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    The New Humanist
by   John Brockman

"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."


Originally published on Edge.org April 24, 2002. Published on KurzweilAI.net, May 14, 2002.

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.

One 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 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").

Continued at: http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge100.html Copyright © 2002 by Edge Foundation, Inc.

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The New Humanist
posted on 05/19/2002 9:14 PM by Citizen Blue

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There seems to have always been an antagonism toward the scientific and humanist approach to reality from the time of Plato and his rejection of art. As I see it, we can cherish both without being totally immersed in either. The concept of relativity can give us reference points for important comparisons; We should be wary of taking perceptions as truth; religion can have many good truths; however, this does not make the whole of them true; the same can be true for science; at best they are paradigms, part of the whole; whatever that is. The bottom line is, we
must question everything. Ideals can be good things, but if not careful may lead to dogmatism and cults. It is true that art can give psychological depth, which can be exciting, can give us empathy to others, and most of all can give color to our lives; but, remember what Freud stated, that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Re: The New Humanist
posted on 05/20/2002 1:50 AM by grantc4@hotmail.com

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If you check out the 100th issue of Edge magazine (www.edge.org) you'll find a number of comments on the article by Edge's collection of heavy thinkers.

Re: The New Humanist
posted on 05/20/2002 10:23 AM by Citizen Blue

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Thank you Grant.

Re: The New Humanist
posted on 05/22/2002 8:36 AM by jwayt

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If the critique of establishment in modern commentary is that it tends toward pessimism, the only constructive suggestion the author offers is a holistic approach.

Perhaps the soundest critique of the pessimists should be that they offer constructive solutions.

Re: The New Humanist
posted on 05/22/2002 2:01 PM by Citizen Blue

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That makes sense.

Re: The New Humanist
posted on 05/22/2002 2:11 PM by Citizen Blue

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Let us study and analyze the psychological- structural principals of art, literature, and the study of the myths of religion to better grasp their relative functions in the history of society; but not take them blindly as the ultimate cause of things. There may be parts of these wholes that are related to reality.

Re: The New Humanist
posted on 05/23/2002 6:27 AM by jwayt

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That evokes Joseph Campbell.

Re: The New Humanist
posted on 05/24/2002 7:33 PM by clifmom@aol.com

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I thought Brockman's "The Third Culture" was glorious, but he shouldn't scoff at the Earth First! activists. A few months ago Atlantic Monthly did a cover story in which they asked anthropologists if they would rather live in the Europe of Columbus or the pre-Columbian New World. The anthropologists would all rather be Indians.
The great explorer Captain Cook noted that the South Sea Islanders all seemed much happier than the Europeans. (And they had better teeth!)

Re: The New Humanist
posted on 05/25/2002 11:51 PM by Citizen Blue

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Even though it is a good thought; going back to nature might not be so pleasant.

Re: The New Humanist
posted on 06/03/2002 5:10 PM by apawi@aol.com

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You and I might not choose to "go back to nature," so to speak, but, if you had the skills, (and if there weren't six billion people on the Earth), it might not seem as farfetched, once you understand the true state of nature.
I am an anthropologist. I have spent the better part of the last 20 years studying hunter-gatherers and "primitive" agriculturalists, both first hand, in South America, Africa and Asia and by combing through the primary literature.
I don't think you would find many contemporary anthropologists who have actually done fieldwork who would disagree with the following:

A. Contrary to popular perception, hunter-gatherers generally have more leisure time, spend less time working, and eat a better, and healthier diet, than do most people living in our technological society;
B. Famine is several orders of magnitude more likely in agriculturally based societies than among hunter-gatherer groups, even those who live in marginal lands such as the Kalahari;
C. In terms of health, "primitive" people tend to suffer from far greater rates of infant mortality than we do; however, once a member of what I'll call a "primary" culture reaches adulthood, life expectancy is not too different from modern people--and in fact, is higher than it was for most people in civilized Europe until the 20th Century. These people are usually stronger, usually have keener senses, and suffer from fewer chronic diseases than the typical US resident.

From a purely subjective viewpoint, the people I have come to know over the years in my fieldwork also tend to seem more stable psychologically, happier, and less prone to pathological behavior than many of the people I have known back home. That's not a very scientific observation, I guess, but it is not an uncommon observation.





Would you also agree
posted on 06/04/2002 12:48 AM by joesixpack@gobills.net

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that those cultures left ZERO lasting impact in history? There's a reason that hunter/gatherer societies are extinct, you know. Their social structures were inefficient and impractical for long-term survival.

Re: Would you also agree
posted on 06/04/2002 11:14 AM by apawi@aol.com

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No, I would not agree. All human beings were hunter-gatherers for the overwhelming majority of the species' time on this planet. By any reasonable standard, a human culture that endures for tens of thousands of years should be considered a successful adaptation.

As for the disappearance of most (not all) of these societies--Hunter-gatherers are displaced by agriculturalists because of population pressure. It is an inexorable law in wildlife biology that populations grow to meet the available food supply. Since agriculturalists store food, they tend to displace smaller groups by taking their land base as their population increases.

As for inefficiency--it depends on how you define efficiency. By some standards, hunter-gatherers are far more efficient than our society. It takes far fewer calories for them to subsist than it does us, for example, if you include inputs from fossil fuels and other modern energy sources.

SW

Re: Would you also agree
posted on 06/04/2002 2:04 PM by grantc4@hotmail.com

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Maybe the hunter-gatherers left little imprint on history because they were not the writers of history. But they did leave a solid imprint on our culture, mainly in the form of language development and knowledge about how the ecosystem works. Unfortunately, we've forgotten much if not most of what they learned. That's the drawback of not writing history.

Re: Would you also agree
posted on 06/08/2002 7:01 PM by Citizen Blue

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Once we arrive at a certain complex level in society, in which I refer to the technological advances that humans have completed, there is a certain invisible crutch that is posited; this means evolution or natural selection has been impeded in such a way that going back to a natural state of things may be difficult for most; in other words many would die; however, there are many who still would have the instinct for survival. But also note that the topography of the world has changed much even in the last 100 years.