Great Questions

In late 2007, I began discussing an idea with a few friends: a series of essays that could be made into a book or a film documentary series—each conceived around a single idea:

We in Western civilization need to broaden our understanding of the world around us. Our processes for exploration and investigation have become so narrow, focused, and specific that we’ve cut ourselves off from a great deal of creative thinking and innovative problem solving. We need to become “Renaissance men and women,” aggressively reversing this trend, and developing our ability to see the world and the challenges we face through a wide variety of different lenses.

At this point, I’d like to offer some of these essays as a blog.

Understanding the Trend toward Specialization

This trend toward specificity has accelerated recently to the point that our current mode of inquiry has become almost exclusively silo-oriented, with our collective know-how splintered into hundreds of tightly confined areas that have little bearing on or communion with one another. An obvious example of this is the workplace, where job functions have taken on incredible levels of detail and specialization—but this phenomenon is by no means limited to our careers.

The cause of the trend is normally identified as the exponential growth in the volume of knowledge available to us all, which has rendered it impossible for anyone to develop and maintain anything more than a surface-level understanding of more than one topic. Though this is unarguably part of the issue, I believe that we’re dealing with something even more fundamental: a change—over the last century or so—in our overall cultural paradigm of thinking and investigation.

This, of course, is not an original idea; in fact, it was the crux of Buckminster Fuller’s Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, published in 1963. Fuller wrote, “Our failures are a consequence of many factors, but possibly one of the most important is the fact that society operates on the theory that specialization is the key to success, not realizing that specialization precludes comprehensive thinking….We are in an age that assumes the narrowing trends of specialization to be logical, natural, and desirable….In the meantime, humanity has been deprived of comprehensive understanding. Specialization has bred feelings of isolation, futility, and confusion in individuals. It has also resulted in the individual’s leaving responsibility for thinking and social action to others.”

No one can doubt that we as a culture increasingly seek out subject matter experts—in hundreds—probably even thousands of disciplines, to provide better, more specific answers to our questions. This reliance on experts, as Fuller points out, has caused us to back off from “comprehensive” thinking, but worse still, has generated a general apathy in most of us about really understanding the world around us. And it has most certainly affected how most of us go through of our lives—from the colleges we choose, to the majors we select, to the careers we pursue, to the way we look for cures to our ailments, to the books we read.

We’re all familiar with the concept of holistic medicine—the idea that the human organism must be understood as an integral entity—one whose individual “parts”—if they exist as discrete physiological elements at all—do so only through constant interactions with other so-called “parts” to create the incredible complexity we call a human being. The concept of the proposed series is essentially an extension of that idea—that a broadened perspective can be—and needs to be—applied to our lives more generally. Our search for answers to life’s questions and solutions to our problems needs to be defocused, such that it takes into consideration the widest possible breadth of investigation.

The Blog

On this blog, you’ll see brief essays on many dozens of different arenas—spanning, as well as my guests and I are able, the breadth of human discourse. In many cases we‘ll be posing more questions than we purport to answer, but in every case, we’ll aspire to re-open readers’ minds to the great issues that confront is in the sciences as well as the humanities.

I will find it interesting to see if this blog becomes popular. I actually have high hopes, insofar as it is clear that people in general are increasingly aware of the quickening pace of innovation and technology, and rightfully concerned that civilization is not sufficiently wise and circumspect to steer us away from trouble.

I will hope that many of you consider becoming contributing authors. In any case, I look forward to your comments on the essays.