It’s hard to say exactly why I found Edward Carr’s article on polymaths so irritating, but I suspect it was this bit:
The monomaths do not only swarm over a specialism, they also play dirty. In each new area that Posner picks–policy or science–the experts start to erect barricades. “Even in relatively soft fields, specialists tend to develop a specialised vocabulary which creates barriers to entry,” Posner says with his economic hat pulled down over his head. “Specialists want to fend off the generalists. They may also want to convince themselves that what they are doing is really very difficult and challenging. One of the ways they do that is to develop what they regard a rigorous methodology–often mathematical.
“The specialist will always be able to nail the generalists by pointing out that they don’t use the vocabulary quite right and they make mistakes that an insider would never make. It’s a defence mechanism. They don’t like people invading their turf, especially outsiders criticising insiders. So if I make mistakes about this economic situation, it doesn’t really bother me tremendously. It’s not my field. I can make mistakes. On the other hand for me to be criticising someone whose whole career is committed to a particular outlook and method and so on, that is very painful.”
Yes, that’s right. People working in a scholarly field develop specialized jargon and rigorous methodology just because they’re scared of Richard Posner and his enormous brain. And it gets better– the next paragraph quotes somebody from Mensa.
I have to say, though, as a physicist, it’s nice to see an article like this where the arrogant assholes aren’t physicists. In academia, physicists have a reputation for extreme arrogance, earned in large part by doing more or less what Posner talks about– barging into another field, ignoring all previous work on the subject, and proclaiming that they have made great new discoveries. Granted, the author isn’t trying to make Posner sound like an asshole– he’s supposed to be one of the heroes of the piece– but you take what you can get.
The factual basis of the article is fairly uncontroversial– modern scholarship has grown very specialized, so it’s difficult for any one person to make significant contributions to more than one discipline. The general tone of most of the pro-polymath comments, though, makes it sound like that may not be such a bad thing…