by Howard Bloom
In fact, Spencer was so wedded to the construction of his synthetic philosophy that when one of the most brilliant women of his age, Mary Ann Evans, fell in love with him and wanted to marry him, he said no.
Mary Ann Evans lived in a building across the street on the Strand—the establishment of the radical publisher John Chapman. Like Spencer, she edited a magazine—the Westminster Review. And that magazine, like The Economist, was turning people’s heads. Spencer found Mary Ann fascinating. He loved her company. He used the free tickets he was given to take her to concerts and plays. He walked with her on their way back from the theater singing their favorite songs. He even took her to the biggest event of the century, the Great Exhibition of 1851, an exposition of new technologies from all over the world mounted by Queen Victoria’s techno-lusting husband, Prince Albert, in a breath-taking, breakthrough, all-plate-glass building supported by slender cast-iron beams built specifically for the purpose—the Crystal Palace.
Spencer, like many of Mary Ann’s friends, felt she should do more than editing. She should write her own books. The push from friends helped. Mary Ann wrote her first book of fiction, The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton. But she didn’t want to be regarded as a writer of fluff. She didn’t want to be pigeon-holed by her femaleness. So she adopted a nom de plume, a male name, George Eliot. And she became a superstar.
Mary Ann Evans was in love with Herbert Spencer. As you know, she wanted to marry him. But Spencer was already married. To his work. To putting all of the sciences together in one big picture.
Nonetheless, one hundred years later there was still no name for what Spencer had tried to do. And there was no word for what you wanted to do. Words matter. Remember the word “dropout.” And the difference between a “cleaning woman” and a “babysitter.”
See if this word helps. See if it captures what you wanted to achieve.
Omnology—an academic base for the promiscuously curious, a discipline that concentrates on seeing the patterns that emerge when one views all the sciences and the arts at once.
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, 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:
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.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is the spirit of The Sixties. And that’s The Sixties’ gift to you and me.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
“I know a lot of people. A lot. And I ask a lot of prying questions. But I’ve never run into a more intriguing biography than Howard Bloom’s in all my born days.”
—Paul Solman, Business and Economics
Correspondent, PBS NewsHour
T. S. Eliot, Edna St. Vincent Millay, William James, Albert Einstein, and the beatniks drove Howard Bloom to adventure in the terra incognita of human extremes, then to attempt to write about his discoveries so clearly and deliciously that anyone with a high school education could understand them. That was the imperative behind his explorations in the Sixties. And that remains the imperative behind his life today. The variety of experiences it’s led to has been mind-boggling.
Bloom has been called “next in a lineage of seminal thinkers that includes Newton, Darwin, Einstein, [and] Freud,” by Britain’s Channel4 TV, “the next Stephen Hawking” by Gear Magazine, and “The Buckminster Fuller and Arthur C. Clarke of the new millennium” by Buckminster Fuller’s archivist, Bonnie DeVarco. Bloom is the author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism, The God Problem: How A Godless Cosmos Creates, and The Mohammed Code: How a Desert Prophet Gave You ISIS, al Qaeda, and Boko Haram—or How Mohammed Invented Jihad.
Bloom’s second book Global Brain was the subject of an Office of the Secretary of Defense symposium in 2010, with participants from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM, and MIT. Bloom is founder and head of the Space Development Steering Committee, a group that has included astronauts Buzz Aldrin, Edgar Mitchell (the sixth man on the moon), and members from the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense, and NASA. He has debated one-one-one with senior officials from Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and Gaza’s Hamas on Iran’s global Arab-language Alalam TV News Network. He has also dissected headline issues dozens of times on Saudi Arabia’s KSA2-TV and on Iran’s global English language Press-TV. He has probed the untold story of the Syrian Civil War with Nancy Kissinger. And he is co-conceiving the core module of an energy infrastructure for the solar system at Caltech funded by the Keck Institute for Space Studies, GE, and the Air Force Research Lab.
Bloom’s scientific work has been published in: arxiv.org, the leading pre-print site in advanced theoretical physics and math; PhysicaPlus; Across Species Comparisons and Psychopathology; New Ideas in Psychology; The Journal of Space Philosophy; and in the book series: Research in Biopolitics. He was invited to lecture an international conference of quantum physicists in Moscow—Quantum Informatics 2006—and the concepts Bloom introduced were later used in a book proposing a new approach to quantum physics, Constructive Physics, by Moscow University’s Yuri Ozhigov.
In addition, Bloom’s work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Knight-Ridder Financial News Service, the Village Voice, The Huffington Post, Cosmopolitan Magazine and the blog sites of Psychology Today and the Scientific American.
Bloom has founded three international scientific groups: the Group Selection Squad (1995), which gained acceptance for the concept of group selection in evolutionary biology; The International Paleopsychology Project (1997), which created a new multi-disciplinary synthesis between cosmology, paleontology, evolutionary biology, and history; and The Space Development Steering Committee (2007).
Bloom explains that his focus is “mass behavior, from the mass behavior of quarks to the mass behavior of human beings.” One of his key topics? The forces of history. And he has lived those forces.
To plumb the depths of mass emotion, Bloom dove in 1971 into a field he knew nothing about—pop culture. He was credited by Rolling Stone founding editor Chet Flippo with “creating a new magazine genre—the heavy metal magazine.” Then he founded the biggest PR firm in the music industry—The Howard Bloom Organization, Ltd.—and helped build or sustain the careers of figures like Michael Jackson, Prince, Bob Marley, Bette Midler, Billy
Joel, Paul Simon, Billy Idol, Peter Gabriel, David Byrne, John Mellencamp, Queen, Kiss, Aerosmith, AC/DC, Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five, Kool and the Gang, Run DMC, and roughly a hundred others. He contributed to the success of films like The Great Gatsby, Down and Out in Beverly Hills, Outrageous Fortune, and Purple Rain. And he did it by focusing not on profits but on soul.
Bloom did more than explore the forces of history, he helped make them. He helped launch Farm Aid and he helped establish Amnesty International’s American presence. He worked with the United Negro College Fund, the National Black United Fund, and the NAACP, and he put together the first public service radio campaign for solar power (1981).
Bloom returned to science full-time in 1988. Since then, Bloom has done stints as a visiting scholar in the Graduate School of Psychology at NYU and as a core faculty member at the Graduate Institute in Meriden, Connecticut. He’s been flown to Moscow, Amsterdam, Paris, Vienna, Seoul, Kuala Lumpur, and Chengdu, China to lecture. He’s also lectured at American locations from Nellis Air Force Base and the Eisenhower Center for Space and Defense Studies to Yale University. He is currently on the board of governors of the National Space Society.
Topping it all off, Bloom’s computer houses a not-so-secret and not-at-all humble project, his 8,100-chapter-long Grand Unified Theory of Everything in the Universe Including the Human Soul. Pavel Kurakin of the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences says that,
“Bloom has created a new Scientific Paradigm. He explains in vast and compelling terms why we should forget all we know in complicated modern math and should start from the very beginning. Bloom’s Grand Unified Theory opens a window into entire systems we don’t yet know and/or see, new collectivities that live, love, battle, win and lose each day of our gray lives. I never imagined that a new system of thought could produce so much light.”
Concludes Joseph Chilton Pearce, author of Evolution’s End and The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, “I have finished Howard Bloom’s [first two] books, The Lucifer Principle and Global Brain, in that order, and am seriously awed, near overwhelmed by the magnitude of what he has done. I never expected to see, in any form, from any sector, such an accomplishment. I doubt there is a stronger intellect than Bloom’s on the planet.”