I myself have spent some time in the past trying to show "the lack of scientific certainty" inherent in the construction of facts. ...I intended to emancipate the public from prematurely naturalized objectified facts.

Translation: don't believe it just because a guy in a white coat told you it's true. A good example is the recent revelation that many antidepressants have horrible and sometimes deadly side effects. Oops! But they told us it was safe...

Intellectuals of the so-called "third culture" view the whole process of cultural critique with distaste and contempt. In his manifesto, The Third Culture, John Brockman describes PO-MO academic criticism like this:

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.

Fair enough, in some cases. By contrast, he claims to represent a new breed, mostly composed of scientists (well, okay: almost solely composed of scientists, with a few technocrats thrown in and the very occasional artist such as Brian Eno):

What we are witnessing is a passing of the torch from one group of thinkers, the traditional literary intellectuals, to a new group, the intellectuals of the emerging third culture.

Should we celebrate such a coup? Or is Brockman's group precisely the crowd most likely to push "prematurely naturalized objectified facts" on the public?

Even Latour admits that postmodern criticism has gone astray. In the same article he says, "The question was never to get away from facts but closer to them, not fighting empiricism but, on the contrary, renewing empiricism." He admits that the opposite has happened--and that, worse, POMO deconstructionism has become a tool of the reactionary right, wielded by entrenched interests against such targets as the scientists studying global warming.

What's the alternative? When I look at the "third culture", I see a group consisting of men and women that almost without exception I respect; but I'm also acutely aware that as a group they're no third alternative but merely the science side of the two-culture war, empowered with a new sense of purpose and a stronger voice within public circles. In short: they're still an elite who are dictating what's real (and by extension, acceptable) to the rest of us. I'd feel a lot more confident in Brockman's crusade if I saw the names of painters, journalists, municipal planners and farmers in his list of luminaries.

Worse, the critique of the humanities by Science is still mired in the "Unweaving the Rainbow" effect (Richard Dawkins' staunch insistence in demolishing any value or meaning to subjective experience, in favour of a rigorous and values-less interpretation of reality). One side begins to sound like the other: either subjective experience is true and real and the objective world is a projection of our subconscious Will; or only the objective world is real and our subjective experience of beauty, love and nature is the product of an external and ultimately alien reality.

With Cultural Critique reeling and possibly soon down for the count, we're left with a strange situation in which its tools have been coopted by the extreme right, used to attack the opponents of nuclear power, globalization, Big Oil etc. Opposing them are the Third Culture intellectuals of (let's face it) Big Science, and representing the ordinary Joe is... nobody. With Critique discredited and taken over by the enemy, people who are outside the elites no longer have any tools with which to participate in debates about their own future.

Or is it simply that the two sides in the war, Critique and Science, have always translated all objections and criticisms into their own terms, including those that might actually come from a completely different direction? Could it be that ordinary people participate in these debates all the time--but using language that goes at right angles to terminologies of power, will, object/subject, neurophysiology or physics? If a member of the public says, "well, I thought about [issue X] and then I prayed about it, and this is what I've decided..." both sides in the war will translate that statement into their own languages, implicitly or explicitly rejecting the possibility of addressing the speaker on his or her own terms.

My .sig quote these days is from Alfred North Whitehead, and goes like this: "The recourse to metaphysics is like throwing a match into a powder magazine. It blows up the whole arena." Both sides in the two-culture war are engaging in outrageous metaphysics, and any issue they touch gets blown up.

I'm proposing a simple solution to the so-called two-culture war, and that is for the rest of us to stop giving so much credence to the pronouncements of either side. The fact is, both Critique and Science use tightly limited vocabularies and rigorous formal methods that limit the scope of what they can say. Consider art and the myth (and urban myth) of every-day conversation as equals to the two cultures' language, if you want a richer dialogue on change and growth. Try not to accept the pronouncements of either camp uncritically. (And no, I'm not advocating a return to some naive Romanticism--that would be to accept the subjectivism of one camp. I'm talking about treating all arguments with a healthy dose of skepticism, and with due consideration to your own needs and aims as a person.)

You'll see sly allusions to this point of view in my forthcoming novel, Lady of Mazes--but don't worry, it's no POMO manual. It goes sternly against both the traditions I've been talking about here by being... well... an entertainment.

And pure entertainment may challenge, provoke, or even enlighten... but it never fools you into taking it too seriously.

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