Our dear friend Wikipedia defines Omnology as interdisciplinary studies, that is to say, as "the act of drawing from two or more academic disciplines and integrating their insights to work together in pursuit of a common goal [...] to develop a greater understanding of a problem that is too complex or wide-ranging [...] to be dealt with using the knowledge and methodology of just one discipline." This is a good definition as far as it goes, but to say that a study is interdiscipline when we truly mean metadiscipline is wrong-headed. Interdiscipline implies that our pursuit lies in the ether between the boundaries of concrete, substantive disciplines. Categories are useful and necessary but they are, of course, mere concepts--divisions abstractly foisted on reality to order it into discrete units. We use categories and disciplines to parse nature into manageable chunks, but we all know that it is truly an organic whole. Or, at least, we should know this.
Some seem surprised-- and others irate-- that the so-called Postmodern mind wishes to collapse the categorical trend and throw all the isms and ologies into one big methodological stew. This seems counter intuitive, they say. Here is a sad case of useful schema becoming reified to the point that scholars would rather see the simulacrum than the holistic unity of creation. Psychology informs sociology, linguistics informs epistemology, culture dictates memory & history, and biology informs them all. From physics to phonetics, we are dealing with the natural phenomena within ONE system. Omnology is not the stance of those who say that global warming is too big for one discipline and thus requires a "team effort" from everyone... Omnology is, rather, the belief that there is always only ONE discipline whose aim is the empirical understanding of the complexities of the natural order.
Postmodern social sciences seem to be heading in the right direction. Although piloted by that demon Relativism, the good ship Postmodern sails forth, the Magellan of her age, charting the increasingly unknown waters of identity formation. Neuroscience--particularly the case made by Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel--supports what Memory Studies has been claiming since Halbwachs and Nora; the act of remembering is an act of inventing narrative. Kandel and others
have located the cells within the brain that hold the "physical" aspect of memory and when these sites are activated, the brain reconstructs the memory through an imaginative process. Memory is more accurately "recollection"--we re-collect various likely elements of the past and knit them to that concrete distillation that is physiologically rooted in our brain (Kandel refers to this as the "kernel" of memory). Think of the grandfather who "fleshes out" the tale of Cinderella. He remains true to the facts of the tale, but he might change the color of the dress or the length of the hair in each successive telling. This is what happens when we recall the past. Moreover, the narrative we use is colored by the values of those groups to which we belong and from which we derive the greater part of our sense of identity. All of this is not to say that memory is necessarily unreliable or is invalid testimony. It is, after all, likely in the best interest of the individual and the group to recall an eventful moment ACCURATELY, that is to say, according to how it unfolded in real time. Thus memory, as a function of our social selves, is pulled by the two forces of objective truth/facts and subjective perceptions/interpretations.
What holds true for memory studies holds true for nearly all of the social sciences. The proximity of the observer to the observed is problematic and thus we see a sort of Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle at work. The observer is a social being and as such he will never fully comprehend the pervasiveness of those social forces which fall under the umbrella term "ideology." Lest we dismiss these "soft sciences" and cling, instead, to the more reliable natural sciences, we would do well to note that the social component has root in the biological. The contrast between socialization and environment--the infamous "nature v. nurture" debate--is only useful so long as the individual recognizes a difference between the two concepts. The individual is socialized but those very social processes arose from the natural tendencies of human behavior. The individual is not a tabula rasa but is the host of many ingrained bio-social acquisition devices that function akin to Chomskey's device for Language Acquisition. It is nature AND nurture, nurture THROUGH nature--socialization arising out of the natural and biological disposition of humans in groups. The particulars may be articulated differently, but the fact of the matter is that human societies look more alike than they do different when compared to other species. Only the peripherals change.
Omnology, then, is the study of life. The border-less approach makes it compatible with mysticism. We may seek to articulate certain miracles (both past and present) through the language of causation and science but this, for the mystic, does not detract from the divine origin of that miracle. God does not design a bicycle so that He may walk wherever He goes. The Deity works through the laws and substances of His creation. He may act outside of those laws at times, according to His divine prerogative, and thus His actions may be seen as "supernatural" but the indwelling of God in His creation--the "natural" communion of God with creation in the everyday--that is what resonates within the heart of the mystic.
I am both omnologist and mystic. I attempt, as Melville put it, to punch through the "pasteboard mask" of perceived reality in order to apprehend true reality. I am beginning to see how St. Francis saw the hand of God in nature and how that hand is, according to Scripture, obvious to mankind. We hide truth under layers of schema and if for one moment we could turn aside from our compartmentalization, we would fully appreciate how much like an organic system creation is. All components complement their fellows, all present methodologies are unnecessarily myopic, all of creation sings the complex beauty of a scientific God!
