Generalists Wanted

March 21, 2025 by J.B. Shurk

Of all the pernicious concepts infecting minds today, perhaps none is more harmful than the belief that only “specialists” can tackle complex problems. Strange as it might seem, “specialization” is a very recent human phenomenon. Smart and capable people in the past did not limit their studies to particular subjects or avoid novel ideas emerging in unfamiliar fields. Thinkers acquired and applied knowledge wherever they could.

Mathematician and Catholic cleric Nicolaus Copernicus not only developed the heliocentric model of the universe, but also formulated the “quantity theory of money” linking inflation directly to the amount of money in circulation. The plays and poetry of William Shakespeare not only establish him as arguably the greatest writer to have ever lived, but also reveal his philosophical sophistication and proficiency in the modern fields of psychology and sociology. Leonardo da Vinci was not only a master painter, but also an engineer, biologist, physicist, inventor, and military tactician. We call these geniuses “polymaths” and “Renaissance men” today because they contributed so much to so many different subject areas. As a critique against the twenty-first century’s obsession with subject-matter “specialists,” perhaps Copernicus, Shakespeare, and da Vinci should also be remembered as accomplished “generalists.”

Can you imagine one of today’s tenured “experts” from the mathematics or economics department of a modern university admonishing Copernicus for having published theoretical ideas well outside his canon law studies in the Catholic Church? Or a political science or philosophy professor dismissing Shakespeare as a clever rhymer who was nonetheless out of his depth with regard to international relations and theories of the human mind? Or an engineer or architect spurning da Vinci for being a mere portraitist? Of course not. All of these academic “specialties” and every other discipline with a department on a college campus stand on the broad shoulders of the great “generalists” of the past.

Until recently, smart and curious people were encouraged to learn about everything they could.

America’s second president, John Adams, was a farmer and famous Massachusetts lawyer. However, when the War for American Independence broke out, he vigorously studied economic theory and military strategy. As America’s representative in various foreign courts, it was imperative for Adams to speak competently about such matters. He did not throw up his hands and wonder, “What’s a poor country lawyer to do?” He got to work and became an expert.

America’s third president, Thomas Jefferson, despised the drift toward “specialization” already evident in his day. A lawyer and farmer like Adams, Jefferson was also an architect, inventor, engineer, political philosopher, and classicist — one of our country’s exceptional polymaths and a remarkable “generalist.” In his personal correspondence, he regularly advised family members and friends to study Latin and Greek and to spend time reading the great histories of the past. When he founded the University of Virginia, he created an academic curriculum that provided students a broad foundation of knowledge in every field. Jefferson understood why a mathematician should also be a historian and why a linguist should also be a philosopher. Mastery of many subjects produces masterful thinkers!

For the longest time, American colleges followed Jefferson’s lead. They provided students with liberal arts educations that could be described as “interdisciplinary” in nature. Ralph Waldo Emerson — the nineteenth-century intellectual, essayist, and traveling lecturer — spoke and wrote about numerous subjects over the years: moral philosophy, social theory, religion, history, literature, experimental science, and whatever else was on his mind. Having heavily influenced other great writers and thinkers of his age — including Walt Whitman; Henry David Thoreau; and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. — Emerson helped to unleash a uniquely American “Renaissance” that celebrated human individuality, freedom, and self-reliance. A “generalist” in every sense of the word, Emerson described his own work succinctly: “the infinitude of the private man.” The human mind, Emerson argued for half a century, is capable of anything.

Emerson’s can-do intellectualism fostered a rambunctiously American entrepreneurial spirit. Inventors and innovators such as Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and George Westinghouse — men with little formal education — reshaped American industry and changed the world. No one told them, “Sorry, you haven’t earned the proper engineering degrees to produce automobiles, phonographs, movie cameras, light bulbs, or alternating electric currents.” They used their brains to imagine things that did not yet exist in our world, and then they turned those creative impulses into concrete realities. The technological revolution of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was soaked in American ingenuity, marinated in intellectual freedom, and built by spectacular “generalists” who believed in “the infinitude of the private man.”

Knowledge belongs to anyone stubborn enough and courageous enough to hunt it down. And it is a hunt! You cannot pick knowledge up at the grocery store, sitting on the shelf next to twenty varieties of the exact same thing. You have to go out into the world or peer deep inside the farthest reaches of your mind with the vigor of an explorer committed to making a great discovery. No degree bestows genius; changing the world often requires swallowing a bitter cocktail of gumption, grit, curiosity, creativity, and hard work.

Take a good look at those ingredients. When was the last time you heard a civic leader, teacher, or politician use those words when describing what it will take for the generations alive today to imagine and build the future? Instead, we hear programmed people delivering ad nauseam the same A.I.-generated “woke” scripts: diversity, inclusion, equity, racism, white supremacy, transgenderism, and global warming. These words are not ingredients for success. They are not virtues or lofty ambitions or prescriptions for self-reliance. They are “scare words” imbued with a sense of magic meant to induce everyone who hears them to obey and chant the same things. They are code words invoked to pacify inquiring minds and, in turn, to encode everyone in society to behave the same way.

But brilliant “generalists” do not obey, mimic, or behave. They break things. They take existing paradigms and shatter them into a thousand pieces on the floor. They reimagine the universe without Earth in the center, string together subversive ideas like iambic pentameter pearls, and design mechanical marvels centuries before their time. They rebel against aristocratic central governments and construct political systems in which power originates with the people and in which the protection of an individual’s life, liberty, and property remains paramount. They reject “the courtly muses of Europe” (and the suffocating tenets of “political correctness”) and call for American scholars to free themselves from the cognitive shackles that hobble independent thought. They invent things. They build things. They dream, question, fail, and try again. They risk everything. In short, they do.

What does it say about our society that most artists, academics, writers, and reporters all believe and say the same things? What does it say about our universities that most professors are creatures of the socialist left, that “speech codes” are enforced, that “safe spaces” are monitored for protection, and that “politically incorrect” thoughts are denigrated? What does it say about our scientists that they defend their opinions with religious fervor and censor opposing points of view? What does it say about our white-collared professionals and government bureaucrats that they ridicule public dissent as “disinformation” or “misinformation” and justify their own policies as the products of unimpeachable “expertise”?

All these pathologies suggest that our society is riddled by tyranny and groupthink. Ours is a world where “experts” repeat falsehoods, and regular people are expected to treat those falsehoods as magical “truths.” Obedience has displaced originality. Mimicry has supplanted imagination.

To free ourselves, we must think for ourselves.