'It Will Be Saved by the Amateurs'

When I use professional as an adjective, I generally use it as a synonym for dedicated, serious, experienced. Some of my colleagues at the university are professional. I can rely on them to get the job done. No babysitting required. An alternative use for professional refers to people who are paid for services rendered. I prefer the first usage. Not everyone who earns a salary, even a vastly inflated salary, is a professional, a word often opposed to amateur, which can mean merely unpaid. The OED defines the noun amateur as “a person who takes part in a particular activity purely for pleasure or interest rather than as a professional.” That’s how I use it. Its ultimate root is the Latin amāre, “to love.” 

Thanks to a serious amateur librarian, Isaac Waisberg – who is a professional professor of social science at Tel Aviv University – I’ve become acquainted with another amateur/professional, Erwin Chargaff (1905-2002) -- by trade, a biochemist, one of Hitler’s gifts to the United States and the world.

 

Waisberg runs a service he calls IWP Books. He digitizes books, most of them well out of the mainstream. His authors include Walter Bagehot, John Jay Chapman, Theodor Haeckel, Agnes Repplier, José Ortega y Gasset and Albert Jay Nock – each an eccentric (that is, away from the center –not a disparaging term) and independent thinker, none fashionable, at least among professional academic types, and each worth reading. Included are three titles by Chargaff –  Heraclitean Fire: Sketches from a Life Before Nature (1978), Voices in the Labyrinth: Nature, Man and Science (1978) and Serious Questions: An ABC of Skeptical Reflections (1986). The last includes a chapter on amateurs, which begins:

 

“If the world can still be saved, it will be saved by the amateurs. The experts are more than most other people responsible for the mess in which we find ourselves. They know too much about too little, but each knows something special.”

 

Experts, in other words, form a sort of cult, and we are expected to be their acolytes. The loyalty inspired by experts, especially those positioned in academia and government, is truly mystifying. Our credulity is often faith-based. Chargaff’s wit can be acidic:

 

“An amateur often plays beautifully in politics as well. General de Gaulle may have been an expert in tank warfare, but in what made him famous he was certainly an amateur. Similarly with Winston Churchill or Franklin Roosevelt, who were, if anything, professional nonexperts; and Chaim Weizmann’s eminence was only most indirectly connected with his being a specialist in the technology of acetone. Incidentally, statesmen with a terrorist past are, by that very fact, assured amateur status; for what is a terrorist but an amateur of death?”

 

And this: “Once elected president, the amateur will immediately hide his nakedness behind a grim phalanx of experts.”

 

Chargaff, like Waisberg, is a great admirer of Montaigne: “The prototype of the amateur, perhaps the greatest amateur the world has known, is Michel de Montaigne.” His characterization of the great Frenchman’s essays is the best I know: 

 

“[I]t is neither philosophy, nor fiction, neither an autobiography nor a mere collection of anecdotes, not a guide to better living or wiser dying, but it is a little bit of all that and more. It resembles an ocean from which all manner of things can be drawn forth: a gleaming pearl, a dead fish. It is a book that can teach those most who do not need [to] learn; but dolts will always complain that it lacks organization and cannot be fitted into any category of literature.”

 

Amateurs deftly avoid professional categories. So does Chargaff when he writes:

 

“Is an amateur, then, a man who, letting the world flow through him, remains uncommitted to anything in particular? Certainly not, or not only that. But, whereas an expert’s convictions come from outside, from what he has learned, those of an amateur are strongest in what he can take out of himself, his character, his temperament. He may be a skeptic or an agnostic where politics or patriotism is concerned or even the course of humanity, but he will be unshakable in the course that he himself believes he must take.”