From: John Horgan
Date: 4.20.02

John, if your essay was meant to provoke, it obviously succeeded. But it really works more as a kind of Nike ad for science than a serious analysis of science's relation to the humanities or culture as a whole. It reminds me of Wired rhetoric, pre-Nasdaq crash, or of the jacket copy for books about the Santa Fe Institute in its giddy early days. Science rules!

You are brave indeed to resurrect this kind of scientistic triumphalism now that the e-business bubble has burst and the world is roiling with conflicts that science has little or no hope of illuminating, let alone ameliorating.

A few more cantankerous thoughts:

You say scientists confront the "real world," as opposed to these humanist ignorami. I wish you had named names, so we could judge if your targets match your cartoon description. But let's take Judith Butler, who does deconstruction of sexual identity and is a favorite whipping girl of those bemoaning the decadence of the humanities. I would submit that she's far more engaged with reality—our human reality—than string theorists or inflationary cosmologists.

Certainly some science trade books, such as Ed Wilson's latest, Future of Life, address issues that should concern any thoughtful person. But tell me, John, is there any science book as important for someone today to read as, say, Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations?

And lots of popular trade books in science are peddling sci-fi escapism, geared especially toward socially awkward adolescent males. What does Lee Smolin's evolutionary cosmology have to do with the real world, honestly, or Ray Kurzweil's fantasies about what it would be like to be transformed into pure software?

I'm a science geek, so I find this sort of stuff entertaining, when well done, but I certainly can't blame others who have no taste for it. Let's face it, trade science books are best understood as a minuscule sub-niche of the entertainment industry. If people would rather read about Virginia Woolf's sex life—or watch "Friends," for that matter—than wrestling with Brief History of Time or Origins of Order, I don't think they should have to feel like second-class citizens.

I agree with you that we would all be better off if more people were scientifically literate. But to me, scientific literacy does not mean getting all excited over the latest scientific "breakthrough," whether brane theory or monoclonal antibodies or nanotech. It means knowing enough to distinguish genuine advances from the hype surrounding Prozac or evolutionary psychology or Star Wars or gene therapy.

Science has enriched modern life in countless ways, both materially and intellectually. But our infatuation with scientific and technological progress for their own sake has also had adverse consequences: pollution, weapons of mass destruction, you know the old bugaboos. And great harm was committed in the last century because people got carried away by such pseudo-scientific fads such as Marxism, social Darwinism, eugenics and psychopharmacology. History teaches us that science is limited in what it can do for us. This is realism, not pessimism. And the last thing we need nowadays is another ideology or faith.

Best wishes, and thanks for getting my adrenaline going.

JOHN HORGAN is a freelance writer and author of The Undiscovered Mind. [more....]