A New Humanism

Here's a quote from a 1992 essay, "The Emerging Third Culture". "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. " In a follow-up from 2002 the author, John Brockman, goes on to note "Ten years later, that fossil culture is in decline" and ignites an interesting discussion on the modern scientists. At the Edge website and in the book "The New Humanists: Science At the Edge".