Omnology

I’m just getting stuck into Roy Christopher’s delectable book of media, culture and science interviews, Follow For Now (review pending).

The most exciting thing so far is discovering a word, and perhaps a playful vocation. Howard Bloom, former manager of (among others) Prince and Michael Jackson, and author of the outsider science classics The Lucifer Principle (1995) and Global Brain (2000), has coined a term for the discipline-beyond-disciplines: omnology.

I quote from the manifesto of omnology:

We are blessed with a richness of specializations, but cursed with a paucity of panoptic disciplines – categories of knowledge that concentrate on seeing the pattern that emerges when one views all the sciences at once. Hence we need a field dedicated to the panoramic, an academic base for the promiscuously curious, a discipline whose mandate is best summed up in a paraphrase of the poet Andrew Marvel:

Let us roll all our strength and all
Our knowledge up into one ball
And tear our visions with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life.

Omnology is a science, but one dedicated to the biggest picture conceivable by the minds of its practitioners. Omnology will use every conceptual tool available – and some not yet invented but inventible – to leapfrog over disciplinary barriers, stitching together the patchwork quilt of science and all the rest that humans can yet know. If one omnologist is able to perceive the relationship between pop songs, ancient Egyptian graffiti, Shirley MacLaine’s mysticism, neurobiology, and the origins of the cosmos, so be it. If another uses mathematics to probe traffic patterns, the behavior of insect colonies, and the manner in which galaxies cluster in swarms, wonderful. And if another uses introspection to uncover hidden passions and relate them to research in chemistry, anthropology, psychology, history, and the arts, she, too, has a treasured place on the wild frontiers of scientific truth – the terra incognita at the heartland of omnology.

Let me close with the words of yet another poet, William Blake, on the ultimate goal of omnology:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour

I wouldn’t presume to associate myself with Bloom’s astonishing breadth and depth of research. For that reason, and until Dreamflesh Journal starts turning a profit, I call myself an amateur omnologist.