| THE
NEW HUMANISTS
In
1992, in an essay entitled "The Emerging Third Culture," I put forward
the following argument:
In
the past few years, the playing field of American intellectual
life has shifted, and the traditional intellectual has become
increasingly marginalized. A 1950s education in Freud, Marx,
and modernism is not a sufficient qualification for a thinking
person today. Indeed, the traditional American intellectuals
are, in a sense, increasingly reactionary, and quite often proudly
(and perversely) ignorant of many of the truly significant intellectual
accomplishments of our time. Their culture, which dismisses
science, is often nonempirical. It uses its own jargon and washes
its own laundry. It is chiefly characterized by comment on comments,
the swelling spiral of commentary eventually reaching the point
where the real world
gets lost.
Ten
years later, that fossil
culture is in decline, replaced
by the emergent “third
culture” of the essay’s
title, a reference to C.
P. Snow’s celebrated
division of the thinking
world into two cultures—that
of the literary intellectual
and that of the scientist.
This new culture consists
of those scientists and
other thinkers in the empirical
world who, through their
work and expository writing,
have taken the place of
the traditional intellectual
in rendering visible the
deeper meanings of our lives,
redefining who and what
we are.
A
Great Intellectual Hunger
Advances in science are being debated and propagated by the scientists
of the third culture, who share their work and ideas not just with
each other but with a newly educated public through their books.
Staying with the basics, focusing on the real world, they have led
us into one of the most dazzling periods of intellectual activity
in human history, one in which their achievements are affecting
the lives of everyone on the planet. The emergence of this activity
is evidence of a great intellectual hunger, a desire for the new
and important ideas that drive our times. Educated people are willing
to make the effort to learn about these new ideas. Book review editors,
television news executives, professionals, university administrators
are discovering the empirical world on their own. They are reading
and learning about revolutionary developments in molecular biology,
genetic engineering, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, artificial
life, chaos theory, massive parallelism, neural nets, the inflationary
universe, fractals, complex adaptive systems, linguistics, superstrings,
biodiversity, the human genome, expert systems, punctuated equilibrium,
cellular automata, fuzzy logic, virtual reality, cyberspace, and
teraflop machines. Among others.
Around the fifteenth century,
the word "humanism"
was tied in with the idea
of one intellectual whole.
A Florentine nobleman knew
that to read Dante but ignore
science was ridiculous.
Leonardo was a great artist,
a great scientist, a great
technologist. Michelangelo
was an even greater artist
and engineer. These men
were intellectually holistic
giants. To them the idea
of embracing humanism while
remaining ignorant of the
latest scientific and technological
achievements would have
been incomprehensible. The
time has come to reestablish
that holistic definition.
In the twentieth century,
a period of great scientific
advancement, instead of
having science and technology
at the center of the intellectual
world—of having a unity
in which scholarship includes
science and technology just
as it includes literature
and art—the official
culture kicked them out.
The traditional humanities
scholar looked at science
and technology as some sort
of technical special product—the
fine print. The elite universities
nudged science out of the
liberal arts undergraduate
curriculum, and out of the
minds of many young people,
who abandoned true humanistic
inquiry in their early twenties
and turned themselves into
the authoritarian voice
of the establishment.
Thus, as we enter the most
exciting and turbulent intellectual
times in the past five hundred
years, the traditional humanities
academicians—by dismissing
and ignoring science instead
of learning it—have
so marginalized themselves
that they are no longer
within shouting distance
of the action. One can only
marvel at, for example,
art critics who know nothing
about visual perception;
"social constructionist"
literary critics uninterested
in the human universals
documented by anthropologists;
opponents of genetically
modified foods, additives,
and pesticide residues who
are ignorant of evolutionary
biology and too lazy to
look up the statistics on
risk.
And one is amazed that for
others still mired in the
old establishment culture,
intellectual debate continues
to center on such matters
as who was or was not a
Stalinist in 1937, or what
the sleeping arrangements
were for guests at a Bloomsbury
weekend in the early part
of the twentieth century.
This is not to suggest that
studying history is a waste
of time. History illuminates
our origins and keeps us
from reinventing the wheel.
But the question arises:
history of what? Do we want
the center of culture to
be based on a closed system,
a process of text in/text
out, and no empirical contact
with the world in between?
A fundamental distinction
exists between the literature
of science and those disciplines
in which the writing is
most often concerned with
exegesis of some earlier
writer. In too many university
courses, most of the examination
questions are about what
one or another earlier authority
thought. The subjects are
self-referential. Yes, there
is a history of science,
but it is a field in its
own right, quite separate
from science itself. An
examination in science is
a set of questions on the
real stuff, as it were,
rather than what our predecessors
thought. Unlike those disciplines
in which there is no expectation
of systematic progress and
in which one reflects on
and recycles the ideas of
earlier thinkers, science
moves on; it is a wide-open
system. Meanwhile, the traditional
humanities establishment
continues its exhaustive
insular hermeneutics, indulging
itself in cultural pessimism,
clinging to its fashionably
glum outlook on world events.
Cultural
Pessimism
"We live in an era
in which pessimism has become
the norm," writes Arthur
Herman, in The Idea of
Decline in Western History.
Herman, who coordinates
the Western Civilization
Program at the Smithsonian,
argues that the decline
of the West, with its view
of our "sick society,"
has become the dominant
theme in intellectual discourse,
to the point where the very
idea of civilization has
changed. He writes:
This
new order might take the shape of the Unabomber's radical environmental
utopia. It might also be Nietzsche's Overman, or Hitler's Aryan
National Socialism, or Marcuse's utopian union of technology and
Eros, or Frantz Fanon's revolutionary fellahin. Its carriers
might be the ecologist's "friends of the earth," or the
multiculturalist's "persons of color," or the radical
feminist's New Amazons, or Robert Bly's New Men. The particular
shape of the new order will vary according to taste; however, its
most important virtue will be its totally non-, or even anti-Western
character. In the end, what matters to the cultural pessimist is
less what is going to be created than what is going to be destroyed—namely,
our "sick" modern society.
....the sowing of despair and self doubt has become so pervasive
that we accept it as a normal intellectual stance—even when
it is directly contradicted by our own reality.
Key
to this cultural pessimism is a belief in the myth of the noble savage—that
before we had science and technology, people lived in ecological harmony
and bliss. Quite the opposite is the case.
In Cultural Pessimism: Narratives of Decline in the Postmodern
World, Oliver Bennett, the director of the Centre for Cultural
Policy Studies at the University of Warwick, pushes matters a step
further when he writes that "the intellectual judgments on which
cultural pessimism rests are inflected by that same complex of biological,
psychological and sociological factors that are linked to the incidence
of some forms of depression and anxiety." He wonders whether
the intellectuals of the postmodern world would benefit from antidepressants
("Schopenhauer on Prozac would perhaps have produced a different
philosophical system").
That the greatest change continues to be the rate of change must be
hard to deal with, if you're still looking at the world through the
eyes of Spengler and Nietzsche. In their almost religious devotion
to a pessimistic worldview, the academic humanists cannot acknowledge
that thoughtful people can have positive ideas. Within their own circles,
they have, until recently, gotten away with it. The romantic emoting
of a culturally pessimistic worldview has been intellectually approved.
The world of the professional pessimists is a closed system, a culture
of previous "isms" that turn on themselves and endlessly
cycle. How many times have you seen the name of an academic humanist
icon in a newspaper or magazine article and immediately stopped reading?
You know what's coming. Why waste the time?
The
Double Optimism of Science
As a counternarrative to this cultural pessimism, consider the double
optimism of science.
The first optimism of the science-based thinkers is conceptual: the
more science they do, the more there is to do. Scientists are constantly
acquiring and processing new information. This is the reality of Moore's
Law—just as there has been a doubling of computer processing
power every eighteen months for the past twenty years, so too do scientists
acquire information exponentially. They can't help but be optimistic.
The
second level of optimism concerns the content of science. Much of
the news is either good news or news that can be made good, thanks
to ever deepening knowledge and ever more efficient and powerful tools
and techniques. Because the findings of science are not mere matters
of opinion, they sweep past systems of thought based only on opinion.
Science, on its frontiers, poses more and better questions, better
put. They are questions phrased to elicit answers; the scientists
find the answers, and move on.
Scientists
debate continually, and reality is the check. They may have egos as
large as those possessed by the iconic figures of the academic humanities,
but they handle their hubris in a very different way. They can be
moved by arguments, because they work in an empirical world of facts,
a world based on reality. There are no fixed, unalterable positions.
Unlike the humanities academicians, who talk about each other, scientists
talk about the universe. Moreover, conceptually there's not much difference
between the style of thinking of a cosmologist trying to understand
the physical world by studying the origins of atoms, stars, and galaxies
and an evolutionary biologist trying to understand the emergence of
complex systems from simple beginnings or trying to see patterns in
nature. As exercises, these entail the same mixture of observation,
theoretical modeling, computer simulation, and so on, as in most other
scientific fields. The worlds of science are convergent. The frame
of reference is shared across their disciplines.
Scientists
As Both Creators and Critics
A
significant aspect of the third culture is that scientists are both
the creators and the critics of the scientific enterprise. Ideas come
from scientists, who also criticize each other's ideas. Through the
process of creativity and criticism and debates, scientists decide
which ideas get weeded out and which become part of the consensus
that leads to the next stage. All scientists are involved in coming
up with new ideas and engaged in the critique of existing ideas, whereas
in literature and the other arts the creators and the critics are,
with few exceptions, two distinct sets of people.
Creativity in both the humanities and the sciences involves the same
thought processes, but science understands that work becomes part
of a common body of knowledge. It doesn't matter who had the ideas
in the first place. Most scientific developments emerge when the time
is right—a new experiment, a new discovery, a new paradox. Science
is a combination of creative insights and robust criticism. This process
gets rid of the failures and refines and improves the surviving ideas.
Science figures out how things work and thus can make them work better.
As an activity, as a state of mind, it is fundamentally optimistic.
The Horizon Grows
Science is still near the beginning. As the frontiers advance, the
horizon gets wider and comes into focus. And these advances have changed
the way we see our place in nature. The idea that we are an integral
part of this universe—a universe governed by physical and mathematical
laws that our brains are attuned to understand—causes us to see
our place in the unfolding of natural history differently. We have
come to realize, through developments in astronomy and cosmology,
that we are still quite near the beginning. The history of creation
has been enormously expanded—from six thousand years back to
the twelve or thirteen billion years of big bang cosmology. But the
future has expanded even more—perhaps to infinity. In the seventeenth
century, people not only believed in that constricted past but thought
that history was near its end: the apocalypse was coming.
A realization that time may well be endless leads us to a new view
of the human species—as not being in any sense the culmination
but perhaps a fairly early stage of the process of evolution. We arrive
at this concept through detailed observation and analysis, through
science-based thinking; it allows us to see life playing an ever greater
role in the future of the universe.
Scientia
Many
people, even many scientists, have a narrow view of science as controlled,
replicated experiments performed in the laboratory—and as consisting
quintessentially of physics, chemistry, and molecular biology. The
essence of science is conveyed by its Latin etymology: scientia,
meaning knowledge. The scientific method is simply that body of practices
best suited for obtaining reliable knowledge. The practices vary among
fields: the controlled laboratory experiment is possible in molecular
biology, physics, and chemistry, but it is either impossible, immoral,
or illegal in many other fields customarily considered sciences, including
all of the historical sciences: astronomy, epidemiology, evolutionary
biology, most of the earth sciences, and paleontology. If the scientific
method can be defined as those practices best suited for obtaining
knowledge in a particular field, then science itself is simply the
body of knowledge obtained by those practices.
Just as science—that is, reliable methods for obtaining knowledge—has
encroached on areas (such as psychology) formerly considered to belong
to the humanities, science is also encroaching on the social sciences,
especially economics, geography, history, and political science. Not
just the broad observation-based and statistical methods of the historical
sciences but also detailed techniques of the conventional sciences
(such as genetics and molecular biology and animal behavior) are proving
essential for tackling problems in the social sciences. Science is
nothing more nor less than the most reliable way of gaining knowledge
about anything, whether it be the human spirit, the role of great
men in history, or the structure of DNA. Humanities scholars and historians
who spurn it condemn themselves to second-rate status and produce
unreliable results.
But this doesn't have to be the case. There are encouraging signs
that the third culture now includes scholars in the humanities who
think the way scientists do. Like their colleagues in the sciences,
they believe that there is a real world and that their job is to understand
it and explain it. They test their ideas in terms of logical coherence,
explanatory power, conformity with empirical facts. They do not defer
to intellectual authorities: Anyone's ideas can be challenged, and
understanding progresses and knowledge accumulates through such challenges.
They are not reducing the humanities to biological and physical principles,
but they do believe that art, literature, history, politics—a
whole panoply of humanist concerns—need to take the sciences
into account.
Connections do exist: our arts, our philosophies, our literature are
the product of human minds interacting with one another, and the human
mind is a product of the human brain, which is organized in part by
the human genome and evolved by the physical processes of evolution.
Like scientists, the science-based humanities scholars are intellectually
eclectic, seeking ideas from a variety of sources and adopting the
ones that prove their worth, rather than working within "systems"
or "schools." As such they are not Marxist scholars, or
Freudian scholars, or Catholic scholars. They think like scientists,
know science, and easily communicate with scientists; their principal
difference from scientists is in the subject matter they write about,
not their intellectual style. Science and science-based thinking among
enlightened humanities scholars are now part of public culture.
One
Culture, the Third Culture
Something
radically new is in the air: new ways of understanding physical systems,
new ways of thinking about thinking that call into question many of
our basic assumptions. A realistic biology of the mind, advances in
physics, electricity, genetics, neurobiology, engineering, the chemistry
of materials—all are challenging basic assumptions of who and
what we are, of what it means to be human. The arts and the sciences
are again joining together as one culture, the third culture. Those
involved in this effort—scientists, science-based humanities
scholars, writers—are at the center of today's intellectual action.
They are the new humanists.
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