Advertisement

Tracking Emergence of Third Culture Thinkers

Share
<i> John Brockman, president of Edge Foundation and founder of the Reality Club, is a New York City literary agent who specializes in third culture books</i>

Following are excerpts from “The Emerging Third Culture” by John Brockman.

In the past few years, the playing field of American intellectual life has shifted. A ‘50s education in Freud, Marx and modernism is not a sufficient qualification for a thinking person in the ‘90s. Indeed, intellectuals in America are, in a sense, reactionary, and quite often proudly (and perversely) ignorant of many of the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time.

In 1959, C. P. Snow wrote about “The Two Cultures.” On one hand there were the literary intellectuals; on the other, the scientists. He noted with incredulity that during the 1930s the literary intellectuals, “while no one was looking took to referring to themselves as ‘intellectuals’ as though there were no others.” This new definition of the intellectual by the “men of letters” excluded scientists such as astronomer Edwin Hubble, mathematician John von Neumann, cybernetticist Norbert Wiener, and physicists Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and Werner Heisenberg . . . .

Advertisement

In a second edition of “The Two Cultures” written in 1963, Snow optimistically suggested that a new culture, a “third culture,” would emerge and close the communications gap between the literary intellectuals and the scientists.

Although I borrow Snow’s phrase “the third culture,” it is not the third culture he predicted. Literary intellectuals are not communicating with scientists. Scientists are communicating directly to the general public . . . rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are in terms of our own species, the planet, the biosphere, and the cosmos.

A partial list of these scientists (which to avoid impropriety does not include any of the thinkers currently represented by my literary agency) includes zoologist Stephen Jay Gould, physicists Freeman Dyson and Steven Weinberg, the late physicist Richard Feynman, astronomer Carl Sagan, biologist E. O. Wilson, computer scientists Marvin Minsky, Danny Hillis, and Douglas Hofstadter, and mathematicians Benoit Mandelbrot and John Paulos . . . .

Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, recently wrote that “Science is the only news. . . . Human nature doesn’t change much; science does, and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly.”

The following are some of the scientific developments to receive prominent media play recently: molecular biology, artificial intelligence, chaos, massive parallelism, the inflationary universe, complex adaptive systems, the human genome, expert systems, punctuated equilibrium, cellular automata, artificial life, fuzzy logic, the Gaia hypothesis, virtual reality, cyberspace and teraflop machines, among many others.

Unlike previous intellectual pursuits, these achievements of the third culture are not the marginal and internecine exploits of a mandarin class: They will affect the lives of everybody on the planet.

Advertisement

Traditional intellectual media play a vertical game: Journalists write up and professors write down. This is an activity referred to as popularization. Today, third culture thinkers avoid the middleman and write their own books, much to the consternation of those people with a vested interested in preserving the status quo . . . .

There have been many articles expressing surprise at the recent great publishing successes of serious science books. But such successes are surprises only to old-style intellectuals. Their party line is that these books are anomalies--that they are bought, but not read.

I disagree. Newly published science books continue to appear on bestseller lists with regularity. Readers recognize that in science there is still a sense of wonder and that scientists are providing maps to the real world. The emergence of this third culture activity is evidence that many people have great intellectual hunger for serious ideas and are willing to take the time, and spend the money, to educate themselves regarding important new ideas . . . .

The role of an intellectual concerns communication. Intellectuals are people who know things and understand ideas and also shape the thoughts of their generation. An intellectual is a synthesizer, a publicist, a communicator. It is intellectuals with changing ideas and images--those scientists doing things and writing their own books--who drive our times . . . .

Our thinkers are our greatest resource, and ideas are becoming our most important export commodity. America is a deeply intellectual country, vibrantly alive with new and exciting big ideas. . . . America now is the intellectual seedbed for Europe and Asia. . . .

In 1991, the emergence of the third culture introduces new modes of intellectual discourse and reaffirms the preeminence of America in the realm of serious and important ideas. Throughout history, intellectual life has been marked by the fact that only a small number of people have done the serious thinking for everybody else. What we are witnessing is a passing of the intellectual torch from one group of thinkers, the traditional literary intellectuals, to a new group, the intellectuals of the emerging third culture.

Advertisement
Advertisement