When he was 88 years old, the physicist Freeman Dyson was asked by journalist Charles Nevin to reflect on having spent “60 years in the same job.” Among his various reflections, Dyson chose also to provide a word of counsel to younger people, just starting their careers: “…do not imagine that you have to know everything before you can do anything. My own best work was done when I was most ignorant.”
Now, there is, surely, much merit to be found in the conventional wisdom which suggests that with experience comes greater insight and discernment, the sort of the thinking underlying the advice to avoid reading works of authors published before they were 40. However, one wonders if there is something to the opposite view: That there is some quality about being a novice (or at least not being a long-standing professional in a given field) that may be conducive to originality. Through some combination of being liberated from a field’s established ways of doing things or having an income independent of the powers-that-be in the discipline, it is the amateur—oftentimes—who helps to push a discipline forward.
A look to history seems to confirm this. In 1755, an anonymous author in Germany—drawing, in part, from the findings of two previous astronomers—published a work suggesting that there might exist “innumerable spheres or sidereal heavens in the finite universe.” In what would be the first published text of his career, he put forward the notion that there were perhaps endless versions of our own galaxy. The young author proposing this then-unorthodox idea would later be identified as none other than the philosopher Immanuel Kant, who, in the early part of his career, dabbled in subjects ranging from theology to physics and hardly confined himself only to the discipline for which he would later become best known.
Similar examples abound. Some are, indeed, from the days before the onset of what the economist Jacob Viner identified in 1950 as the most pressing threat then facing the academy: hyper-specialization or, as he put it, “to see the world through the eye of a needle.” The Age of Enlightenment was surely also the days of the polymaths and autodidacts. But even more recently, there have been the amateur mathematicians, such as President James Garfield, who famously developed an original proof of the Pythagorean Theorem while serving in Congress (and with little formal training in mathematics). Then, just this past year, a 26-year-old MIT graduate developed a model of the Coronavirus pandemic’s likely spread from his parent’s living room that was more accurate than those financed and championed by the world’s leading public health institutions.
The remarkable achievements by amateurs in a variety of disciplines are particularly worth recognizing today, when myriad surveys suggest that universities, the homes of the seasoned professionals, are becoming increasingly intolerant of free expression and unhampered inquiry. Today, this is likely a much greater threat to discovery than the hyper-specialization Viner warned of. Following ideas wherever they lead—even when they contradict cherished ideological commitments—is no longer in vogue. One, thus, wonders if part of the solution is to encourage there to be more “amateur historians” and “amateur sociologists,” who, like some of the well-known amateur astronomers of the last century, will choose to work outside of the institutional constraints of academia, even if they are themselves classically trained. After all, Dyson’s concept of “ignorance” could apply just as much to an ignorance of current academic norms as to this idea of the brash youth pursuing ideas unencumbered by a discipline’s established dogma.
As such, there is more to this conversation about amateurism than simply affirming the theory that the more years one spends immersed in a subject, the less original or less intellectual brazen he becomes. (It is more than just acquiescing to historian Robert Conquest’s dictum that “Everyone is conservative about that which he knows most about.”) Today, in an age when diverging from the consensus on subjects ranging from the proper response to a health crisis to the best course of action to address inequalities is punishable by deplatforming, difficulty in securing academic posts, or being laughed out of so-called polite society, we may need to rediscover the power of amateurism in investigating ideas—or at least as a complement to those still working from within the universities and think tanks.
After all, a brief look at history makes clear that it has often been those who might have been derided as “laymen” or “dilettantes” who have been the ones to break new ground. Or, as George Santyana suggested, for a thinker to be at his best it was necessary, at times, to roam “wander alone like the rhinoceros”—formal institutions and their established ways of doing things left far behind.
