savvy generalist, The

Some years ago I had a brief and undistinguished career as a member of the executive staff of a foundation. I was a "philanthropoid," so to speak. One day our staff of six found itself discussing what knowledge and skill we needed to deal with the numerous and varied requests for support that came our way. They came from various sources: colleges and universities, scientific foundations, social and humanitarian agencies, religious groups, interracial, international, intercultural programs, and experiments invented by individuals who were sure they had discovered something new to save the world. Our staff job was to study and evaluate these requests and reject most while sending a few to the all-powerful board, which made the final decisions. What kind of expertise did we need to make sound recommendations and rejections of all the various requests? Finally our director gave us his judgment: "We have to be savvy generalists."

A savvy generalist is one who does not claim to be an expert in a particular field but can spot a genuine expert when he sees one. The tendency in the sciences as well as the humanities is toward concentration on one particular aspect of knowledge to the point where one can converse intelligently only with others in the same field who have a comparable degree of specialized knowledge. Thus, one who seeks knowledge ends up by specialization on some aspect of a large field until one knows a lot about a relatively small area of the cultural knowledge. All things are judged, inevitable, by the way they affect one's specialty. A savvy generalist might be defined as one who knows a little about a lot. The generalist is most sensitive to the way in which fields of knowledge should interact with one another. He or she is an expert at spotting the vital connections between different areas of knowledge that make any specialty more understandable and more useful to the community as a whole. Here are some examples of what I mean.

Edward O. Wilson, in his book, Consilience, defines that unfamiliar word thus: "A jumping together of knowledge as a result of the linking of facts and fact-based theory across disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanation." For example, industrialists and economists need to get together with environmentalists and natural scientists so that, in the effort to speed industrial expansion and profits, we do not destroy the resources and biodiversity of the earth, which is the basic source of all wealth. Economic reports of lumber and paper companies do not reflect the longrange costs of destroying forests and the plants and animals they have produced and nourished over hundreds of centuries.

Nuclear scientists and military leaders need to talk with politically mature and internationally minded leaders who understand and will try to control the proliferation of nuclear weapons and our mistaken dependence on the deceptive safety they offer. We are lucky to have organizations like Scientists for Social Responsibility. The nuclear clock is moving toward midnight again.

In the field of human health we could use a greater concern for wholeness. The orthopedic surgeon who did a wonderfully skillful job on my broken leg a couple of years ago asked me how I was. "Okay," I replied, "but I'm having some pain around my hip."

"I wouldn't know about that," he said as he left the room Psychologists and psychiatrists, as well as clergy and educators, need to confer and share their knowledge about human health and wholeness with medical specialists.

It is a time for the savvy generalists to make themselves heard as we wander through the dangerous landscape of our random, undisciplined information explosion. As Wilson remarks, "We are drowning in information while starving for wisdom."

Copyright The Human Quest Nov/Dec 1998
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