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Natural Insights
What the wild teaches us about ourselves and the world.
Living in the Information Age, it is all too easy to mistake knowledge for wisdom. This is not news, of course, to anyone who pays close attention to cultural trends. Facts increase exponentially, but we spend less time than ever reflecting upon them.
The movement away from reflective, introspective thinking has been going on for a while — a century or two, anyhow. The industrialized mind moves fast; the digital mind even faster. Introspection is the process by which we synthesize information and thereby derive some small insight from it. It’s an intellectual activity best done by ruminating generalists, since truth isn’t the exclusive domain of any particular discipline. But ruminating generalists are few and far between these days.
An ancient Greek philosopher could have been a mathematician, a poet, a scientist and an art critic to boot. Today such intellectual meandering is largely unacceptable — especially in established academic circles. The generalist lacks credibility.
There is way too much information nowadays. No one can possibly digest it all. So modern thinkers focus their energies upon one discipline, perhaps two. They become authorities in one particular field or another. They become specialists and, as a consequence, their work is…
