A Few Fine Men

I began to read the paper. It kept talking about extensors and flexors, the gastrocnemius muscle, and so on. This and that muscle were named, but I hadn't the foggiest idea of where they were located in relation to the nerves or to the cat. So I went to the librarian in the biology section and asked her if she could find me a map of the cat.
"A map of the cat, sir?" she asked, horrified. "You mean a zoological chart!" From then on there were rumors about some dumb biology graduate student who was looking for a "map of the cat."
When it came time for me to give my talk on the subject, I started off by drawing an outline of the cat and began to name the various muscles.
The other students in the class interrupt me: "We know all that!"
"Oh," I say, "you do? Then no wonder I can catch up with you so fast after you've had four years of biology." They had wasted all their time memorizing stuff like that, when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes.
After the war, every summer I would go traveling by car somewhere in the United States. One year, after I was at Caltech, I thought, "This summer, instead of going to a different place, I'll go to a different field."
- Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!

This book--in case you've somehow missed it in your journey through Internet culture--is a compendium of anecdotes from the life of Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize-winning physicist and idol to nerds everywhere. I've been neglecting it for years, mainly because, up until quite recently, I was a militant partisan of the humanities side of the two-culture war. I was expecting to hear all about how empty and pointless literary scholarship is and how evolutionary explanations account for everything and so on. These days, I wouldn't have minded so much--but thankfully, that's not what the book is about. Unfortunately, it's not really about physics either. The book consists mostly of Feynman blundering into other people's scholarly or other fields, demonstrating to his own satisfaction how much smarter and better he is than they are, and blundering back out. Magically, it turns out that Feynman is a better biologist than biologists, a better safecracker than safecrackers, a better philosopher than philosophers, a better pick-up-artist than pick-up-artists, and a better samba musician than Brazilians! It never seems to occur to him that his own personal standards for judging his success in a field might not be the ones used by others, nor does he ever seem to register criticism and take it under advisement.

The question, then, is: what do we do with this information? Is Feynman a bad role model for intellectuals? Should his book be taken as a monument to hubris and forgotten? (Nevermind that there's little chance of that.) The implicit alternative is that scholars should stick to their fields, should be terrified of treading on other people's turf, should keep their grubby hands off such things as art, music, and sleazy pick-up artistry (well, maybe it's hard to argue with that last one). This position is rarely articulated openly, but there are many things about the contemporary academic world that push, consciously or not, in that direction. There is now so much literature on so many different topics that a scholar inevitably seems a bit amateurish even when she ventures only slightly outside of her field. My knee-jerk reaction against Feynman's uninhibited interdisciplinarity comes at least in part form this sense that he hasn't been trained properly! The alternatives, as I've described them, are perhaps drawn a bit too starkly, but in practice the extremes seem a lot more common than the middle ground.

It wasn't always thus. We don't begrudge Kant the fact that he dabbled in astronomy, and we certainly don't think any less of Benjamin Franklin for being self-conscious polymath. Even in the twentieth century there were still prodigies who mastered multiple fields even if they were only well-known in one. What's wrong with Feynman is not his curiosity and willingness to engage with other scholars, it's his conviction that the things that made him a great physicist--inventiveness, a willingness to work through problems, a healthy spirit of competition, plus a great deal of inborn mathematical skill--were also the things that would make him qualified to lord it over mere biologists or philosophers. In fact, his view of the problem of polymathy seems to have foundered on his superficial view of mastery. The way he tells it, what matters is the flashy entrance, the instant solution, the clever trick--in short, things that make good stories but poor scholarship.

The closest living analogue to Feynman is probably Malcolm Gladwell, who never had a home field of expertise at all. Like many other academics, I've railed against Gladwell's glibness and fondness for pat conclusions. But I'm beginning to recognize some of the value of Gladwell's approach, and more importantly, I've begun to understand its causes. Hyperspecialization and superficial polymathy are not mutually exclusive: the former leads directly to the latter. The only person capable of building bridges between disciplines today is someone wholly uninvested in the specialized scholarly reverberations of his attempts to generalize. Gladwell and Feynman continue to appeal because they offer the promise of participating in scholarship without being torn apart by its involution.

I am nothing like Feynman; I move my sights a couple thousand miles or a few decades and immediately start thinking of myself as a dabbler. I would, however, like to see a working model for generalists that doesn't make specialists cry and keeps the audience somehow involved in the outcome of the scholarly process. The only way to do that, I suspect, is to encourage more generalists, and encourage them in such a way that the worst excesses of the Feynman approach remain limited. If we have competing generalizing theories and approaches, ones that even non-specialists can have a stake in, then finally the arguments of specialists will begin to make some sense. The collapse of broad-goal-oriented scholarship (certainly in the humanities and perhaps in the sciences as well) since the 1970s, while by and large a positive development methodologically, has not produced the kind of positive rethinking that looks increasingly necessary. We just keep doing the same thing we did before and pretend that it all somehow makes sense. So let a thousand general flowers bloom, or something.