Originally published 29 May 1995
Thirty-five years ago [in 1959], C.P. Snow, in a now famous essay, wrote about a polarization of academics into two camps: literary intellectuals and scientists. Not only did the two groups not understand each other, said Snow, they worked at cross purposes. He looked forward to a “third culture” that would bridge the gap.
The third culture is now here, says John Brockman in a just-published book called The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution. It is the only culture, he implies, that has much that is relevant to say about the human condition.
Brockman is a New York literary agent who sells books written by top-notch scientists for a general audience. Some years ago, he realized that there were lots of very bright people doing important work on big questions (what is life? what is mind? where did we come from? why are we here? etc.) who were also effective communicators.
Generally, these scientists communicated only with each other, at scientific conferences or through technical journals. Brockman offered to help package their ideas for a public audience. His authors have enjoyed enviable success.
Brockman’s new book lets 23 cutting-edge scientists talk informally about their own work and the work of their colleagues. They include biologists Stephen Jay Gould, Lynn Margulis, and Richard Dawkins, linguist Steven Pinker, philosopher Daniel Dennett, computer scientists Marvin Minsky, and W. Daniel Hillis and physicists Roger Penrose, Murray Gell-Mann, and Alan Guth.
That’s just for starters. Brockman has assembled under one cover a dazzling salon of cutting-edge creativity. There is mutual respect among these people, but also lots of feisty disagreement. The book is a free-for-all of provocative opinion.
The real fun starts when these golden boys (Margulis is the only woman) of the self-proclaimed scientific culture take on the literary establishment.
Stephen Jay Gould: “The British Nobelist Peter Medawar, a very humanistically and classically educated scientist, said it was unfair that a scientist who didn’t know art and music pretty well was, among literary people, considered a dolt and a philistine, whereas literary people don’t think they need to know any science in order to be considered educated… That just isn’t right, and it doesn’t reflect reality either.”
Murray Gell-Mann: “Unfortunately, there are people in the arts and humanities — conceivably, even some in the social sciences — who are proud of knowing very little about science and technology, or about mathematics. The opposite phenomena is very rare. You may occasionally find a scientist who is ignorant of Shakespeare, but you will never find a scientist who is proud of being ignorant of Shakespeare.”
Physicist Paul Davies: “It’s only in recent years that scientists have exercised any sort of influence over what we might call the big questions, and this influence has created a very ugly backlash. The fact that scientists are starting to be heard, capturing not only the minds and hearts of the population — as evidenced by the success of science books — is provoking what seems to be a territorial squeal from the literary side.”
Psychologist Nicholas Humphrey: “There’s terror among the British intelligentsia that culture has passed them by… Since they don’t understand science, their only defense is to say that it doesn’t matter. But they’re fighting a losing battle.”
And Brockman himself: “The traditional American intellectuals are…quite often proudly and perversely ignorant of many of the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time. Their culture, which dismisses science, is often non-empirical. It uses its own jargon and washes its own laundry. It is chiefly characterized by comments on comments, the swelling spiral of commentary eventually reaching the point where the real world gets lost.”
The scientific elite have tested their mettle in the battle of the books, and are ready to declare the culture wars a rout. Literary intellectuals have been driven from the field, they say. Venerable “Great Books” answers to the big questions are now as irrelevant as a flat Earth.
Part of this apparent hubris of The Third Culture may lie in Brockman’s editing, rather than in overweening confidence of the scientists. Still, the book will surely provoke the literary establishment to come out of its musty warrens and do battle on the open field of popular communication.
The people gathered here by Brockman are certainly doing exciting work, work that cannot be ignored by anyone who pretends to be educated. But the literary agent and his hotshot cadre of scientists are fooling themselves if they think the culture wars are won. In truth there is no third culture, just Snow’s original two cultures with the tide of battle going temporarily to the scientists.
The real third culture is the vast majority of the population of this planet who don’t give a hoot for either science or literature. If the two cultures want to do something useful, they should stop squabbling among themselves and start creating what Snow looked for in the first place: a scientific way of knowing infused with the universal truths enumerated by William Faulkner — “love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.”
Maybe then the rest of the population will pay attention.
