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, information technology, 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--on either side of C.P. Snow's old divide--are at the center of today's intellectual action. They are the new humanists.
THE NEW HUMANISTS
By John Brockman
In 1991, 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 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.
Twelve years later, that fossil culture has been essentially replaced by the "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. The scientists of the third culture share their work and ideas not just with each other but with a newly educated public, through their books. Focusing on the real world, they have led us into one of the most dazzling periods of intellectual activity in human history. The achievements of the third culture are not the marginal disputes of a quarrelsome mandarin class; they affect the lives of everybody on the planet.
The emergence of this new culture is evidence of a great intellectual hunger, a desire for the new and important ideas that drive our times: 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.
Humanism and the Intellectual Whole
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 included science and technology along with literature and art--the official culture kicked them out. Traditional humanities scholars looked at science and technology as some sort of technical special product. Elite universities nudged science out of the liberal arts undergraduate curriculum--and out of the minds of many young people, who, as the new academic establishment, so marginalized themselves that they are no longer within shouting distance of the action.
In too much of academia, intellectual debate tends 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 real world? 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 genetics and evolutionary biology.
Cultural Pessimism vs. Scientific Optimism
A fundamental distinction exists between the literature of science and that of disciplines whose subjects are self-referential and most often concerned with the exegesis of earlier thinkers. Unlike those disciplines in which there is no expectation of systematic progress and in which one reflects on and recycles the ideas of others, science, on its frontiers, poses more and better questions, better put. They are questions phrased to elicit answers; science finds the answers and moves on. Meanwhile the traditional humanities establishment continues its exhaustive insular hermeneutics, indulging itself in cultural pessimism, clinging to its fashionably glum outlook on world events."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 continues:
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....[T]he 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. 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 have created 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?
As a counternarrative to this cultural pessimism, consider the twofold optimism of science.
First, the more science you 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.
And second, much of the new information 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. 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. They are both the creators and the critics of their shared enterprise. Ideas come from them and they also criticize one another's ideas. Through the process of creativity and criticism and debates, they decide which ideas get weeded out and which become part of the consensus that leads to the next level of discovery. Unlike the humanities academicians, who talk about each other, scientists talk about the universe. Moreover, 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.
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 6,000 years back to the 13.7 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.
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 there is a real world and 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 and knowledge accumulate 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-based thinking among enlightened humanities scholars is now part of public culture.
In short, 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, information technology, 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--on either side of C.P. Snow's old divide--are at the center of today's intellectual action. They are the new humanists.
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Responses to "The New Humanists" from Nicholas Humphrey, Joseph LeDoux, John Horgan, Timothy Taylor, Carlo Rovelli, Steven Johnson, Douglas Rushkoff, Piet Hut, Mihalyi Csikzentmihalyi, Denis Dutton, Daniel C. Dennett, Howard Rheingold, Chris Anderson
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From: Nicholas Humphrey
I have major problems with the essay. In particular, I don't find the identification of science and optimism at all convincing--on either of your two counts.
1. I don't think scientists do (or should) expect an exponential Moore's-Law-like expansion of interesting problems. In fact, just the opposite: I think we are–or soon will be–exhausting the mine of deep and interesting problems. We'll have a "theory of everything," we'll have proved Riemann's hypothesis, we'll have got to the bottom of consciousness, and so on. This is indeed the Golden Age of Science. But it has to be self-closing, at least as far as the big, the hard, problems are concerned. I wrote about just this issue in my essay "Scientific Shakespeare." The point I made there is that the "arts" continue to have opportunities that the "sciences" soon will not have. I think we scientists had better be prepared for–and humble in the face of–the next phase of human culture, which may well revert to the traditional province of the arts.
2. I don't think scientific discoveries can be counted on, necessarily, to bring about a net increase in human happiness—either through what they reveal about the course of nature or through the tools they potentially give us with which to intervene in it. Many scientists, from Bertrand Russell to Jacques Monod to Martin Rees, have been and are deeply pessimistic about what science tells us about the way the world is headed. And, as a separate issue, many still have anxieties about the use to which scientific discoveries will be put—from weapons of mass destruction, to eugenics, to thought control.
This isn't to question your main point that today science is the only game in town. I do of course agree there's more hope in science than there is in anything else. But the problem, as I see it, for this essay is that you already made this point years ago as convincingly as could be, in your introduction to The Third Culture, and it really doesn't need making again. In fact, if I were you, I would now adopt a totally different tack. Instead of repeating your attack on the Bloomsbury-obsessed intellectuals of the second half of the twentieth century, I think you should be drawing attention to the way they have already become marginalized—partly through your own efforts. The evidence for the triumph of science in the intellectual culture is all around. In literature (e.g., Ian McEwan's Enduring Love), in film (e.g., A Beautiful Mind), in theatre (e.g., Michael Frayn's Copenhagen), and so on. What we're seeing is an astonishing turnaround from the old values to the new. Your essay, as it is, is curiously paranoid. You no longer need to be! You've largely won. But the next task is to provide a sober assessment of the nature of the victory.
Nicholas Humphrey is a theoretical psychologist at LSE and The New School and author of The Mind Made Flesh.[[32]]
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From: Joseph LeDoux
It's great to seek some sort of fusion across diverse fields, but I'm concerned that things are not as black and white as you imply in the piece. There are of course some vocal "relativists" in academic circles, but I think most people who are actually making culture (artists, writers, muscians) are open to and very interested in what science has to say. Unfortunately, the same is less the case for some scientists. It is shocking to see how ignorant and dismissive of the arts scientists can be. As I see it, the broader view of culture which you propose is going to require some mind expansion in the sciences as well.
Joseph Ledoux is a neuroscientist at New York University and author of Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are.
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From: John Horgan
You say scientists confront the "real world," as opposed to these humanist ignorami. I wish you had named names, so we could judge whether 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 are string theorists or inflationary cosmologists. Certainly some science trade books—such as E.O. Wilson's latest, The 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? 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 subniche of the entertainment industry. If people would rather read about Virginia Woolf's sex life–or watch Friends–than wrestle with A Brief History of Time or The Origins of Order, I don't think they should have to feel like second-class citizens.
I agree that we would all be better off if more people were scientifically literate. But to me "scientific literacy" does not mean getting excited over the latest scientific "breakthrough," whether braIn theory, 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 pseudoscientific fads 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.
John Horgan is a freelance writer and author of Rational Mysticism: Dispatches from the Border Between Science and Spirituality; The Undiscovered Mind.
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From: Timothy Taylor
Certainly I recognize some of what John [Brockman] diagnoses as frustrating (and worse) in the social sciences—"text-in, text-out" bubbles of inconsequential, content-free activity only blasphemously given the name of scholarship. But we must also recognize that there has been an extraordinary—and often extraordinarily arrogant—underestimation of the complexity of the humanities by some hard scientists who extend themselves across the arts sciences divide. Personally, I have no doubt that to do moral philosophy well, for instance, requires a longer intellectual training than is typically needed to make advances in, say, plasma physics or genetics. But I also know that some physicists and geneticists are prone not to recognize this. I do not mean to say that what they do is simpleminded (emphatically it is not), just that some (perhaps much) of what they do is epistemologically more straightforward.
The dangers of scientists attempting to become the new humanists are best illustrated by specific examples. For instance, Richard Dawkins's idea of "memes"—proposed cultural counterparts to genes—has not been adopted in archaeology, precisely the discipline where it should have succeeded had it been useful. It is unsurprising (and no real discredit to him) that a top-notch evolutionary biologist does not cut the mustard when it comes to theorizing cultural transmission: After all, Richard Dawkins may have no more training in cultural theory than I have in evolutionary biology. A problem arises, however, if people who may know no better think that memes must be a good idea, and interpret the paucity of critical discussion of them as evidence of the acceptance of the concept.
Similar kinds of concerns arise in relation to the psychologist Steven Pinker's formulation of a "language instinct." This is not a bad idea in theory, but it is elaborated with–apparently–total disregard for an extensive body of work by Russian, French, and German philosophical linguists which has reached very different conclusions. That is to say, whether or not one accepts Pinker's linguistic judgments, his work has come out from a cognitive psychology background into the glare of public attention (and has been widely accepted to be true by the media) without engaging with those humanistic debates of most central relevance to the plausibility or otherwise of his most dramatic claims (as expressed by followers of L. S. Vygotsky, to take one example).
One has to confront the tricky problem that popular science often either preaches to the converted or, when it strays into more "humanistic" domains, makes an unwitting ass of itself. The United States has an excellent tradition of scientists writing for a broader audience, but a scarily growing third of the national population shares a metaphysics which cannot accommodate Darwinian evolution, let alone understand what it entails. The rise of creationism in the United States is an unfolding intellectual tragedy that will be turned around only when there is greater respect–among scientists, in particular–for the sophistication and unpredictability of human social and cultural formations. This will require a renewed humility in addressing the true complexities of our behavioral wellsprings. The prospect of a great nation intellectually split between religious fundamentalism and an equally assertive, dogmatic, and unreflectively narrow scientism is not pretty.
A real victory for science would consist not in sweeping away other aspects of existence, such as religion (not that it has any hope of doing so) but in respectfully deepening understanding of what it is to live and die as a human being and observing the universe from that perspective. Many dimensions of nonrational, symbolic, or ritual behaviors can, of course, be partially or wholly analyzed within a scientific framework, but other aspects will never be amenable to such a thing. There are places where experiment and verification cannot go, and we have to observe, interpret, reflect, and explain perceived phenomena in a qualitatively different way.
Timothy Taylor is an archaeologist at University of Bradford, UK, and author of The Buried Soul: How We Invented Death and The Prehistory of Sex.
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From: Carlo Rovelli
We are certainly far away from obscurantism, but there are also signs of reaction against scientific thinking, and John's optimistic essay is a warning. There are serious signs of irrationalism all over the planet and also in the words of our top leaders. Our guarantee against obscurantism is not democracy alone: Peoples have often voted into power forces that openly adhered to irrationalism, such as the Nazis and some current governments. Our guarantee against obscurantism is the widespread recognition of the vital and clear force of rational scientific thinking. When I talk with cultivated people who happily claim they know nothing about math and science, I get even more scared than when powerful people say they do not read books.
Scientific thinking is at the core of our knowledge-based civilization. We can add to this our thirst for justice, our faith in dreams, our deep awareness of the emptiness of life, our faith in humanity as a value, our desire for beauty, our sense of mystery, and all else that the wonders of the human adventure has given us. None of this is challenged by science, or challenges science. To the contrary. The scientific quest for knowledge is deeply emotional in its ways and motivations. If we resist it, we resist reality. Reality, however complex and unknowable in its deepness, is there, and fights back.
Carlo Rovelli, a specialist in quantum gravity, is a theoretical physicist at the Centre de Physique Théorique, in Marseille.
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From: Steven Johnson
I think Nicholas Humphrey may have a point when he says that "you've already won." One brief piece of anecdotal evidence: I attended a dinner party last weekend that was populated entirely by people who had spent their undergraduate—and in some cases graduate—years in the trenches of postmodernist theory. These were all people who, like me, had sworn allegiance to Baudrillard, Derrida, Foucault, Jameson, et al. in their early twenties. (A number were semiotics majors with me at Brown.) Any science courses we'd taken in those days we took in order to archly deconstruct the underlying "paradigm of research," or expose one of any number of "centrisms" lurking behind the scientific text and its illusory claims of empirical truth.
What struck me over dinner, though, was how readily the conversation drifted—without me pushing it along—to precisely the realm you describe in "The New Humanists," largely focused around brain issues. None of these people had returned to grad school in neuroscience, mind you, but they were all clearly versed in, and fascinated by, the latest news from the brain sciences. They talked casually about neurotransmitters and "other-mindedness;" they leaned readily on evolutionary psychological explanations for the behavior they were discussing; they talked about the role of the "god spot" in the evolution of religious belief. There wasn't a scare quote or a relativist aside in the entire conversation. I couldn't help thinking that if any one of them had made a comparable argument ten or fifteen years ago, he or she would have been heckled out of the room.
I don't think my dinner survey was anomalous. It seems to me that the most interesting work right now is work that tries to bridge the two worlds, that looks for connections rather than divisions. I think that's what E.O. Wilson was proposing in Consilience: not the annexing of the humanities by the sciences but a kind of conceptual bridge-building. In fact, I would say that the most consilient work today has come from folks trained as cultural critics—books like Michael Pollan's Botany of Desire, with its mix of Nietzsche and Richard Dawkins, or Manuel De Landa's 1,000 Years of Non-Linear History, with its unique combination of Deleuze and chaos theory.
I suspect there are other bridges to build in the coming years, but the traffic along those bridges will have to be two-way for the interaction to pay off. Obviously, the postmodernists have made a lot of noise trashing the empirical claims of sciences, but if you tune out much of that bombast, there's quite a bit in the structuralist and poststructuralist tradition that dovetails with new developments in the sciences. To give just a few examples: The underlying premise of deconstruction--that our systems of thought are fundamentally shaped and limited by the structure of language--resonates with many chapters of a book like The Language Instinct. (I tried to persuade Pinker of this when I interviewed him years ago for Feed.) The postmodern assumption of a "constructed reality" goes nicely with the idea of consciousness as a kind of artificial theater and not a direct apprehension of things in themselves. Semiotics and structuralism both began with Levi-Strauss's research into universal mythology, which obviously has deep connections to the project of evolutionary psychology.
Steven Johnson is cofounder of the pioneering Web magazine Feed. He is the author of Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software and Interface Culture
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From: Douglas Rushkoff
I have lately been thinking about the lasting effects of modernism and science on religious narrative. Some cultural theorists may think we're in the age of "post-postmodernism," but our theologians are still contending with Descartes, Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud. The most profound impact of modernity is that we can no longer base the authority of our religious testaments on history; our myths and our gods are refuted by scientific reality. We lose our absolutes and the sense of certainty they afforded us.
So in march the postmodernists, from James Joyce to MTV, who learn to play in the house of mirrors, creating compositions and worldviews out of relativities. Entirely less satisfying (feels more like a Slurpee than hot oatmeal that actually fills you). We cultural theorists tried to make sense out of this world of self-references, as if it mattered. What we ended up with was a culture of inside jokes, cynicism, and detachment. Detachment was considered cool, and then "cool" itself was replaced by objectification. So all our kids walk around emulating the models in a Calvin Klein catalog, posturing through their lives, as if getting photographed were the supreme human achievement. One's appearance in an ad or on a billboard could transform that person into an absolute--the benchmark against which others would define themselves.
But I believe this whole Vanity Fair culture, beginning with Joan Didion or Tom Wolfe and ending with David Sedaris or Dave Eggers, has run its course. We've grown sick of living in a vacuum and struggling to remain detached. It's no fun to read magazines through squinty, knowing smirks. We realize that detachment is a booby prize. We want to engage, meaningfully, in the stuff of life. In comes science. And with it comes good old-fashioned innocent awe. Science is not the force that corrupts our nature, it is the open-minded wonder that returns us to it. It is being welcomed back into the culture of narcissism, because we've finally grown tired enough of ourselves to care about something real. We ache to let go of our postured pretentiousness and surrender to that sensation a kid gets at the Epcot Center or planetarium.
The jaw drops, the eyes widen, the mind opens.
Douglas Rushkoff, a professor of media culture at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program, is the author of Coercion: Why We Listen to What "They" Say and most recently Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism.
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From: Piet Hut
I, too, expect science to be able to deal with any aspect of reality, in due time. The only catch is that we don't have much of an idea what this future science will look like. This means that we can be proud of the method of science and the results that have been obtained so far, but we'd better be modest about claims that our current results more or less describe the world "as it really is." There are two directions in which to argue for this position.
1. Argument from the past. Remember how self-assured many of the leading physicists were toward the end of the nineteenth century? Fundamental physics seemed almost completed—and then suddenly relativity theory and quantum mechanics came along, offering a vastly different understanding of physical reality. Today we still admire the great contributions from people like Maxwell and Kelvin, but we have completely dropped their pictures of what the world really is like.
2. Argument from the future. Imagine living in the year 100,000 (in an optimistic picture in which civilization has not completely destroyed itself). Would it really be plausible that history books would tell you then that science developed in 500 years, from Galileo in 1600 to the year 2100, when the structure of reality was understood—with the rest being 97,900 years of footnotes? I find this extremely hard to believe. I consider it far more likely that we will continue to see "jaws dropping, eyes widening, minds opening," not only in popular presentations but at the very frontier of science as well.
This is why I don't expect science to be able to provide a valid alternative to a full worldview anytime soon. Whether we are looking for an ethical, humanistic, religious, or spiritual view of the world, including our own presence, science just isn't far enough along to address that quest. It makes more sense to use the scientific method to sift through the knowledge that has come down to us through the ages, to try to separate dogma and specific cultural trappings, while highlighting that which seems to be based most on empirical investigations.
Whatever will be discovered with our tools in, say, the year 52,003 already applies to the real world. And the question is, From the vantage point of 52,003, will our current scientific knowledge be seen as more helpful in leading a full life than our current religious and spiritual views? If we distill from the latter what is most closely related to experiential insights into the human mind, my guess would be that these will provide us with the more useful tools for quite a few centuries to come.
Piet Hut, a professor of interdisciplinary studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, is a founding member of the Kira Institute.
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From: Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi
John, I do share with you the almost petulant impatience concerning what passes for scholarship in the humanities and the social sciences. The isolation from the rest of the world, the navel-gazing, the faddish swings and inbred coteries are not a pretty sight. But is this situation due to the perversity of humanists, or is it a temporary disease that just now happens to afflict the humanities? You seem to blame mostly the individuals involved, whereas I would hope that the problem resides with the way the humanities have been practiced in the past few generations.
The mandate of the sciences is to explore, discover, and create new ways of looking at the world and new ways of controlling physical processes. Some of this will be useful to humankind; some—such as nuclear waste, greenhouse gases, genetic changes—might yet be our bane. But because every culture (first, second, third...) tends towards hegemony and values dogma, we must pretend that science is an unmitigated blessing. And in the meantime, it is true, as you say, that the pursuit of science and its sexy daughter, technology, are a lot of fun for those involved in the chase.
What we expect from the humanities is something different. It is not the production of novelty but the selection, the evaluation of what is important, meaningful (dare I say "good"?)—and the transmission of the selected human achievements to the next generation. And the next. Thus the role of the humanities is conservative, bridging the present and the future, with a view to the past. As you know, there cannot be evolution without a mechanism for screening novelties that improve life from inferior novelties: Producing novelty alone does not lead to adaptive change. To help in this process should be the role of the humanities.
By and large the humanities have abandoned that task. Why? There are surely many reasons, but one of the major ones is that the same criteria that make sense in science have been applied to the humanities. Assistant professors in philosophy or English are hired and promoted on the basis of the "originality" of their contributions—which forces them to come up with ever cuter novelties rather than to reflect on what is valuable and permanent. Young scholars are not rewarded for being good humanists but for applying the "explore, discover, create" approach to texts, in a superficial imitation of the sciences. If there is blame to assign, it is the recent success of the sciences that has helped erode the uniqueness of the humanities.
The domains of the humanities are in trouble. But there is less of a distinction between "scientists" and "humanists" than between the institutional structures and the social reward systems within which the two groups operate. As you report, there are now humanists who think like scientists. It is also probably true that the number of scientists who are provincial in their outlook, who ignore the long-term implications of their work, who disdain anyone outside their circle, is at least as large as that of the benighted humanists. The difference is that the scientists are doing a job appreciated by the majority, while the humanists are not.
My solution to this problem is in some ways the opposite of yours: The humanities need to rediscover their true calling and stick by it. Of course, this does mean that in order to evaluate, select, and transmit valuable knowledge, the humanist has to be acquainted with the products of science and understand their implications. It may no longer be possible for an artist to be at the forefront of science as Leonardo was, but the insularity of both camps ought to decrease. With a common fund of knowledge, the two endeavors can then proceed toward their respective goals.
Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi is the Davidson Professor of Management at the Claremont Graduate University, and author of Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience; and Finding Flow. ________________________________________________________________
From: Denis Dutton
It may be tempting to regard as passé the triumph of your New Humanists over the decayed scholarship that has come to count as academic humanism in the last generation. But your thesis needs to be reiterated and elaborated. It touches a nerve, not least because you are talking about how whole careers have been wrought and rewarded in the century past, and how the organized pursuit of knowledge will be undertaken in the century ahead.
We cannot identify what the New Humanists are for without having some notion of what they stand against. As academic disciplines, the humanities, particularly studies of culture and the arts, have arrived at a dead end. If they were moribund it would be bad enough, but they have become a general laughing-stock. The annual meeting of the Modern Language Association is now a standard target for smart journalists looking to deflate the pompous and foolish, giggle-inducing jargon proliferates, and political tendentiousness replaces aesthetic insight in what modestly used to be called literary criticism.
The social reasons why the traditional humanities have split off from the rest of creative, productive thought are complex. Anyone who teaches at a university will know the difficulty of trying to get students to read the long fictional works that used to be the centerpieces of the curriculum of English and literature departments. It's easier to rename an area "cultural studies" and start watching movies and soap operas. The shallowness of discussions of popular culture requires that they be dressed up in impen-etrable jargon. While no one would deny the need for a technical vocabulary in genetics, neuroscience, or physics, the jargon encountered in academic cultural studies has become a smokescreen for a lack of thinking-the emperor's clothing of choice.
The humanities have, in adopting jargon, tried to ape the sciences without grasping the actual nature of scientific thinking. In other respects, they have consciously and dogmatically rejected the scientific model altogether. Either way, the result, as you say, is that humanities academics have "so marginalized themselves that they are no longer within shouting distance of the action." E. M. Forster's celebrated phrase "Only connect" has become the misleading slogan of much academic research in the humanities. It misleads because useful thinking does so much more than "only connect" anything with anything else. In science, making connections is a matter of using observation to disclose the mechanisms that lie under experience and produce it: This means disregarding some classes of connection (my star sign and my personality) and deeply analyzing others (my genetic makeup and my eye color). Science advances by using experiment and observation to learn which connections are worth studying and which are pointless to pursue.
The popularity of deconstruction as a humanistic methodology was that it allowed free rein to an "only connect" mentality. As the connections are between words and ideas, the humanities are thus made into a closed system in which any connection-symbolic, metaphorical, however whimsical-is possible and valid. The system is shut off from any external regulation or constraint: Anything really does go. You're therefore right to say that the literary humanities have become self-referential: not only in the sense that they refer constantly to their own history but that they are unchecked by any external standard of reality. From this flows not only the hollowness (and therefore the jargon-mongering) but also the tiresome appeals to authority (name-dropping references replacing argument in scholarship) and the impulse to politicize questions (find the victim, name the oppressor) in order to imbue them with a sense of importance.
As the cheap fireworks of the "theory years" in the humanities fizzle and sputter, your New Humanists do in fact offer a revival of productive, creative thought for anyone who wants to understand better the nature of the human race. Science of the kind you champion supports itself on an independently existing reality: the physical and biological (evolved) universe as it is-independent of human will, including the wishful thinking of English professors. Even when dealing with traditional social and cultural achievements of human history, we need not fall into a "social constructionist" view of the human world. It is a historical fact that human beings have found myriad ways to construct their social and political arrangements, and endless avenues to express themselves artistically. It is equally true that history and anthropology both reveal universal human tendencies in societies and arts, and that the discovery of these universals is not just another social construction but has in principle an epistemic status equivalent to the discoveries of astronomy or genetics. It may be harder to count universal human values and tendencies than to count the planets, but that does not mean that it is pointless or impossible.
Yes, there is something new in the air, after two or three generations of humanistic scholarship that has run itself into the ground. You call it a "realistic biology of the mind." It is a view of humanity that takes the best from physics, biochemistry, evolutionary research and theory, genetics, anthropology, and even rigorous philosophy. It is keen to find an experimental and empirical basis for its general conclusions. It is, frankly, exciting. And best of all, it is just getting started.
Denis Dutton, a philosopher, is founder and editor of the Web publication [56]Arts & Letters Daily , and is editor of the journal Philosophy and Literature.
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From: Daniel C. Dennett
I'm happy to join in the Third Culture victory dance, and I agree with most of what you have to say in your essay, but I also share some of the misgivings expressed, and would like to add a few of my own.
As Nick Humphrey urges, you should drop the paranoia. You've--we've--won. And as usual, there's a danger of squandering the spoils and ignoring some of the problems created or exacerbated by victory. As Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi notes, many of the problems in the humanities these days are due to misplaced science envy, misbegotten attempts to make the humanities more like the natural sciences. And as Marc Hauser says, your essay does contain some self congratulatory caricatures.
Contrary to what you say, there are "systems" and "schools" in science, every bit as ruthless in the suppression of heresy as their counterparts in the humanities. Science abounds in received doctrines and authorities that one questions at the risk of being branded a fool or worse, and for every young humanities scholar writing fashionably formulaic drivel about one deservedly obscure poet or critic or another, there are several young scientists uncritically doing cookbook science, filling in the blanks of data tables that nobody will ever care to consult. I'm told that Sturgeon's Law is that 95 percent of everything is crap, and while I would be inclined to adjust that percentage to about 50 percent (I'm a softie, I guess), as far as I can see, the percentage, whatever it is, is not markedly lower in neuroscience than it is in literary theory. Don't make the mistake of comparing some of the best examples on one side with some of the worst on the other. Hebb's Rule--that if it isn't worth doing, it isn't worth doing well--could put a lot of scientists out of work along with their makework colleagues in the humanities.
It's a two way-street. When scientists decide to "settle" the hard questions of ethics and meaning, for instance, they usually manage to make fools of themselves, for a simple reason: They are smart but ignorant. The reason philosophers spend so much of their time and energy raking over the history of the field is that the history of philosophy consists, in large measure, of very tempting mistakes, and the only way to avoid making them again and again is to study how the great thinkers of the past got snared by them. Scientists who think their up-to-date scientific knowledge renders them immune to the illusions that lured Aristotle and Hume and Kant and the others into such difficulties are in for a rude awakening.
DANIEL C. DENNETT is a philsopher at Tufts University and the author of Darwin's Dangerous Idea; Kinds of Minds; and Freedom Evolves.
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From: Howard Rheingold
Because scientific propositions must be testable, and because questions of humanism versus science come down to how these ways of knowing affect our lives, I propose a test for the role of scientific understanding in human affairs: Can science improve life for most people alive today, and for our heirs, by understanding the nature of cooperation as profoundly as physicists understand matter and biologists understand the processes of life and evolution?
I suspect that if this question, above all others, is not answered soon by some method, all other questions are likely to become moot. Even if we stipulate the advent of a technological singularity in the manner of Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil several decades hence, who today does not have at least a reasonable doubt that machine intelligence will mature quickly enough to take over soon enough to prevent human intelligence from beating itself to death with its own creations?
I pose this as a scientific, not a philosophical question. Certainly the attempt to apply scientific methods to psyches, societies, markets, and civilizations has been less successful to this point than scientific probes into the nature of the cosmos, matter, and life itself. Does this mean that the atom or DNA of cooperation, the fundamental element of human collective good, is eternally elusive, perhaps in some Heisenbergian-Gödelian-Zen sense? Or does it mean that current scientific knowledge of human cooperation and conflict remains inadequate? This is a key question, because we know that science did move beyond age-old inadequate understandings of the physical world when the "new methods" of rational, empirical inquiry emerged from the work of Descartes, Newton, Galileo, and Bacon centuries ago. Is human social behavior beyond the understanding of science, or has science simply not caught up yet?
It isn't necessary to make a case to anyone who follows world events that some serious new thinking about solving the problems of genocide, warfare, terrorism, murder, assault--violent human conflict on all scales--is urgently needed. Traditionally, discourse about this aspect of human nature has been the province of the humanities. Can any scientist say with certainty, however, that such questions are forever beyond the reach of scientific inquiry? Investigations into the nature of disease meandered for centuries in unsupported theory and superstition. When optics and experimentation made possible the knowledge of the germ theory of disease, discovery and application of scientific knowledge directly alleviated human suffering.
Some general characteristics of cooperation among living organisms in general, and humans in particular, have emerged from biological and economic experiments using game theory and sociobiological theories explaining the behavior of organisms. The use of computer simulations in Prisoner's Dilemma and other public-goods games and the application of public-goods games to human subjects has begun to provide the first pieces of the puzzle of how cooperation has evolved up to the present--and, most important, small clues to how it might continue to evolve in the future. Sociological studies of the way that some groups successfully manage common resources have illuminated a few general characteristics of cooperative groups. Recent economic studies of online markets have demonstrated the power of reputation systems. Social network analysis, experimental economics, complex-adaptive-systems theory, all provide relevant evidence. The evolution of social cooperation, aided and abetted by the evolution of technologies, has been the subject of meta-theories of social evolution.
The entire puzzle of how groups of different sizes agree to cooperate, why and how cooperation breaks down, how conflicts arise, intensify, and resolve, is largely unknown. But the puzzle pieces from a dozen different disciplines are beginning to fit together to reveal larger patterns. Part of the current lack of understanding may stem from the nature of specialized scientific inquiry: Biologists, economists, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, computer scientists, game theorists, and political scientists have only recently begun to suspect that they hold parts of the same puzzle. It has taken some time for those studying cooperation, reputation, and conflict to recognize the need for interdisciplinary syntheses.
The practical chances of this proposed test of the power of science to do what the humanities have tried to do for centuries depend on whether someone marshals resources and spurs organizational motivation for a full-scale, cross-disciplinary effort to understand cooperation. Unlike knowledge that might lead to new weapons, new media, or new medicines, no organizational or economic structure currently exists to support an Apollo Program of cooperation. And even the best organized and funded effort can't guarantee that an answer exists, or that it won't take a century to discover. The consequences of failure might or might not be the end of all cultures, but if scientific inquiry does succeed in elucidating the nature and dynamics of social cooperation, it will have proved its superiority as a way of knowing that can improve the way most people live. Curing diseases was impressive. Curing conflict would be proof.
Howard Rheingold is a communications theorist; his books include The Virtual Community and Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution.
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From the Introduction to The New Humanists: Scientists at the Edge by John Brockman (forthcoming, Fall 2003). [64]
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JOHN BROCKMAN is publisher and editor of Edge. His books include The Third Culture; The Next Fifty Years: Science in the First Half of the Twenty-First Century; and The New Humanists: Scientists at the Edge[12] (forthcoming).[13]
References (omitted)
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/brockman/brockman_print.html