A 1950s education in Freud, Marx, and modernism is not a sufficient qualification for a thinking person today. Indeed, the traditional intellectuals are, in a sense, increasingly reactionary, and quite often proudly ignorant of many of the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time. Their culture, which dismisses science, is often nonempirical. The writing is most often concerned with exegesis of some earlier writer. It uses its own jargon and washes its own laundry and is chiefly characterized by comment on comments, the swelling spiral of commentary eventually reaching the point where the real world gets lost.
Too many university courses are about what one or another earlier authority thought. Unlike those disciplines in which there is no expectation of systematic progress and in which one reflects on and recycles the ideas of earlier thinkers, science moves on; it is a wide-open system. Meanwhile, the traditional humanities establishment continues its exhaustive insular hermeneutics, indulging itself in cultural pessimism, clinging to its fashionably glum outlook on world events.
In their almost religious devotion to a pessimistic worldview, the academic humanists cannot acknowledge that thoughtful people can have positive ideas. Within their own circles, they have, until recently, gotten away with it. The romantic emoting of a culturally pessimistic worldview has been intellectually approved. The world of the professional pessimists is a closed system, a culture of previous "isms" that turn on themselves and endlessly cycle.
The first optimism of the science-based thinkers is conceptual: the more science they do, the more there is to do. Scientists are constantly acquiring and processing new information. They can't help but be optimistic. The second level of optimism concerns the content of science. The findings of science are not mere matters of opinion, they sweep past systems of thought. Science, on its frontiers, poses more and better questions, better put. They are questions phrased to elicit answers; the scientists find the answers, and move on.
Humanities scholars condemn themselves to second-rate status. But this doesn't have to be the case. There are encouraging signs that the third culture now includes scholars in the humanities who think the way scientists do. Like their colleagues in the sciences, they believe that there is a real world and that their job is to understand it and explain it. They test their ideas in terms of logical coherence, explanatory power, conformity with empirical facts. They do not defer to intellectual authorities: Anyone's ideas can be challenged, and understanding progresses and knowledge accumulates through such challenges.
Like scientists, the science-based humanities scholars are intellectually eclectic, seeking ideas from a variety of sources and adopting the ones that prove their worth, rather than working within "systems" or "schools." As such they are not Marxist scholars, or Freudian scholars, or Catholic scholars. Science and science-based thinking among enlightened humanities scholars are now part of public culture.
The arts and the sciences are again joining together as one culture, the third culture. Those involved in this effort—scientists, science-based humanities scholars, writers—are at the center of today's intellectual action. They are the new humanists.
— John Brockman, The new humanists (2002)
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