| |
|
The New Humanist
"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.
www.edge.org
| | Join the discussion about this article on Mind·X! | |
| |
Mind·X Discussion About This Article:
 |
|
|
 |
The New Humanist
|
|
 |
|
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
|
|
|
|
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.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
