and have no formal qualifications to even make a remotely plausible case in my favour. Nobody references me now and none will remember me in 500 years. I do, nonetheless, embody the courage and concomitant exuberance that no promise of comfort can constrain and, as such, will go wherever I want to learn whatever my condition renders possible.
I synthesise street smart with book smart. I know of politics in theory as well as day-to-day practice. I have pierced into the psyche of humans in sport and the classroom, in company and competition, in solitude and in festivities, through hardship and opulence, in the hinterlands as well as the centres of power. I combine prose with poetry, rigour with beauty, intellectuality with physical prowess, a tendency for collectivity with the reality of a lone wolf, a study of human with an understanding of programming, an intuition on colour with a conception of pattern as such into theology and religiosity.
What is common in this multitude is the virtue to give everything an honest try by bringing to it the full power of my undivided attention. It is to not seek excuses for inaction. I never say “I cannot” when what that would really mean is “I do not want to”.
My initiative is neither informed nor conditioned by the opinion of others. They default to the kind of naysaying that confines a person to a tiny room with no sight of the open vistas. Whereas I am not satisfied with the comfy chair. I will hike to the top of the mountain and dive in cold waters. I proceed with the belief that I can learn anything I set my mind to and can perform admirably in it. Such is my conviction that I am not afraid of the challenge.
This is not a matter of genius, which is beyond human design. It is about attitude, which can be studied and greatly altered by continuous effort with the appropriate method, even if it also has a biological basis.
Genius is rare. I am not that person. I was not a child prodigy and am not a late bloomer either. Though I can tell from history that genius occurs more frequently and is clustered together in cultures that are defined by openness. Those are the societies who are young in age and spirit, freed from the burdens of institutionalist pretence and attendant etiquette, and who exhibit that unmistakable zest which drives forward their inquiry into the world.
Boundaries naturally occur in all fields of endeavour. There is a need to maintain a trail of paper by which to track outcomes. It is then followed up by the want to streamline processes, replicate results, and create a baseline of expectations. The bureaucrat emerges organically as an intermediary among those whose job it is to think things through and/or make stuff happen. The bureaucrat starts out as the custodian of records and eventually turns into the enforcer of norms.
Scholars who had achieved something noteworthy at a certain point in their career, and who lack the courage to press on with their inquiry, wish to cling on to their holdings. They effectively set up barriers to entry by weaponising bureaucracy in the name of standards, with which they limit their competition and thus retain their privileged status.
Over time, bureaucracy turns intellectuality into a pay-to-win scheme. It confers social status and creates a sense of classism where the way one talks communicates more about their perceived intellectual acumen than what they actually say. At scale, this shadow play manifests into a glorified popularity contest, more superficially sophisticated than high-schoolers figuring out who is the coolest among them, though not much different in function: the celebrated experts get the lion’s share of the money while the rest learn to be happy with leftovers.
Bureaucratisation evolves along with the fracturing of intellectuality into increasingly narrower fields of specialisation. The bureaucrat thrives in this environment as the driving force of the want for interdisciplinarity, by becoming the interlocutor among the relevant specialisations. The specialist, in turn, benefits from the resulting obscurity. There is practically nobody who can check on the tangible value of their contributions. This is a state of comfort, which can be alluring, at which point complacency kicks in and the system as a whole enters its state of decline.
Courage is both contagious and dangerous. When one speaks their mind fearlessly, others are emboldened to do the same. Once a few do this, the movement grows into a power impulse that emanates from the mind to affect conduct, institution, and artefact alike.
The potency of courage consists in its unpredictability. The courageous person will not accept to be constrained and is thus inconvenient to any established order that finds comfort in stasis.
What teachers such as Mariam Sabri can do is instil a sense of alertness in their students. Encourage them to continue where they would otherwise stop. Celebrate their every attempt at formulating a question and congratulate them for their eagerness to develop an independent thought. Push them to go where their curiosity leads and be there for them when they need a tutelary figure to help them channel their vitality into a force of creativity.
This, however, demands that the teacher be not pedantic and obsessed with adherence to formality. The teacher must, in effect, have that spark of alertness to push back, even in subtle ways, against the overreach of the bureaucratariat.
Do it right and the next genius might show up soon after to remind humanity that the most predictable is the least animate.