Let’s start with a respect for truth

by DANIEL C. DENNETT

Introduction

“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.” (From The Emerging Third Culture”, 1991)

Last month, The New Republic published Steven Pinker’s article “Science Is Not The Enemy: An impassioned plea to neglected novelists, embattled professors, and tenure-less historian” (August 6, 2013). A link to a 3-minute video attacking the article was inserted in the middle of Pinker’s text—”WATCH: Leon Wieseltier’s rejoinder: Science doesn’t have all the answers“. Billed as one of “An irregular video-interview series with New Republic Literary Editor Leon Wieseltier”, the video was conveniently ready for posting within minutes of the publication of Pinker’s article.

Now, a month later, Wieseltier is back with a 5,650-word attack in the magazine entitled “Crimes Against Humanities: Now science wants to invade the liberal arts. Don’t let it happen.” (September 3, 2013).

This is not a new debate. In my 1991 essay “The Emerging Third Culture“, I wrote:

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 in the 1990s. 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.

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