Ethics

On the Virtues of Amateurism

By Ed Brayton

Jim Babka has a great post at Positive Liberty about blogging and the virtues of amateurism that I agree with entirely. He offers this great quote from Robert Proctor:

Something is lost when people specialize. I like to see things like an amateur. The word amateur is literally "lover," it's from amore. Professionalism is often the death of intellectual inquiry. So I think there's a kind of virtue in systematic amateurism that really needs to be rekindled. If you don't love and hate and play and joke with your objects of study, then you're really not treating them properly. I tell my students if you're not angry and excited and enthralled by your topic, you should choose a different one.

Full post as published by Dispatches from the Culture Wars on December 29, 2008 (boomark / email).