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A New Trinity for Historians

Let me tell you a story. Every summer of my youth my grandfather Frank D. Borah took me to the harness races at the Wayne County fair in southern Illinois. He knew much about the horses and their equipment. Regarding the latter, he spelled out the importance of blinders, which many of the horses wore, to keep them from seeing another horse approaching from the side. Were that to happen (without the blinders on), the horse might shy away and thus break stride, which would be a great detriment to winning the race.

There is a moral to this story. Try running with the blinders off! For it seems to me that far too many people, if not the vast majority, in academia, and that would include historians, are failing to see either to the left or to the right for the big picture.

That is unfortunate in the extreme for the following reason. What students need from higher education, including from teachers of history, but are rarely getting--what Myron A. Marty called a"scholarship of synthesis" in"Historians' Craft: Common Interests in a Diverse Profession," The Journal of American History 81 (December 1994): 1086. Why is such wholeness seldom forthcoming? Huston Smith, famed for his book The Religions of Man, suggests some of the reasons in Why Religion Matters (2001), namely that education in our colleges/universities is depersonalized through"bulging enrollments," the excessive compartmentalization of knowledge, and the obsession with"vocational objectives" (getting a good job upon graduation, instead of seeking after wisdom). In presenting such shortcomings Smith observes:"Renaissance men who knew something about everything that was to be known disappeared several centuries ago." (p. 82) It is my contention though, that in spite of the inherent difficulty posed by the burgeoning of knowledge since at least the last half of the nineteenth century, educators, including historians, must begin to integrate the diverse fields of knowledge, as was once done (or at least was attempted) in earlier eras.

That calls for the coming into being of a new trinity--science, religion, and philosophy. To meet the challenges of this the new millennium will require the amalgamation of all three (into a whole, which will indeed be greater than the sum of the parts). By this I mean a holistic view(s) of reality in all its myriad forms from the universe as a whole (our"little prison cell," as Blaise Pascal referred to it in his timeless Pensees) to the microcosm of our planet and its teeming life of all kinds.

Toward what end? An education for students transcending the demands of the job market with the supreme goal then being that of wisdom, or, to put the matter another way (drawing from Huston Smith's narration of a fine documentary about the Tibetan Buddhists in Requiem for a Faith, produced in 1968) the pursuit of the"scheme of things entire."

Having thought about such things for some time now, it seems to me two of the impediments in the way of doing that concerns first of all the training of teachers and secondly the reward system, once such educators are hired, which demands (at least usually) a specialization in a narrow niche of scholarship. That often, if not always, precludes a look at the big picture (that is, a view without the blinders), if one expects to get ahead career-wise in the academic world, which would include what everyone is seeking--a tenured position.

Not too long ago, in reading from James H. McClellan III and Harold Dorn's Science and Technology in World History (1999), it was duly noted that Aristotle, the great synthesizer of knowledge in the ancient world, had no institutional affiliation. If he had had such (and this is worth pondering) perhaps he would never have compiled his compendiums of learning by the scholars of antiquity. With this sobering thought in mind, can we not by an act of will resist the siren call of"publish or perish," or hopefully bring about some reforms in academia, which, I fear, otherwise put a premium upon publishing"more and more about less and less," rather than allowing for a greater degree of synthesis (seeing the big picture)?

To reach the goal of synthesis, we must travel down the threefold path of science, religion, and philosophy. Let me suggest why--science alone, for all its successes in modern times, does not lend itself to the answering of ultimate questions. The scientific method, when when complemented with the niceties of mathematics, rests finally on empiricism, which rests in turn on observations. And, here modern physics, as developed through the insights of quantum mechanics, since the early 1920s, demonstrates that all observations (beginning with subatomic particles, but, I would assert as well, at all other levels of reality) are inherently limited in precision. Werner Heisenberg, for instance, proved the matter, at least for the subatomic realm, in 1927. His so-called"Uncertainty Principle" makes clear that what is observed can not be divorced from the act of observing. This is not the fault of one's measuring devices either. For, Heisenberg discovered that one could not determine both the position and the velocity of a subatomic particle at one and the same time. A choice had to be made! Thus did the genie of indeterminacy enter the picture, which it would appear can never be exorcised.

So, in addition to science, we need religion and philosophy. Religion to tell us, or at least to suggest, what matters so far as the good life, faith, and the"meaning of it all" are concerned. For the promise too, but to give one example from the world's religious traditions (Christianity) of something eternal, beyond our transitory existence on planet earth, as from"I'll Fly Away" (an old-time gospel song):"Just a few more weary days and then, I'll fly away." Philosophy to fashion further our knowledge into a coherent whole. Now, if we were to accomplish all this (and I would fervently maintain that we must try), it would be possible to fulfill a prophecy of Jesus, recorded in John 8:32 (King James Version of the Bible):"And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."