Begin the Begin

In his 1991 essay, 'The Third Culture', the writer and publisher John Brockman discusses what he sees as a shift in public discourse, away from the traditional literary intellectual towards the scientific and empiric . He writes:

"The third culture consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are."

For Brockman, the really important questions about life are unlikely to have their answers in the pages of the New York Review of Books, the LRB, or similar learned publications. He has little time for literary intellectuals, arguing that a "1950s education in Freud, Marx and modernism is not a sufficient qualification for a thinking person in the 1990s". Traditional intellectuals are often ignorant of the most important intellectual achievements of the last 100 years, and sometimes even proud of it.  

This sort of intellectualism is, Brockman says, "chiefly characterised by comment on comments, the swelling spiral of commentary eventually reaching the point where the real world gets lost."  While that may be an ironic quotation to post on a blog, where I hope to get comments aplenty, it is surely right.   Intellectual discussion in the traditional sense is a kind of dance, to display that you understand how theories interrelate and run together, that you know who critiqued who, and to show that your selected beliefs fall within the acceptable boundaries of polite discussion (or for extra frisson, just outside!).  Like a complicated parlour game where the object is to guess the rule, it is a world that sets up complex barriers to entry to the discussion, intimidating aspirants into believing that they too must be able to hold their own on Lyotard, Foucault and Kristeva if they are to be considered intelligent.  You might well be able to explain quantum theory, but have you read Sappho in the original?  

This kind of writing and thinking often tends towards the pessimistic.   Brockman's excellent website, www.edge.org, sends an annual question to a huge list of interesting and intelligent people, mostly scientists.  The 2007 question was 'what are you optimistic about?' and the responses are informative, surprising, and above all uplifting.  Inspired by this, Prospect magazine in the UK tried a similar exercise with a host of public intellectuals and academics, and received contributions that for the most part could easily pass for suicide notes.  Doom and gloom were foreseen everywhere, the world on the road to ruin, technology, science and progress the drivers toward destruction.  

This isn't a criticism of Prospect, but of the majority of the contributers who have criticism as the main weapon in their mental arsenal.  For some of them, criticism is their sole weapon.

 

Instead of a curiosity about the world, and a desire to understand it and possibly improve it, all they can do is criticise it, analyse it for faults, point out its failings.  It's the kind of writing that tends towards what Dave Krieger calls 'disasturbation' - idly fantasising about disasters without properly assessing their likelihood or attempting to do anything to prevent them.  

The second effect of the traditional intellectual world is that it can intimidate people away from art.  Plenty of literary theory, for example, is complete rot, but it can easily trick people into believing that they have come up short in some way in trying to understand art.  The assumption is always that if you don't like James Joyce, there must be something wrong with you.  Perhaps you don't fully understand his significance.  Maybe if you'd read the Odyssey (in the original), then you would.  Never is the suggestion made that the author may have failed, and a snobbish disdain prevails for authors who work hard to make themselves clear and understood.   As for critics who don't go in for the hardcore world of literary criticism, such as  John Sutherland or Nick Hornby (and, heaven forfend, McSweeney's or the Believer) are treated like embarrassing relatives, the lunatics in the attic. 

It is a real shame, but people are put off from experiencing and enjoying art by a sense of not fully understanding it, whereas in fact what they  actually don't understand is the industry of theory that has formed around art like mould between tiles.  And why should they understand it?  It's utterly inexplicable.  

There is, however,  a danger that in dismissing the kind of intellectual that he does, Brockman could be read as dismissing art as well.  The term 'the third culture' was inspired by an book called 'The Two Cultures' by the physicist and novelist C.P. Snow.  Snow talks in similar terms about the differences between scientists and literary intellectuals, but hoped that a third culture could emerge where the two groups would overcome the communication gap between them.  Brockman explicitly rejects this conception of the third culture, instead arguing that, having given the literary intellectuals a chance to join in, and seen it spurned, the scientists have simply bypassed them, and taken over the playing field: "the achievements of the third culture are not the marginal disputes of a quarrelsome mandarin class: they will affect the lives of everyone on the planet."  Science has won, it seeks the truth and has had astounding success. The literary intellectuals have failed, and public discourse must be about science if it is not to be irrelevant.  Brockman's essay is a polemic, and he takes on his opponents robustly.  He obviously feels that there is a balance to be redressed.  Nevertheless, despite the force of his argument, I don't think that he intends to exclude art and literature along with the literary intellectuals (a number of the contributors to Edge are artists, writers, musicians, and even actors) .  

If Brockman does want to dismiss art, I think he makes a mistake.  While it is true that a world in which the potential of science and technology to rapidly redefine what it means to be human leaves discussions like this looking elitist and pointless, art and literature do have something to say about life and what it means to be human, and they can (and arguably should) be informed by the best understanding of the world that science provides.  While science may have the best explanations, it doesn't have all the answers - ought does not follow is, and there remains a space for art to engage in the third culture, as the best art surely does.  

I think that the third culture is the best one we can aspire to, but I also think it should be the one that Snow hoped for.  I love art and literature, and I'm also fascinated by science.  And I agree with Brockman that "third culture activity is evidence that many people have a great intellectual hunger for new and important ideas and are willing to make the effort to educate themselves."  

This blog is part of my ongoing effort to educate myself, and it is a modest attempt to contribute to the third culture.  Talking about the third culture, the biologist Steve Jones says "If you aren't someone who can talk in general terms about scientific as well as nonscientific issues, you aren't civilized."  I aspire to being civilised, and you'll find on this blog discussions of science written by someone who is not an expert, but is not scientifically illiterate either, and discussion of art and literature by someone who is glad not to be an expert in these fields. There'll occasionally be stuff about cycling too.  

I hope you enjoy all of it.