Back in the 16th, 17th and 18th Century, there were a lot of intellectual “cross-trainers” around: educated people who applied their minds to a variety of subjects including philosophy, mathematics, science, commerce and government. Ben Franklin is a good example, but you also had Thomas Jefferson, Rene Descartes, Leonardo DaVinci, etc. Today, of course, you don’t find many people like that. There’s so much knowledge out there now, you need to specialize in order to be taken seriously.

That’s too bad. There are still a few thinkers left who cross boundaries, who try to weave science and humane thought together. But they aren’t too common anymore. Rarer still are those who know what they’re talking about. In the 20th Century there was C.P. Snow and Jacob Bronowski, and we still have Robert Pirsig. I am currently picking through Pirsig’s second book Lila. Despite the fact that Lila doesn’t possess the charm of Zen and Motorcycle Maintenance (it’s actually a rather strange book), there are occasional brilliant insights in that book. It’s like rooting around a garbage dump, looking for diamonds — and occasionally finding some. The garbage dump is Pirsig’s grandiose “Metaphysics of Quality” and his blather about “values”, and the diamonds are found when Pirsig sucessfully melds philosophical and scientific insight, such as his comparison of the various levels of functioning within a computer with the idea of a mind existing within a mechanistic human brain, and the idea of a society existing amidst a host of independent, non-cooperative human egos.

I recently read an article in The Atlantic about a writer named Henry Adams. This Adams was not one of the early Presidents of the US (although he was one of their descendents), nor is he a character from the 1960s show The Addams Family. Henry Adams was a cranky blue-blood who lived around the turn of the 20th Century, who concerned himself with the overall state of human affairs. In 1906 he authored “The Education of Henry Adams”, wherein he tried to build a philosophy based upon the lessons of history and science. He asked whether creation has a particular purpose, or is just an accident of circumstance. As with most people who ask such questions, he didn’t come up with a definitive answer. But at least he asked the question and was taken seriously. Today, if you ask that question, you aren’t taken very seriously. In an age of intellectual specialization, anyone who asks the big questions is automatically put into the “fuzzy mystic” box. OK, well, maybe Ken Wilber and Fritjof Capra and their like can be accused of speaking and writing a bit too much and forgetting to come back to earth sometimes. You wonder if they have in fact nailed down the basics of differential calculus and iambic pentameter.

Nevertheless, it’s too bad. Just not a good time for big thinking.