I've had some really vague idea rattling around in my head—or maybe just a loose connection of ideas—that I haven't been able to put together. But it's got something to do with a general, abstract problem that humanity's been working on for a long time, in various ways: how do you categorize all human experience?
You think of all the things human beings can do, say, create, think about, all of it. It's an enormous range of possible activities. How can you sum it all up and give it a table of contents, so to speak? How do you come up with a concise set of abstractions that somehow accounts for every human concern?
There's a lot of different disciplines that have tackled this problem, from different directions. Library science proposes to categorize all human creativity and scholarship. Religious and ethical systems attempt to evaluate and classify human actions according to whether they're beneficial or harmful by some standard or other. Consider the example of the "cardinal sins" of Christianity, lust and sloth and so forth; the seven sins are intended to be an approximately complete list of the ways humans can hurt each other. Certain divinatory systems, like tarot cards and runes, attempt to map human experience onto a set of symbols that represent important human abstractions: "justice", "beginnings", "death".
I've attempted, as much as possible, to be a generalist. A long while ago I came across Terence's famous maxim, homo sum: nihil humanum a me alienum puto. "I am a human being: I think nothing of humanity is strange to me." It's how I've tried to live, usually failing somehow. I used to be very different. I'd soaked up the science-nerd culture of a whıte American high school circa 1990 and I got to sneering at anything that wasn't science. Wasn't science "the truth", the way other subjects weren't? I might have grown up into an Elon Musk fan, if the Fates hadn't intervened.
But I can easily see the attraction of being that sort of person. It makes everything simpler. Believing in "science is true, every other subject is made-up and fake" relieves a person of a lot of difficult choices; your reading list becomes a lot shorter. Why bother to learn anything about art or literature or psychology or whatever? Meanwhile, nobody teaches you how to be a generalist—like, a real generalist, not some faker like Jordan Peterson. Your potential reading list is a hundred million books long, and that's probably a low figure. And then there's all the other material and media in the world, all the periodicals, all the movies and music and TV shows. Even a scrap of paper stapled to a telephone poll might be useful and educational, if you've really and truly decided that nothing of humanity is strange to you.
Maybe it's a fool's errand.
~Chara
