Foxes and Hedgehogs - Brief Article

Archilochus of Paros, a Greek poet who, as literary folk like to say, "flourished" between 714 and 676 B.C., was known for his vituperative satire. The result is that only brief fragments of his poetry have come down to us. One very brief, and very ambiguous, line of his is Frag. 103: "The fox knows many things. The hedgehog knows only one, but it's a big thing." No doubt it loses a bit of its majestic quality in translation.

Scholars have, as scholars do, argued for centuries over the meaning. Of course, Archilochus was defining, and drawing a careful distinction between, the generalist and the specialist, the gifted all-rounder and the professional, specializing expert. The question is, which side is Archilochus on? Is he on any side? I haven't the foggiest idea. But I know which side I'm on and it's generally a good thing to talk and write about what you know about. This praiseworthy magazine devotes all its space, time, matter, and energy toward being doubtful about ideas expressed by people who only rarely know what they're talking about. It will never run out of material.

As examples of foxes the literary essayist Isaiah Berlin once nominated Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Shakespeare, Moliere, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, and James Joyce. His hedgehogs were Plato, Lucretius, Dante, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, and Proust. There is a third category, which Berlin doesn't mention because, I guess, it's so awfully rare, which includes people like Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Thomas Jefferson, who combine in their natures both fox and hedgehog. Home run sluggers are strictly hedgehogs, while the little guys who regularly poke scratch singles through all parts of the infield, get to first base on bunts, and make it a habit to steal second, are your foxes. Babe Ruth was your quintessential hedgehog. Wee Willie Keeler, who "just hit em where they ain't," was your fox par excellence. Politicians and popes are almost always foxes, economists and saints almost without exception hedgehogs.

When it comes to science (and I'm coming to science, just be patient please), we have a menagerie that is almost entirely made up of hedgehogs. In the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries, before, that is, there were "scientists" (the word was only invented in 1840), there were "natural philosophers" and these were your archetypical foxes almost to a man, but that time is long past. Scientists are specialists now.

There are (or recently were) a few glorious, wondrous exceptions, like Richard Feynman, Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, and Murray Gell-Mann. They were able to unite hedgehog and fox into one stupendous, extraordinary, magnificent chimera that unified into a single, complete, breathtaking whole the best of both worlds, the specialist in A who is also the very knowledgeable generalist in B through Z, or at least through Q. But such people, like Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Jefferson, are rare as hen's teeth, as you would expect with wonders.

Most scientists are now mute, inglorious hedgehogs who know one thing, and are virtually totally unacquainted with anything else. This is because (rather obviously) they must devote all their waking hours to their specialty if they are to have any hope to succeed in being, and staying, a specialist in these days of mindnumbing, overwhelming, incoming data. Do you know anyone who really understands computers who can locate his gluteus maximus, even with both hands and a road map? The nerd is always with us and his name is Expert.

Few of us are lucky enough even to be given the choice: fox or hedgehog, Jack-of-all-science, or Jill-of-the-microbiologyof-the-endomorphology-of-telomericchromatin. For those who have the choice and make one, the wise money and the tenure is with the Jills of this world. The Jacks will never get an article published in Scientific American, win a Nobel Prize, or be profiled by The New Yorker.

Things get worse. Even the man in the street will most often plonk for the narrow expert over the wide amateur. They assume that if only the world was run by experts we'd all be in paradise. The hell we would. And a very wise man named Gordon Drennan who's from Ultimo in New South Wales tells us why in a letter to New Scientist: Because experts focus on their own areas of expertise, they overestimate its value to the big picture. They overestimate its practicality and underestimate its cost and the problems it might involve. Like the man who only has a hammer, they try to use what they know and understand to solve every problem, regardless of other, more effective solutions. A world run by experts would be a disaster.

A world run by experts would be a disaster. Unless the hedgehog is also a fox, the specialist also a pretty fair generalist, Earth is doomed if ruled by experts. And if we can't have the combination of fox and hedgehog (and we almost certainly can't, it is much too improbable) and must choose only the one, let it be the good generalist, the all-rounder. The wise but limited amateur who knows his measure at least as well as he knows the measure of other men, including the experts, the scrappy lefthand hitter who knows how to knock the ball between short and third and deep into the left field corner when infield and outfield are all swung round way over to the right, the Wee Willie Keelers, rather than the mighty sultans of swat who know only one big thing, aim every swing for the bleachers, and so strike out ten times for every homer they hit.