After I took a single, basic class from Academie Duello in Vancouver, B.C. (which I highly recommend) I started to think about the people who lived in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In school, I was taught that in the past, because there was less knowledge overall available, and fewer trades and skills that could be practiced, that it was possible to become a Renaissance Man. A Renaissance Man, I was told, had expertise or at least a good understanding of every available craft and skill available of the age. I believe there was also a concept of a Renaissance Woman, though what would define such a person wasn't discussed in class.
The idea was that the Renaissance Man could discuss any subject brought up in conversation, and conversations were very important.
Conversations are important today, but people engage in them without considering what they're doing, which is unfortunate. That's a whole blog post by itself.
He could also do anything required of him in the course of an adventure, and he would, of course, have to be well-traveled, and travel back then was always an adventure.
The R.M. could ride well, shoot well, create an extemporaneous poem worthy of applause, write essays that stood up to criticism, acquit himself well in a duel, understand chemistry, physics, medicine and other sciences as far as they were understood in the day, speak many languages, perhaps even all the known languages of Western Europe and their trade partners, read several languages living and dead of cultures held to be important at the time plus a few languages of people few had ever heard of, etc. He probably wasn't expected to know 'common' trade stuff, so he might not be expected to shoe a horse, though snooty seventeenth century nobles might believe that of course he could if he wanted to he could figure it out. (Not! But you'd never convince them of that.)
Anyway, despite the concept's flaws and not-so-subtle exclusionary ideas that make it more possible to have someone say that you know how to do everything and have others believe that, the idea of the Renaissance Man inspired a great deal of study and effort in a class of people that otherwise might have been at loose ends. To at least be worthy to be in the presence of a Renaissance Man, or hopefully not look like a complete idiot when engaging in conversation with such a person, people read and studied and practiced a variety of skills and bodies of knowledge.
I'll go out on a limb and say that many, if not most people in our very own century learn about stuff that they otherwise might not be interested in so that they can function in today's society too. In order to function within society, we try video games that we hear our friends talking about, watch tv shows, keep up on the news, sports, and so on, even if we weren't initially interested in them, just so we could be a part of our group.
Here's where it gets uncomfortable for me. I want everyone to be uplifted together. I want all of society to become better, smarter, happier, and for everyone to live long, healthy, fulfilling lives … and yet the egalitarian, inclusive, non-judgmental attitudes toward which I lean undermines the advancements I long for. Why? Correct me if I'm wrong (and I hope I am), the very act of deciding that some skills are more important than others is imposing a bias that will necessarily exclude people who don't value the same skills. Can we all agree that certain core skills are essential? Probably not, and some of the skills we consider the most basic are skills that very smart, very skilled people don't have. An example is reading. There are lots of people who can't read who are very skilled and very smart. Therefore, reading, although nice, isn't required and if I force someone to learn to read who doesn't want to, I may not be saving them from ignorance. I might just be wasting their time and making them miserable.
Maybe the answer is that we don't exclude anyone based on what they don't know, but we include and encourage based on what they do know in order to develop a community, even a world, where everyone learns from everyone.
Of course, that would require an ability to communicate through a shared language, be it written or spoken word or some other means. (Languages! They're important!!)
Not that I'm looking for answers to anything. I'm just thinking about what inspired and developed these remarkable Renaissance Men, and what we can do to develop a concept of a World Person or something along those lines to inspire excellence in ourselves and each other. And yes, there are always people who want to keep things the same and who want to control education and force their culture on others, and in the process they force people into survival mode where the only way to make it to the next day is to shut up and keep your head down, and/or isolate people physically, culturally, or both, so that they can't learn and communicate freely from others. I'm not planning on fighting them. I'd just like to get people to think about what they can learn and want to learn, what's important to learn, vs. what we do learn passively.
Because our brains are constantly learning. The Renaissance Man had a list of stuff he needed and wanted to know, and he worked very hard to accumulate the learning he valued in order to function as best he could in his society. I think a lot of people don't just fail to think about how limited their time is or what they're doing, they fail to think about what they're learning. Given a choice between learning how to get to the next level on Candy Crush vs. learning a new language, I think most people would go for the game. Me too. And yet, I value the new language more. I need inspiration, a concept to strive for, to motivate me to spend at least some of my time to study that new language, otherwise, I'm going to play the game.
Does that mean we need social pressure in order to become capable and educated?
Capable. Educated. I'm sure in part my sense of our forebears being more educated and capable is skewed by the fact that the people and things that are recorded by history are the exceptional things and people. It still seems that in bygone eras, if for no other reason than social and physical survival, people had to be more capable and independent. Otherwise, they would starve. Even the nobles, if they were excluded from society because they were uneducated boors, ran the risk of losing status, money, their holdings, and ultimately lose their good family name which turned them into the commoners they didn't understand and could not live among. And they'd either die out or their families would eventually become part of the lower classes, indistinguishable from family lines who never had wealth or status.
Not necessarily a bad fate for uneducated boors …. They might even learn something useful, perhaps even great and wonderful.
During this time period, the lower classes in Western Europe and later in America became more and more able through industry and education to become more than what their forebears could ever dream of becoming. This led to our current society … which now seems a bit lost. People want wealth. Sometimes they want power too, but mostly I think that most people want just enough power that they have agency. But how they try to get that money and power seems to be based on things that have nothing to do with what they actually have some control over: their skill base and their education. To our Renaissance forebears, these things were obvious. You had to have skills and you had to become as educated as possible to survive and thrive. Everything else was stuff that undermined your health and wealth, like gambling, drinking to excess, etc. You know, the usual.
Do we have more destructive distractions than our forebears? Yes, but quantity doesn't matter. Even if there was one destructive distraction in the world, you'd still have the ability to do that instead of something awesome with your time.
In school, when we learned about the Renaissance Man, I learned about the concept of specialization, and how in America and much of Western Europe we're living in an era of specialists. At the time, I felt a shiver. I'm still shivering, and it's growing stronger. I don't want people to be so reliant on the infrastructure that the reliance itself collapses the infrastructure. But more, I see the potential that's lost. With this infrastructure and culture that allows and even encourages insane levels of specialization to the point where people don't even have to know how to cook beyond pushing a few buttons, I fear that as a culture, we're not as able to troubleshoot and solve problems outside our specialties.
I think that we can do better than this. I'm watching other cultures do better than this, and I want our culture to learn from them and from our forebears, because:
We as a species can solve the world's most daunting problems if we decide to make ourselves capable of solving them. We just have to decide on the knowledge and skills we'll require to solve them, and make those socially, culturally valuable to as many people as possible. If billions of people decided that in order to be someone of worth you had to know these things and be able to do these other things that will save the world and then went out and learned and did them, just as the western world once decided what things a Renaissance Man ought to know and then Renaissance Men went out and learned those things ….
I think the result would be remarkable.
I don't think it's possible or right to regulate or insert stuff into public educational systems. That never works out. But we can learn from each other, broaden our horizons to go with the cliché phrase, and encourage each other to cram as much valuable stuff as we can into our skulls. What we choose to cram in must remain individual choice or the beauty of unique voices and cultural experiences are lost. But the idea of actively striving for something like the Renaissance Man … is it possible to bring that to life in our day and age without incurring severe social consequences that are worse than the problems we solve?
That unanswerable question may be a bigger question, and a bigger problem, than the ones that come first to my mind when I think about the world's woes and how we can help save it.