The genuine polymath is still one in a million

We live at a time of universal polymathy. We don’t know everything, but there’s not much difficulty in being able to discover any given truth. But it’s worth remembering just how hard it used to be to find things out. Thirty years ago if you wanted to research off your own bat it meant a trip to the public library — and perhaps filling out a form for an inter-library loan. Or you could try your luck in a bookshop, new or secondhand. The whole process took a long time, and most people stayed within their professional competence or enthusiasm, frankly admitting to ignorance outside those limits. It was the age of the specialist, memorably captured by Michael Frayn in Donkeys’ Years and the character of Kenneth Snell:

Take me, for instance. I’m working on parasitic infestation of the small intestine. Now, I can trace my path into the small intestine. I can follow it step by step from when I was four years old, and I first observed regurgitation. A herring gull at Llandudno, in North Wales, as it happened, and curiously enough it was near Cardiff in South Wales that I first became involved with intestinal worms, which is the other strand of the story. Now, I can remember when I first got the job I thought, the possibilities are endless! The whole alimentary canal lies open to me!

These days, thanks to the internet, research takes just a moment, though it may be grossly inaccurate. A reliable book on the subject can be downloaded in seconds or an out-of-print volume ordered. Whether you can understand the argument once you’ve read it is another matter, though you can always pretend. The past few weeks have turned many of us into amateur epidemiologists with decided views on R numbers, while lovers of political theories of control happily bandy about what Giorgio Agamben said about ‘the state of exception’.