Who are you?

Who are you, human? Hedgehog? Or fox? Specialist? Or generalist? Do you dive deep? Or skim far? The fact is, although the fox/hedgehog dichotomy speaks to a certain truth in human motivation, it is a binary, circumscribing two discrete and independent camps: either/or, black or white, deep or broad. Such a dichotomy does not conceive of the vast spectrum between the poles. You may find certain qualities of the hedgehog endearing, while lauding the fox for others. Your interests most likely lie somewhere on this spectrum, as do mine — though I confess I am partial to the fox.

This now famous aphorism was coined by the warrior-poet Archilochus in the 6th c. BCE in reference to the stalemate between agile horsemen and synchronised hoplites, the former capable of attacking and retreating at will from all directions, the latter forming an impenetrable unit whose mastery of close-quarter defensive combat was unsurpassed. It was popularised in an essay on literary theory entitled The Hedgehog and the Fox, by 20th c. scholar and historian of ideas, Isaiah Berlin, who sought to divide great thinkers into two categories of differing worldviews. According to him, this proverb concealed a richer meaning:

Scholars have differed about the correct interpretation of these dark words, which may mean no more than that the fox, for all his cunning, is defeated by the hedgehog’s one defence. But, taken figuratively, the words… mark one of the deepest differences which divide writers and thinkers, and, it may be, human beings in general. For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single, universal, organizing principle… — and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory… The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes.¹

No judgment is made here as to the superiority of one path over another. Insofar as all humans — that I know of, at least — wish for their lives to be meaningful, both paths are intellectually and artistically viable. Whether you are a professor emeritus of neuroscience, or a multi-instrumentalist jazz, rock and blues musician, you derive meaning from what you do, and your life is richer for it. Within the context of our developed societies though, the same cannot be said about the economic viability of both paths.

Unquestionably, the prevailing worldview favours hedgehogs.

Through the division of labour and free market forces, our academic institutions have been hitched to the global economy — a World Machine in which you are trained to be a cog with a single set of specialised functions. By means of the exchange mechanisms of supply and demand, the advantages you gain from specialising may be shared with others, in principle accelerating scientific progress and technological innovation and enriching society. But forego specialising, and risk being cast aside by the invisible hand of the market.

The market determines what is “practical” and what is not. The government of Japan has gone so far as to slash funding for the humanities and social sciences in 2015, citing the need for more practical vocational education. Such drastic quasi-authoritarian measures to increase productivity threaten the livelihoods of specialists and generalists alike, while further undermining efforts to unite academic knowledge.

Consider renowned evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould’s explanation of the contrasting value of these two surface-level woodland antagonists:

Foxes (the great ones, not the shallow or showy grazers) owe their reputation to a light (but truly enlightening) spread of real genius across many fields of study… Hedgehogs (the great ones, not the pedants) locate one vitally important mine, where their particular and truly special gifts cannot be matched.²

Gould goes on to argue that, just as the paths of the fox and hedgehog are both intrinsically valuable in their own right to society, so too would the union of the sciences and the humanities not fail to enrich human culture:

I use the fox and hedgehog as my model for how the sciences and humanities should interact because I believe that neither pure strategy can work… The way of the hedgehog cannot suffice because the sciences and humanities, by the basic logics of their disparate enterprises, do different things, each equally essential to human wholeness.

In pushing the boundaries of scientific or artistic excellence, the hedgehog specialises at the frontiers of human ingenuity, building the magnificent edifice of knowledge, pixel by pixel. In contrast, the fox moves orthogonally to the hedgehog — it ranges laterally across many domains, forming unlikely relations between ideas by analogy, and constellating clusters of knowledge. By leaps of intuition, the fox is able to seek out unfamiliar pixels, unite divergent branches of thought, open dormant channels of communication (even across the two-cultures divide that separates the sciences from the humanities) and disseminate ideas far and wide.

Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars — Walter Benjamin

Sometimes, the fox’s groundbreaking intuition uncovers an inconvenient truth that risks toppling whole systems of belief — consider the counterculture efforts of some of our greatest iconoclastic foxes, e.g., Poggio Bracciolini (dissemination of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, 1473), Galileo Galilei (support for Heliocentrism, 1609), Thomas Paine (Rights of Man, 1791), Charles Darwin (Theory of Evolution, 1859), Pablo Picasso (Cubism, 1907), James Joyce (Ulysses, 1922), Noam Chomsky (The Responsibility of Intellectuals, 1967), Elon Musk (Tesla & SpaceX, 2002–3). Whether scientific, philosophical, artistic, technological or political in nature, their challenges to the status quo generated lasting systemic change.

Unfortunately, elegantly rebellious though the figurative fox may be, its romantic unpredictability has, economically speaking, little in the way of market value in our excellence-oriented and risk-averse world. This, of course, disregards outliers such as very successful entrepreneurs and astronauts — who aren’t representative of the average population.

To me at least, it seems the fox is in danger of being tamed.

When hedgehogs are inordinately favoured at the expense of foxes, lateral thinking is stymied, the dissemination of knowledge slows to a trickle, knowledge silos proliferate, and the rate of scientific and cultural change stagnates. How do we save the fox from conformity and annihilation? How do we unite the causes of fox and hedgehog, and bind together the natural and social sciences so that each may benefit from the expertise and wisdom of the other? In the spirit of the thirteen colonies, how do the many unite forces to become one?

Who are you? Who do you want to be?

E pluribus unum — Out of Many, One.

Who Are You? — Illustration by Vincent B. Poupard

In the next article, we’ll draw up a list of the phenomenal attributes required to bootstrap the human supermind, in:

Part IX. Engineering Collective Superintelligence — Consilience through designed serendipity and conversational critical mass