Cult of the Amateur
August 16, 2019
By NZB3
Back in 2007 Andrew Keen wrote The Cult of the Amateur. On his promotional tour, and in the book, Keen disparaged amateurs in all spheres of life. He thinks that unless one is trained and spends all one’s time as one’s main business on the art or science in question then the work is sub-standard and brings everybody down.
He finds Wikipedia scary: Orwellian scary.
Keen said the internet, even in 2007, was killing our culture. It needs saving, saving from vile pornography for example.
There is concern that kids don’t have to worry about math or spelling or knowledge anymore because they’re learning that there’s always going to be a computer within reach to furnish the answers. So let me tell you why he was wrong then and wrong now.
As always before, knowing your gear is always important. Ability is always an advantage to those that have it. Take this Youtube clip I was just watching as an example. Note how Ann Coulter discovered the hard way that there is no substitute for knowing.
As far as I’m concerned the Renassance Man is the highest form of man. He’s the MacGyver, the Leonardo de Vinci. He is the very model of a modern major general. With due respect to those with day jobs, the kind of person I admire is an amateur in many spheres, able to turn his hand to many disciplines and practical capabilities.
I like to wheel this quote out at times like this…
“Every man should be able to paint a portrait, catch a rabbit, cook a gourmet meal, grow corn, plan a battle, string a bow, build a shelter, repair an engine, write a poem, ferment grapes, make gunpowder, build a suspension bridge, balance a ledger and negotiate a treaty, change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”-Robert Heinlein
By way of final example, consider not lowly patient office worker and amateur physicist Albert Einstien nor architects Christopher Wren, Thomas Jefferson, or other great amateurs of their age.
Consider the modern professional athletes burned out or gone to an early grave. For example, Jonah Lomu..
“For me the game is like life. It’s a short way of living your life fast.”- Lomu, 1975-2015
Or, Olympic champion swimmer, Ian Thorpe,-
“I’m stuck in a time warp. I haven’t grown up, except the legs and shoulders.” – Thorpe’s biography
I am reminded of Neitzsche, a warning to us for taking the economic importance of a division of labour society out of its proper context…
“It is, however, the smallest thing unto me since I have been amongst men, to see one person lacking an eye, another an ear, and a third a leg, and that others have lost the tongue, or the nose, or the head. I see and have seen worse things, and divers things so hideous, that I should neither like to speak of all matters, nor even keep silent about some of them: namely, men who lack everything, except that they have too much of one thing- men who are nothing more than a big eye, or a big mouth, or a big belly, or something else big,- reversed cripples, I call such men.”- Zarathustra among the cripples and beggars
The truth is that amateurism is not a ‘cult’ but our original state of grace. It is professionalism that has ruined New Zealand politics and New Zealand sport, especially rugby. The institutions that were, that are, the fabric of our culture are discarded carelessly when they should have been held on to. In the absence of communities of non-professionals the gap is filled by commodification. Communities become networks. Community leaders become bureaucrats who are bought and sold like….like rugby players now are too.
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This article first written on Silent Running, 10/7/2007, and has been reproduced with minor modifications
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