It hasn’t been easy. The world is a complicated place and you have to know so much stuff before you can really be called Renee Sonse, man.
The proposition that we are all becoming overly specialised in our knowledge and skills, and therefore hopelessly ill-equipped to deal with even the smallest philosophical dilemma, is one that has been hanging around for a while now. The observation is usually delivered by some upper-class twit in search of fame and a chin, and they often conclude with an “…unlike those of us lucky enough to have received a classical education” snorty, braying laugh.
I think I can detect a return to a well-rounded generalism among us, though. There is simply too much to read and get across to be a modern Leonardo, but consider the following:
· We are all amateur dieticians. We’ve never been more aware of what we eat, and know that chocolate and beer sit at the top of the pyramid.
· We are all hip to germ theory. We’ve never known more about diseases of the body, just as a general topic of conversation. Christ, it's the fuckin' weather for some people.
· We’ve never known more about diseases of the mind (everybody knows of someone who’s suffered a mental illness without sending them to Bedlam or trying to exorcise the demons). Still nuts though.
· It appears to me that every parent is a keen amateur psychologist. Every single one of them is aware of the nature/nurture argument. You wouldn’t have found that 100 years ago, nor a three-year-old trying to drive your semi-trailor when you weren't looking.
· It’s highly likely we’ve been more places and seen more stuff than any of our ancestors. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t been overseas. Looking around my workplace, in fact, I can’t see anyone who was born here. An idiot is an idiot, whatever the country of birth.
· We all have to be half good at working a computer. Half.
· A cheap, mass produced car in 2009 has more horsepower than cars that used to win Grand Prix fifty years ago. We are all Fangio.
· We are taught very complicated things at school. Things that kept geniuses like Charles Darwin up at night. Any kid who finishes school in Australia with a decent score and a nice balance of science and humanities is going to be across evolution, germ theory, economic theory, reproductive facts, sexual competition, relativity, the internal combustion engine, plate tectonics, cosmology, literature, trigonometry and meteorology. Absolutely no grammar.
A watershed moment illustrating our actual well-roundedness passed recently and I want to mark its occurrence.
Once upon a time when you were at a restaurant, people with very specialised skills served you. There was a maitre d', a sommelier, a waiter, a bus boy and they were all delivering food made by a team of people whose internal hierarchy defies description. “You! You will only make sauce and you will only make salty sauces… for two years! Sauce only!”
The other night, I went to a restaurant with Emergency Contact, sat down, unscrewed the lid on the bottle of wine and poured it with no problems (See? Mad skills that my forebears did not have - I chose the wine and poured it all on my own).
Not only were the staff completely oblivious to my straying into their areas of expertise, the guy who cooked the food also brought us the food and ran the bill afterward. They didn’t even charge me corkage.
No corkage!
People, this is the dawning of a new era. We are pouring our own wine and not paying for the privilege. We are multi-skilling our way out of the dark ages.
