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"The Third Culture" on the Edge

© Frederic Giacobazzi

The chief mission of a Suite 101 editor is to acquaint readers with the interesting, the useful, and the well-crafted among the Internet resources in his subject area. I have just finished spending well-invested time at an extraordinary Web site of interest to students of philosophy, one which ought to satisfy visitors on all three counts.

I'm referring to Edge, the Web site of the Edge Foundation, a private, non-profit organization whose mission is "to promote inquiry into and discussion of intellectual, philosophical, artistic, and literary issues, as well as to work for the intellectual and social achievement of society."

The Edge Foundation was chartered in 1988 as an outgrowth of an informal group known as The Reality Club, a group "committed to creating and maintaining a forum that offers an intelligent, thoughtful and engaging exchange of ideas." The Reality Club's Web page tells us that it "has held its meetings in Chinese restaurants, artists lofts, the Board Rooms of Rockefeller University, The New York Academy of Sciences, and investment banking firms, ballrooms, museums, and living rooms, among other venues." In creating the Edge Web site, the club seeks to present "a number of today's sharpest minds taking their ideas into the bull ring knowing they will be challenged. The ethic is thinking smart vs. the anesthesiology of wisdom."

Edge takes a good deal of its inspiration and its view of the intellectual landscape from C. P. Snow's division of intellectual culture into two camps, the literary and the scientific. Snow's 1959 book The Two Cultures presents a reading of intellectual history which argues, in part, that twentieth-century literary intellectuals attempted to commandeer the title of intellectual from the scientists, delegitimatizing scientists as men and women of letters and attempting to exclude them from the intellectual mainstream. Snow laid the principal blame on the literati, but also chided scientists for failing to defend their rightful cultural prerogatives. Snow eventually came round to the view (presented in his 1963 essay "The Two Cultures: A Second Look") that a "third culture" would emerge, fusing the old dual cultures and placing the literary and the scientific on co-equal terms, communicating and cross-fertilizing each other.

However, while employing Snow's "third culture" phrase, Edge, under the leadership of founder John Brockman, takes the view that the dominant intellectual culture today is maginalized and "increasingly reactionary." Post-modern intellectuals, says Brockman, are "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." By contrast, according to Brockman, "Today, third-culture thinkers tend to avoid the middleman and endeavor to express their deepest thoughts in a manner accessible to the intelligent reading public." This is the mission which Edge seeks to accomplish. You can read more of this analysis in Edge's Third Culture section.