Sometime ago, a grumpy lady senator was reported to have been visibly irked and did not mince her words when she found out a huge part of the DA’s National Corn Program would be allocated for research: ‘Baliw na baliw kayo sa research. Aanhin niyo ba yung research?’ Then for good measure she added: ‘ I’m a smart person but I don’t understand your research, what more of the farmers. Does a farmer want research?’
Someone who had spent almost her entire life in doing research in obscurity could have told her: ‘Only if we understand, will we care. Only if we care, will we help. Only if we help shall all be saved.’
That someone was Jane Goodall, who quietly passed away recently, aged 91. She is widely recognized as one of the world’s most renowned primatologists and animal behavioral scientists.
More than 25 years ago in the United Kingdom, when she was in her early 20s, Jane Goodall made a life-changing decision to pursue her interest in animal behavior. She packed up her bags and booked a passage to Tanzania to begin studying a community of chimpanzees by living among them in a remote place called Gombe.
She lacked scientific training. She had no degree. Driven by passion and courage, by dint of sheer hard work and struggle, virtually alone in wilds of East Africa, she persisted unwaveringly in her work until her death. Thanks to her decades-long groundbreaking study of the chimpanzees, the world has now a better understanding of the natural behavior of our closest animal relative and ultimately a greater knowledge of our own species.
The late Stephen Jay Gould, the American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science hailed Jane Goodall as ‘one of the intellectual heroes of this century.’ Her contributions to biology, natural history, anthropology, and the humanities from her work in Tanzania are now part of our collective knowledge. It is all because of her ‘research’ activities.
A kindred spirit of Goodall’s was a Frenchman named Jean Henri Fabre who devoted himself fully to studies of insects, a lifelong interest he had cultivated since adolescence. His ‘research’ activities involved patient, long hours of observation, meticulously noting the details of their behavior. Considered by many to be the father of modern entomology, Fabre is unknown by many. Yet because of him and his dedication, we now know more about insects and their micro world.
Goodall and Fabre belong to a rare breed of human beings who dedicated themselves to solitary intellectual pursuits, not for fame or money, but for acquiring knowledge to share with the rest of humankind. What they did was painstaking, arduous, tedious, and unrewarding. What they had was an intense passion, bordering on obsession, combined with an immense amount of patience, a deep sense of humility, and great empathy for the subjects they were studying.
In the Philippines, I can cite the late Dr. Felipe Landa Jocano who remains as one of our country’s foremost anthropologists. His field studies on Philippine folklore, pre-history, and cultural communities have enriched the field of Philippine Anthropology. I use his books as reference when I write about Filipino culture.
Goodall, Fabre and Jocano are what someone hailed as society’s ‘intellectual heroes.’
They gathered knowledge through direct experience. For this, I believe they were ‘scholars’ in the true meaning of the word.
Before they became famous, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Louis Pasteur were ‘scholars’ in the real sense of the word. Today, like them, there are obscure scholars toiling in unknown parts of the world, secluded from the outside world in their rooms, laboratories, basements, doggedly pursuing their ideas, making false starts, experimenting through countless trials and errors, patiently and diligently observing, taking copious notes, analyzing, continuously making and revising tentative conclusions.
Others like Jane Goodall are out there in the field, jungle, poverty-stricken slums, dusty ancient ruins, or immersed in the lives of people, conversing, observing, noting, collecting, analyzing, synthesizing, speculating.
That to me is what true scholarship is really all about and not the common layman’s understanding of it as a form of financial aid awarded to students for further education.
Oddly, in reference books I have scanned, there are few clear definitions of the term ‘scholar.’ The Oxford English Dictionary offers this: specialist in a particular study, a distinguished academic.
To me the best definition of a scholar is an individual who has a clear commitment to enrich the lives of others in the wider world through mastery of a discipline by accumulation of knowledge.
By this definition, a scholar is not necessarily an academic ‘egghead’ sitting at a wooden table cluttered with stacks of books, flickering candles, in a dimly lit room immersed in studying ancient texts. Surrounded by towering bookshelves and a vintage globe, he is creating a scene of intellectual pursuit and timeless wisdom.
Many scholars are actually outside of laboratories doing their work in the open air. He could be a young meteorologist out there in the field measuring wind speeds, amount of rainfall, a geologist sorting through layers of rock and soil under the heat of the sun, an ethnologist up there living among a mountain tribe to learn their ways, and so on.
But more significantly, he could also be you and me. Yes, we can all be scholars, at whatever age in life. For it is never too early nor too late to go on an intellectual pursuit to gain knowledge that we can share with others in our limited circle or wider society at large.
As for me, I have adopted a scholarly mind or attitude a long time ago. Just like Goodall when she started, I have no scientific training. I have no degree in any of the sciences. I am not being funded by any organization. All I have is a boundless curiosity about everything. My mantras are: Why so? What if? Why not? What then?
I too like go watch and observe and take notes and make sense of what I see and hear.
When my wife and I go out to a mall, I prefer to sit on a bench to watch and observe people around me unobtrusively.
But it’s not just people. I observe the cats in our backyard. I note their individual meowing sounds, which distinguish them from each other. I cross check their behavioral patterns with the books I have on domesticated cats. Does this make me an amateur ethologist, a scholar of animal behavior?
In short, the world is my laboratory or petri dish. My pursuits are driven by endless curiosity and boundless sense of wonder.
And what I like most about being a ‘scholar’ is I’m not pressured by deadlines or the pressure to produce, as with the case of scholars/scientists funded by research grants. For true learning thrives in freedom.
The history of innovation shows that freedom for researchers to pursue their creative ideas, without strings attached, has been vital for countless discoveries, many of which have led to breakthrough technologies with enormous benefits for society.
It is noteworthy that the Greek root word for scholar is ‘scholastes’, which is translated as ‘spare time, leisure’, or ‘conversations and the knowledge gained through them during free time.’
In my case, doing casual research and discovering unknown tidbits of information is a joyful experience. It’s giving a natural boost to my feel-good hormones, eliciting a sense of happiness and pleasure. I delight in surprising my friends with esoteric facts in conversations. I love to put down my findings in think pieces such as this so more people can benefit from them and spread it.
This is what’s keeping me feeling up and ‘alive’ in my twilight time.
So, to my fellow seniors, don’t waste the third act of your life.
Be mentally active and stay curious about the world around you. It’s not too late to adopt the mentality of a scholar. It’s fundamental-FUN and MENTALLY healthy.