Garden of Daisies

On Thinking in Our Age

August 30th, 2006

Michael Baigent on why the conclusions he, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln came to in ‘The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail’ hadn’t been uncovered before”

The answers to [this question], we realised, lay in our own age and the modes or habits of thought which characterize it. Since the so-called ‘Enlightenment’ of the eighteenth century, the orientation of Western culture and consciousness had been towards analysis, rather than synthesis. As a result, our age is one of ever-increasing specialisation. In accordance with this tendancey, modern scholarship lays inordinate emphasis on specialisation - which, as the modern university attests, implies and entails the segregation of knowledge into distinct ‘disciplines’. In consequence, the diverse spheres covered by our inquiry have traditionally been segmented into quite separate compartments. In each compartment the relevant material has been duly explored and evaluated by specialists, or ‘experts’ in the field. But few, if any, of these ‘experts’ have endeavoured to etablish a connection between their particular field and otheres that may overlap it. Indeed such ‘experts’ tend generally to regard fields other than their own with considerable suspicious - spurious at worst, at best irrelevant. And eclectic or ‘interdisciplinary’ research is often actively disocuraged as being, among other things, too speculative

I very seriously hope we are ready to start speculating again. All of this analysis is killing us.

Entry Filed under: University (Studies and Classes), Thoughts on other things...