Wade's Map of Arizona
I admit, I’m somewhat of a dilettante, a generalist, a dabbler. I have an interest in many things, but I don’t need to be an expert at them. There are too many interesting topics, and not enough time to explore every angle.
In Plato’s ideal of The Republic, each person has one job, and he’s an expert at that job. If he dabbles in other things, he becomes mediocre at everything. If it makes me mediocre to dabble, then so be it. I’d rather follow my own adventures, travel my own path through different topics and experiences than to obsess on one thing all the time.
Late last year, Wade was traveling through Arizona and came to the conclusion that it’s not possible to travel the world. His map of the state tells it all. In two months’ time, he was barely able to cover a fraction of the map.
The same thing goes for exploring a topic through books and travel, movies and discussions. I’ve been talking about cannibalism in literature as part of my world food travel adventures on the home site. And while exploring the Internet references to cannibalism, I have come to realize that I have traveled about as much of the topic as Wade was able to cover of Arizona.
There is so much literature out there, discussions about gruesome fairy tales, man-eating giants from ancient Greece, and tales of man meat markets in China. There are tales of survival cannibalism from Europe in the middle ages to colonial Jamestown, the Donner party and that sports team that crash landed in the Andes in the 1970s. Then there are all these movies I could watch, from horror to comedy to human interest. I couldn’t possibly make time to read or watch everything on the topic, to explore every segment of the map. And I don’t feel the need to experience this one for myself.
But that’s OK. I can only share those travels I’ve actually made, and I don’t have to cover every inch. I’ll leave the rest of the details to others. The world is made up of many, many people, after all. We should simply share the load.
This is a very clutch idea: to bring the topic of knowledge aquisition strategies to the forfront is to open up a big topic! I like it. Each thing that you make headway to learn takes an investment of life time. To put time into learning one thing is often at the expense of learning others. Knowledge really is a mutually exclusive endeavor: the person who is an expert in Chinese history may be completely useless if put in a situation where he had top build a shelter, and, likewise, the carpenter may find himself at odds if he tries to climb a mountain. I suppose if people want to stay in their sphere of comfort their whole lives then specialization of knowledge may be of essence, but if you want to $move, grow, be prepared in unfamiliar circumstances, then a general knowledge is key.
This latter form of knowledge is often shunned by the experts or the academics but I think it opens up far more avenues for learning, experience, living.
If you have a general knowledge set you can become specialized if the situation calls for it. If you know only one thing, you are stuck with it.
As I travel I know that I am not going to experience even a small portion of the planet, but I am gaining a general idea of what is here, and I know that if I ever wanted to speciize in one region, I would have a good start. Though I, too, prefer my general knowledge and experience.
It takes all kinds of people to keep balance. The world needs academics with the focus to make advancements in a field of specialization. It needs scientists with the patience and tenacity to endure what seems to others like nanoscopic progress, day after day.
But it also needs those who can communicate and bridge gaps, those who can adapt and connect. I often feel that this shunning of which you speak is a symptom of insecurity, a tendency to interpret other-mindedness as inferior, to raise themselves on a cracked and creaking pedestal where they can look down on others, unaware they’re on very shaky ground.
Ah well. If we were all the same, life would be pretty boring indeed.