A monument to the idea

Reading the many Steve Jobs obituaries that appeared following the Apple CEO’s death last week, I was struck by the difficulty the writers had in defining exactly what it was he did. Was he a technologist? A designer? An engineer? A businessman? It’s hard to say. Jobs didn’t have a university degree. He didn’t dedicate his time to any one particular narrow endeavor. His remit was broad; his influence sweeping. The New Yorker’s Ken Auletta described him as a “bridge”.

What he was was a bridge – between businessmen and technology, between designers and technology, between animators and engineers and the public. Here’s an example. When I was writing my book on Google, I would sit in at meetings there and understand half the words – they might as well have been speaking Swahili to me. Jobs never spoke that way. You understood him. Engineers are brilliant – they have all sorts of ideas. But without someone like Jobs to translate their work, they could never cross that divide.

That’s another way of saying that Jobs was a multi-disciplinarian. It wasn’t easy to categorise what Jobs did, because he didn’t operate in just one category. He was a generalist with wide vision. Sometimes this quality is referred to, with some deprecation, as ‘Jack of all trades, master of none’. It deservers better treatment than that.

It was Jobs’ ability to think outside the restrictions of any given field that made him special. As a visionary with bold ideas – a thinker, to put it simply – he created digital devices and delivery systems that up-ended the music, media, and communications industries. It’s unlikely any of his disruptive innovations – the iPod, iTunes, the iPhone, the iPad – would come from within any one of those industries.

There is debate about whether or not Jobs’ contribution to technology and media will ultimately be considered positive – critics think he presided over a walled-garden business model that compromised freedom at the altar of profit; consumers simply voted with their dollars – but it can’t be denied that his efforts were brilliant and the impacts far-reaching.

Jobs is just one example of how intuition and imagination are as important as specialist skill, knowledge, and discipline when it comes to, as he would say, putting “a dent in the universe”.

In the last few thousand years of thought, specialists have rightly been held up as the great heroes of intellectual achievement. Socrates the philosopher. Darwin the naturalist. Einstein the physicist. Tesla the inventor and engineer.

But there are exceptions. Isaac Newton, like Jobs, didn’t fit so easily into one category. He was a physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian. Leonardo Da Vinci was a painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist, and writer. (For the record, I don’t think Jobs should be held in the same regard as these great thinkers – he is merely a topical analogue.)

As we continue to evolve and move into an era of hyper-available information, we should hope for more Newtons and Da Vincis stepping up to answer life’s big questions.

For that to happen, universities should drop their common insistence on course specialisation – the idea of having a ‘major’ is outdated and, while good for some, is ultimately limiting. Students should of course still have the option to specialise in one subject, but they should be encouraged to dig in new directions, to chase fairies through enchanted gardens, and to commit to a scholarship that links sciences with the humanities (and even, if they must, commerce).

We are in a better position than ever to answers life’s biggest questions: Is there a God? What is the meaning of life? What way of organising society is most in harmony with our biology, evolutionary history, and social behaviour? How do we achieve happiness? Can we end armed conflict, and, if so, how?

Answers to these questions have long been sought, but they have been confined, largely, to philosophers who weren’t exposed to the vast scholarship and science that today is available at the end of a Google search. Socrates with Wikipedia would have been a towering prospect.

It’s time to attempt to answer these questions because we are now in the privileged position of having instant, easy, and free access to centuries of accumulated knowledge. Thanks to the internet, this vast bank of knowledge – complete with detailed histories, rich scholarship, and succinct synopses – is immediately accessible, easily digested, and spreadable on a scale that 20 years ago we couldn’t have imagined.

Jared Diamond is a prime example of a modern generalist who is helping us understand life and the planet in ways that were previously mysterious. In his books Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse, he traces the course of human history and lays out how we became who we are today – why certain cultures are richer than others, why some societies thrive while others suffer, and how powerful empires meet their demise. Diamond, in the Newton mould, is a cross-disciplinarian of the highest order. Here’s how he describes it in the introduction to Guns, Germs, and Steel:

My mother is a teacher and linguist; my father, a physician specialising in the genetics of childhood diseases… I went through school expecting to become a physician. I had also become a fanatical bird-watcher by the age of seven. It was thus an easy step, in my last undergraduate year at university, to shift from my initial goal of medicine to the goal of biological research. However, throughout my school and undergraduate years, my training was mainly in languages, history, and writing. Even after deciding to obtain a Ph.D. in physiology, I nearly dropped out of science during my first year of graduate school to become a linguist.

Since completing my Ph.D. in 1961, I have divided my scientific research efforts between two fields: molecular physiology on the one hand, evolutionary biology and biogeography on the other hand…

My speciality is bird evolution, which I have studied in South America, southern Africa, Indonesia, Australia, and especially New Guinea. Through living with native peoples of these areas, I have become familiar with many technologically primitive human societies, from those of hunter-gatherers to those of tribal farmers and fishing peoples who depended until recently on stone tools.

Diamond possesses the wide vision and broad wisdom necessary for building a narrative greater than the sum of its parts – for making sense of a jumble of information that otherwise would be considered only in silos.

We owe massive intellectual debt and gratitude to the likes of Socrates, Einstein, and Darwin for laying the groundwork from which all of today’s society benefits. But we also owe it to those thinkers to move a step beyond their findings and start tackling the questions that they were never equipped to answer. We have the tools at our everyday disposal.

It’s time to shake off the tyranny of tunnel vision. Bring on the generalists, celebrate the visionary, and let’s start joining the dots of our existence.