The History: Part 2

As some already know, Eileen is fond of the website, Edge, which represents the online home of T

BABEL Graffitti at Taylor Grocery & Restaurant in Oxford, MS (October 2006)

he Reality Club, a somewhat loose confederation (or “informal club”) of some of the most well-known figures in the sciences and the arts, such as Daniel C. Dennett, Freeman Dyson, Jared Diamond, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, and Elaine Pagels, among many others, whose motto is, “to arrive at the edge of the world’s knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves.” John Brockman, one of the founders, along with the late Heinz Pagels, is especially interested in promulgating Edge as “The Third Culture,” an outgrowth of the idea, in Brockman’s words, that “A 1950s education in Freud, Marx, and modernism is not a sufficient qualification for a thinking person in the 1990s.” The Third Culture is partly an extension of C.P. Snow’s bookThe Two Cultures, in which he argued that, some time in the 1930s, literary intellectuals split

off from the scientists and created a culture of intellectual letters that effectively did not consider how various scientists, such as Norbert Weiner or Werner Heisenberg, might contribute to the current cultural dialogue and debate. In his second edition of The Two Cultures, published in 1963, Snow suggested, in Brockman’s words, “that a new culture, “third culture,” would emerge and close the communications gap between the literary intellectuals and the scientists.” Brockman somewhat demurs with Snow’s prediction because, as he puts it, “Literary intellectuals are not communicating with scientists,” and further, “Scientists are communicating directly with the general public.” According to Brockman, whereas academic humanities discourses have become “the marginal disputes of a quarrelsome mandarin class,” contemporary scientific discourses “affect the lives of everybody on the planet.” Brockman’s statements may be ultimately unfair to contemporary humanities scholarship and also hyperbolic regarding the public impact of certain esoteric science discourses, but nevertheless, he and his cohorts have created, through the conversations published on Edge and The Reality Club’s commissioned lecture series (videos and texts of which are also available on Edge), an energetic and not-to-be-missed forum for exploring what Brockman has termed the most important themes of the post-industrial age. Read more