Last time I did a post on the philantrophy of Warren Buffet. In his conversations Buffet mentioned a philanthropist that no one else knew about and that was “Abraham Flexner”. I did some research on Flexner and learned that he truly did change the face of medicine in America, but Flexner also brought to light a philosophy on education reform that is very relevant today.
Flexner believed that people detach themselves from the realities of everyday life to devote themselves to engagement in other things they prefer, perhaps to escape the tedium of the days. The world today and even before that has been in a sorry state, and people tend to ignore the factors which impact them most. There is much wrong in this world already, and unless there is a conscious effort to change that, the world will continue to be in its sorry state. Whether there will be sufficient opportunities to lead a full life, in other words, whether we will find purpose in what we deem useful is a more philosophical question, for our definition of what’s useful might have become too narrow.
Flexner once posed a question to George Eastman –“Who is the most useful worker in the field of science?” and the reply came back as “Marconi”. But the truth is that Marconi was not the inventor, but merely the aggregator of the findings of others before him. Maxwell and Hertz had done most of the work well before Marconi, and neither were they concerned with the utility nor the practical objectives of their developments.
The entire history of science is filled with people who did what they wanted merely to satisfy their curiosity. ‘Curiosity’ was the only thing they were concerned with and they satisfied their spiritual selves with such undertakings.
Institutions of education and learning should be devoted to cultivation of curiosity and less on immediate application, and by doing this, they are more likely to contribute to human welfare.
But Flexner also noted that - “It is merely the folly of man and not the intention of scientists that is responsible for the destructive use of agents employed in modern warfare”. Take machines for example, which originally started with the invention of the printing press and for the greater good of mankind, but soon turned into unmanned drones designed strictly to spy and kill.
Alfred Noble, whose name is attached to establishment of the Noble Prizes, made his wealth by producing commercial dynamite, which found its use in mining, railroad tunnel establishment, but also of course to the abuse of politicians for warfare.
The Wright brothers built the airplane with the dream and obsession to fly like the birds, but politicians with their corrupt minds again found its purpose in warfare.
Perhaps it is also true that blaming Quant’s for inventing derivatives is also a misdirected exercise. The greed of humanity has existed since its existence; only the tools have changed.
Marc Anderson recently at the Deal breaker Conference recently said that people who majored in English will end up working at shoe stores, but such statements discount the capacity of humans to apply and borrow knowledge from different spectrum's and apply it somewhere else (I emphasized this in my post on Andrew Carnegie).
No educational institution can possibly direct the channels in which someone should work. Knowledge can only be acquired if one makes an effort to acquire it; no one can force learning on anyone else. Thus such eccentric but curious pursuits, perhaps aren’t wasteful at all.
But this is not to criticize institutions who make an effort to integrate applied learning(STEM sector degrees, or business school perhaps?), but only to state that the useless is a feeder to the useful. Marconi was successful because he picked the brains of right men. This also points to the fact that any scientific discovery is rarely attributed to a sole inventor, the most critical example here is Tesla(and if you don’t know who that is, please do this world a favor and read this)
Even in the pursuit of the practical an enormous amount of useless activity goes on. The mere fact that they bring satisfaction to an individual is all the justification that is needed. Flexner also mentioned that such motivation runs deeper than any other since it has to deal with the dissimilarities of humanity:
“Does humanity want symphonies and paintings and profound scientific truth, or does it want Christian symphonies, Christian paintings, Christian science, or Jewish symphonies, Jewish paintings, Jewish science, or Mohammedan or Egyptian or Japanese or Chinese or American or German or Russian or Communist or conservative contributions…”
A Harvard professor was once offered a stipend to move to Princeton; on the offer he asked-“What are my duties?” To which the Flexner replied -“There are no duties – only opportunities.”
Perhaps if we all start seeing the world as a land of opportunities, we can also find and pick the brains of others who have been busy doing useless things. Maybe innovation really is just finding the catalyst or becoming the catalyst to whatever useless stuff there is already out there.
Socrates once said that –“An unexplained life isn’t really worth living for”. I hope that you continue to leave nothing unexplained and set only one goal for yourself for next year – and that is to continue a pursuit for useless knowledge that will have consequences in the future that won’t be so useless after all.
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Flexner and higher education; useless knowledge; Iconclast
