To a scientist—an honest one—the term disruptive is one of approbation. It means something’s been discovered or invented that shakes the continuously ossifying framework of accepted knowledge and possibly dislodges something new. There’s even a system for quantifying how disruptive your idea might prove to be: the CD (consolidation-or-destabilization) Index, developed by Dr.s Funk and Owen-Smith in 2016. Worryingly, however, a recent article [1] from Nature.com entitled, “Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time” (the thesis of which is that papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time), calls attention to a sharp decrease in cross-disciplinary journal citations as a possible symptom and/or cause of the accelerating decline in status quo-shaking ideas. Nuclear physicists and astrophysicists (for instance) just don’t talk to each other anymore.
Now, personally, I know very little about science, and understand even less; but this pattern of decreasing cross-pollination makes perfect sense to me from the standpoint of my own chosen field of study: Japanese Jiu-Jitsu. This martial art (the seemingly misnomered “Gentle Art”) is specifically focused on grappling, and was never meant to be a complete fighting style. It was originally one element of a comprehensive method that included kicks, punches, and throws—to say nothing of the yet larger framework of armed combat. Grappling was what you did if you lost your squadmates and your horse and your weapons, and you were too close to boot the other guy in the head.
But over time, inevitably, those fighters who happened to enjoy and excel at grappling began to specialize more and more in that particular branch and its ever-ramifying network of twigs. And the same, of course, happened with Karate (strikes) and Judo (throws) and all the dividing and multiplying sub-sub-styles—and then particular demographics became associated with particular disciplines, and there followed all the usual corruptions and degradations that we’re eternally pushing back against in every field of endeavor in the fallen world. It wasn’t until extremely recently that global travel and communication became so commonplace that masters of every vanishing twig-point from around the world could truly work together to brush away the kudzu of history and politics, and finally rediscover the tree.
Every branch, as it develops and forks outward, becomes far stronger in its own specific area of expertise. A samurai freed from the obligation to keep up with his Kenpo training can naturally devote more time to teasing out the hidden possibilities of Jiu-Jitsu. And, because it takes years—centuries—of experimentation to develop the art to its fullness, no one can be a devotee of twenty different styles that are still in the frontier of development. Of course, now, in the wake of all that specialization, the heirs of the arts can be swiftly taught what it took generations to learn—but in doing so, we unavoidably lose whole universes of nuance and infinitesimal detail, the filigreed delight of any true master.
We all stand on the shoulders of giants, as Newton said, and you can go on stacking up giants as high as you like—as long as you accept that the ones toward the bottom will gradually be squashed into a dense, homogenous paste. Mind you, that paste will form a highly nourishing fertilizer for the giants at the top of the pile; but, again, those giants must either go on branching off into finer and finer sub-disciplines, intricately detailed but increasingly isolated, or accept the homogeneity of a consolidated knowledge base, containing (in digest form) as much of every sub-discipline as can reasonably be accommodated by a single human mind.
It seems a grim dilemma—and, for a non-Catholic, it is. But this reductio ad Jiu-Jitsum (if you will) presumes that the entirety of any particular discipline needs to be assimilated by this or that individual intellect and soul. It’s based on the failure to comprehend the nature and purpose of the Universal Church. I don’t need to understand astrophysics, because there are other members of the Body of Christ who do. A given astrophysicist doesn’t need to understand Japanese grappling, because we’ve got that covered over here in the dojo.
And eventually, inevitably, the “vanishing twig-points” will overreach themselves and collapse back together into the sappy paste we mentioned earlier. All the sciences will return to their base form of Natural Philosophy, informed by Theology. And then, at last, we’ll truly be able to begin.
1: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05543-x