Every once in a while, I will come across some mention of Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo or Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Jefferson, and this always gets me to thinking, and asking a question which is at the end of this blog post.
These men were all known as “Renaissance Men.” The more technical term is “polymath,” meaning, someone who is really really good at a lot of different things.
You can look up some of these polymaths on wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Renaissance_men
If you look at that wikipedia page, you may be surprised, as I was, to find out just how many of these people there have been. We’re not talking someone who dabbled in a lot of different things as a hobby. We’re not talking about jacks of all trades. We’re talking about people who were the best in the world at several things. Try to imagine if Michael Jordan found a cure for cancer, while he was touring as the best concert violinist in the world. That’s kind of what we’re talking about here, without too much exaggeration.
The question I keep asking myself is, how come we don’t have any equivalent renaissance men today? It’s not like they all lived in Italy in 1500. We had Thomas Jefferson. We had Benjamin Franklin. How come we don’t have a senior senator who is also a fabulous poet or painter?
If you read this blog regularly, you know I am generally somewhat skeptical and cynical. And I’m starting to wonder if it’s possible, in modern-day America, for us to have a real live Renaissance man at all.
For one thing, would even be possible for one person to manage to get all the necessary credentials and approvals needed to be allowed to design the biggest Christian church in the world, if they were also very busy doing city planning and sculpture all day long? Is there any public school system that is really designed to handle a 12-year-old Renaissance kid? With all the emphasis on no child left behind, have we made allowances for the possibility of there being one child leaving all of us behind? And if the kid did have that much talent, would it be possible for them to branch out in six or seven different areas of study all the same time? The very idea of a typical school bureaucracy trying to handle such a kid makes me roll my eyes.
I’m not saying we need to develop 5000 Renaissance men. I’m just wondering why it is that we don’t have any. Given just how much larger the world population is, statistical analysis demands that there be such potential in existence right now. Somehow, da Vinci and Michelangelo, without the Internet, managed to do all this stuff. I’m not sure what our excuse is.
© Justin Locke
