On the Omnologist’s Manifesto of Howard Bloom

By Joe Perez

Here’s one manifesto, The Omnologist’s (see below), that I can wholeheartedly sign aboard. Were I to defer on a particular, it would be over the manifesto’s emphasis on thinking over doing, words over deeds, science over art.

Not sure about the ending of the word “omniologist,” either. Dictionary.com tells us who the -ists are:

The -ist is a suffix of nouns, often corresponding to verbs ending in -ize or nouns ending in -ism, that denote a person who practices or is concerned with something, or holds certain principles, doctrines, etc.: apologist; dramatist; machinist; novelist; realist; socialist; Thomist.

The one -ist I wholeheartedly embrace is To Exist. It is not the self that studies the omni; it is the Self which is Existence which does what it does, looks around and through itself, writing every manifesto before tearing it down and building it again. It is the True Self of the Omni which is that which I embrace, as it is logically linked and physically embodied in each particular self, uniquely.

I embrace the manifesto with appreciation. As I see it, the Ommnologist’s Manifesto is a look through the Eye of Spirit, the King of Existence telling the story of its own Sovereignty.

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Howard Bloom is the author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century. In “The Roots of Omnology,” published on Entelechyjournal.com, he proclaims:

The Omnologist Manifesto

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 in the heartland of omnology.

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