Two Cultures

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49:1 Richard Farson It is my great pleasure to introduce to you Carol Anne Bundy, an old friend of mine, and someone with whom I have been discussing the subject of this conference for more than a year. Carol Anne was educated as a lawyer, but I met her when she was collaborating with Jonas Salk during the last five years of his life as they together explored the larger issues of the evolution of society. Unfortunately Jonas died before they were able to publish together, but since his death she has continued to pursue some of those same interests, resulting in two volumes about to be published. Welcome, Carol Anne. We look forward to a most interesting and valuable conference on the continuing division between science and the humanities, arts and social sciences.

49:2 Carol Anne Bundy

2 CULTURES SYMPOSIUM

Another Look at Dialogue between the Sciences and Humanities:

Dreamer’s Panacea or the Future of Thought?

Convened by The Western Behavioral Sciences Institute, La Jolla, California and

The Human Futures Foundation, Oxford, England

Internet Conference the 24th February - 24 March, 2006

Oxford, UK Conference – TBA (March 2007)

La Jolla, California Conference – TBA (September 2007)

Opening Comments

First I would like to thank Richard Farson of the WBSI for giving all of us the opportunity to participate in these discussions. Richard was a dear friend of Jonas Salk's--a "think-alike," as Jonas liked to say--and participated with us on many occasions on some of the topics that I hope we will be able to touch upon in the course of this conference.

And I would also like to thank in advance those who have agreed to participate, offering their insights and perspectives based upon considerable collective expertise and experience. Looking at the list of participants as a whole, one must again offer thanks to Richard for bringing together such a remarkable group of minds. Sincere thanks to everyone for their interest, time, and commitment.

The subject of C.P. Snow's landmark 1959 essay The Two Cultures held that the division between sciences and the humanities was a major hindrance to solving world problems. The precepts of this iconic work, which Snow wanted to entitle Of Rich and of Poor, have reverberated throughout international academic circles for decades and was resonate with the motivation that inspired scientist and thinker Dr. Jonas Salk to found the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, in the 1960s.

With the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, Salk sought to establish an institute where the scientist could work alongside selected artists, writers, philosophers and social scientists synergistically on the problems of the day. Designed with acclaimed architect Louis Kahn, one could say that the Salk-Kahn collaboration was the first phase of Salk's exploration into exchange between the two cultures. Today the Salk Institute stands as one of the world’s preeminent research institutes with more peer review citations published annually than any other research institute of its kind in the world. But the greater dream of Dr. Jonas Salk has fallen short of the mark, a failing not specific to the Institute.

In fact, one could easily argue that the sciences and humanities have never before been more fragmented and separate due, to large degree, to higher levels of specialization. Yet the need for exchange has never been greater, given the higher levels of complexity which operate throughout all levels of society today.

The 2 Cultures Symposium (functioning initially as an internet conference to be followed by meetings in Oxford, UK and La Jolla, California) seeks to explore what the 2 Cultures means to the twenty-first century. Its aim is twofold: first, to identify barriers to cross-disciplinary dialogue and establish frameworks and approaches for amelioration, if possible; and second, on a deeper level, to explore how dualistic thinking itself inhibits exchange across the whole of the human field and how cross-disciplinary thinking might contribute to new ways of thinking more resonate and better suited to solving the problems we as individuals and as a species face in terms of today and the future.

It was after a lifetime of observing nature and what Salk liked to refer to as "the human side of nature" that he remarked, "Ideas are homologous to genes, only they mutate and evolve at a much higher frequency and at a much faster rate." It may be that the need for cross-disciplinary dialogue has come of age and is now societal mandate as advances in many areas of human endeavor, including, to large extent, scientific progress, have brought to the fore new ethical, philosophical and religious repercussions. As Salk observed, "We are products of the process of evolution and have become part of the process itself."

If we are, in effect, part of the process of evolution, able to tap into the energy locked away within the nucleus of an atom and beginning to manipulate the genes that lie hidden within the nucleus of a cell, mustn't we as a species, make a more concerted effort to deal as effectively with the human mind and its products? Given the great diversity that exists in the human realm at this moment in time and the current, ever nebulous, so called "clash of cultures" prevalent today encompassing a far greater scope that Snow's academic notions of the sciences and the humanities, the trajectory into the future will depend as much upon the evolution of human consciousness as it will upon the furtherance of knowledge.

Might it be through cross-disciplinary effort that we, as individuals and as a species, begin to unlock, in a purposeful way, the hidden patterns and connections that exist across the fields of human thought and questioning? In that it has been projected that the world human population may nearly double within the next fifty years, it can be said that those living today are witness to a point of inflection in the human story. Many questions remain including do we, as individuals, as professionals and academics, and as societies and governments, have the ability to think in new ways towards a more hopeful and harmonious future? Assuming the desire, how might we begin?

49:3 Douglass Carmichael Dear to my heart, this topic. And Carol Anne, so many thanks for your being open to this. I hope this is the longest of my contributions, but I think some scene setting can be helpful.

A major interest of mine in the last few years has been how to bring the best thinking (such as the examples above) in the humanities into public policy discussions.

I started as a physicist at Cal Tech but felt the personalities of Feynman, Pauling, Gell-Mann, Sperry and others were more interesting than the science they talked of. Great humanities courses such as Hallett Smith's year long Yeats, Eliot, Mann and Joyce gave me a good grounding in being able to read most anything. (I always wondered why Proust was left out—perhaps another year.) I went on from there to get a Ph.D. in psych at Berkeley, but the dissertation is the give-away, The Development of the Capacity for Irony. I took courses from Feyerabend and Kuhn, stirring up consciousness about science that was new to me. Then some time at Harvard, Erik Erikson, and then to Mexico with Erich Fromm, and became a psychoanalyst, shifting emphasis around in private practice, teaching (Santa Cruz), and consulting in organizations on strategy and scenarios.

But that is the outer story. Inwardly was the sense that the reality was not as science described it. Something was wrong. I described it in corny terms such as "Science is a phase in the history of art" or "Science is one of the humanities" and it was important the way art or music was important in understanding what humans were about. But slowly I came to see that the science enterprise was peculiar in the way it tends to dismiss the human as relevant.

I see it now that the bias in science towards math and thing-thing interaction leaving out the knower is related to power and control, and markets.

In recent years I've read Bruno Latour, who has shown how science and other social roles like law get mixed up, and that the new objects of science like ozone holes are mixed human and natural phenomena.

Phillip Mirowski has written a book, Machine Dreams: How Economics Became A Cyborg Science. Powerful, how fragments of control systems got integrated by WW2 needs, and emerged as the scientific agenda setting for the post war period, including getting the cold war out of game theory.

Mary Poovey has written a very interesting book, The History of the Modern Fact, exploring how data came out of the discipline of double-entry bookkeeping in the late renaissance.

But the most frustrating has been to see intelligence reduced to AI, and the whole neuroscience-cognition world and its funding driven by payoff in a control economy. At the same time the profound work of Piaget has fallen aside.

I stick close to the psychoanalytic (in the loose sense of getting the story, watching resistance, enjoying a person becoming more aware of the balance between internal experience, the world, and the power of relationships. Increasingly, I read literature, the early English novels, the poets, Don Quixote in Spanish, Lao Tzu and the early Chinese poets in Chinese, and even now trying Agamemnon in Greek.

I watch groups like Edge and sense a macho smugness, which, I think, gets in the way of awe and curiosity and replaces it with power and professionalism. I love science, I love knowing that almost all the *things* I see I can understand—how a car works, a TV, a computer, light through glass, a horseshoe magnet, rainbows, precession of the equinoxes. But I also am aware of how little we know of who we are, how we think, how we are both embedded in culture and the past (science is mostly about things named long before there was science), and about our capacity to dream, to love, to invent gods, and to separate the madness of projection from the reality of perception (knowing they are the same). Wow!

In Snow's Two Cultures I was struck by how he took as equivalent failures the inability of scientists to read Dickens, or (I forget after 40 years what he took as the example but let's say it is..) of the humanists to understand Eigen values or Laplace transforms. These are not equivalent. The physics items are deep in the physics culture in ways that Dickens is not deep for the humanities.

Enough to start. Where will we go in this conversation…?

49:4 Richard Farson Doug, your comment about science drifting into the control economy is of profound interest to me. Presumably, the dialogue between science and the humanities benefits both--science contributing a disciplined approach to truth and discoveries that extend the frontiers of knowledge and human possibilities, while the humanities offer perspective and wisdom. But the last half of the 20th century saw science move not toward the humanities but toward the commercial, to business, to what we refer to as the private sector.

When asked in one of our previous conferences why the word wisdom is seldom seen in the same sentence with leadership, ILF Fellow Ray Alden, former president of the telecommunications giant Sprint, suggested that perhaps wisdom and leadership were incompatible. He was referring of course to corporate leadership and to a definition of wisdom that is close to social responsibility. As Nobel economist Milton Friedman remarked, "The only social responsibility of business is to make a profit." But in recent decades science discovered in a big way that it can be profitable, and perhaps rather than getting in bed with the humanities, it has gotten in bed with business, where wisdom may actually be unwelcome.

Because Jonas Salk developed the hugely successful polio vaccine, most people thought he must have become wealthy, because surely he must have patented the formula. But he did not, and when asked about that decision, I think his words were, "Would you patent the sun?"

49:5 Sandy Mactaggart Carol Anne, following the lead of Douglas Carmichael, I always think it fair to give yourself as moderator, and perhaps others as participants, a brief background of myself, so that you can gauge the origins of the prejudices and assumptions that underpin any comments I may make in this conference.

I was born in Scotland in the late 1920s and evacuated to Eastern Canada in 1940, just too young to experience the war. After it was over, I completed my education at Harvard College and Business School before returning to Western Canada where, together with my late roommate at HBS, we became successful property developers and entrepreneurs in a private company which has always believed that investing in public welfare is as important as creating corporate profit. Involving myself in our children's education brought me onto a variety of governance positions in three schools as well as at Harvard, The American University of Beirut and the University of Alberta.

I suppose I would describe myself as someone who believes we are engaged in developing the practical as well as the moral future of the human mind, which is why I look forward with such interest to the unfolding of this conference.

49:6 Walter Anderson Hi—my name is Walt Anderson, biographical stuff can come later.

Two themes that I think we might fruitfully explore:

The first, which I know was of interest to Jonas, is the human role in evolution. Paul Crutzen, the Dutch meteorologist (and Nobel laureate), proposes that the Holocene Epoch has come to an end, and we should call the present era the Anthropocene Epoch in view of the increasing evidence that human processes and what we might call natural ones are inseparable. Here we see the obsolescence of one kind of dualistic thinking (human/nature) and good reason for dialogue across another polarization (science/humanities) if we are to transcend it.

The second is the role of constructivist/postmodern ideas in widening the science-humanities gap. I'm sure everybody knows what I'm talking about—if not, I can elaborate. Again, there is a crying need for dialogue (in the David Bohm/Dan Yankelovich sense) and much work that needs to be done.

49:7 Jane Alexander I have just been co-chairing the first arts and cultural session at the US-Islamic Global Forum in Qatar last weekend, so this issue is very much on my mind. Political and traditional governmental routes to diplomacy have not made great strides lately between the world of Islam and the west. We artists however bonded immediately and after four days we were real friends, pledged to continue to effect cross cultural exchange despite a neurasthenic $2 million budget at the State Department for 2006. Karen Hughes met with us for only ten minutes. The artists from the Islamic world were: Salmon Ahmed, a rock star from Pakistan who is the Bono of the mid-east, two filmmakers who produced the first feature film ever made in Yemen, a writer from Lebanon who must write in English as he cannot get his books published in Arabic, a filmmaker from Lebanon who moved to Los Angeles because he could not get his films made in Lebanon, an Iranian Islamic arts specialist, and a few others. The Americans were: a hip hop artist from Brooklyn, the writer Amy Tan, the producer of the film Syriana, and me, an actress. The actress from Syria who was invited was not allowed to leave the country and the same was true for another artist from Iran. Why, I wonder, do artists jump in where politicians fear to tread? Are we fools jumping in where angels fear to tread? Are we just fools? Why is it we seem to go the heart of a matter while others skirt around the body of an issue? This may have nothing to do with the Sciences and the Humanities here but I did want to bring it up as it is so freshly with me.

49:8 Carol Anne Bundy Gloriousness all around! I feel like we are sitting down to a Babette's Feast for the mind.

Douglass, a quote from da Vinci comes to mind: Art is the Queen of all Sciences communicating knowledge to all of the generations of the world. We used it as the opening for the address that Jonas gave when he received the American Institute of Architects Twenty-Five Year award on behalf of the Salk Institute. Of course there is the difference between science, as in the purist, epistemology of, which Leonardo was referring to, and science or scientific enterprise. I hope that we will be able to touch upon this throughout the conference. I was recently seated at a dinner next to the founding publisher of The New Scientist, Mr. Thomas Margerison, a distinguished thinker who I hope will be able to participate with us at some point. I asked him what he felt was the greatest challenge to science at this point in time. His answer: statistics meaning the economic drivers that must be appeased a priori irrespective of motivations borne out of a sense of responsibility, i.e., Richard's comment about patenting the sun. Solving the polio problem wasn't about making money for Jonas. It was about solving the problem and Jonas always maintained that nature had supplied the answer. His bit, he felt, had just been in asking the right questions. It was practical, albeit phenomenal, for sure. So what turned it? It was his sense of responsibility which made it a personal, moral imperative which is why Sandy's comment about "moral future of the human mind" is so intriguing and pivotal. An inner drive to be of service, which I hope Douglass will be able to speak to drawing upon his readings of Lao Tzu and the early Chinese poets in particular. As Walter says it is the human role in evolution and it will be interesting to think how this relates to the human mind in evolution...our thinking both individually and more collectively, even as a species. Might we one day think as a species? Do we now? Don't really think so.... Not when push comes to shove. What does responsibility actually mean? Does it mean different things to different people? Surely, yes. Which brings us to Jane's wonderful observations of her recent conference, which must have been an absolutely amazing experience. It has always been the burden of the arts to move barriers, cut through and shift our collective thinking while the politicians, by the very nature of what they do, have tended to be more about establishing and maintaining boundaries and barriers. Dualistic thinking? Binary thinking? Is such a shift possible? Walter has brought up the interesting word transcend. How do science, culture and religion fit into all of this (religio from the Latin, loosely, "to tie")? Wisdom and leadership, Richard—you’re right: there is almost an allergic reaction to the notion of wisdom despite the fact that it is one of our most profound human assets. Why have we buried it? Jonas used to think of wisdom as the ability to make retrospective judgments prospectively. Have we just become too near-sighted or maybe we need a new lexicon? Thanks for all of the great comments. Let's see how far and deep we can take all of this.

49:9 Herbert Blau To introduce myself—and that's probably necessary, since I'm new to this forum and to most of the people in it—

I am including a passage from an Auto/Archive (short autobiography) recently published in our oldest theater journal. I was asked to do it by the editor, who wanted me to explain how I came to the theater and why I'm doing what I'm doing now. He wasn't aware, when he asked, that I was actually working on a longer life, called As If: An Autobiography. What follows is a short excerpt from the short Auto/Archive, which, as you'll see, involves an early crossing from science to the humanities—an issue about which, later, I'll be saying more in other ways:

As to how it all came to be, my initiation in the theatre and the perspective emerging from it, I’ve not yet dealt with in the autobiography, no less the radically altered vision in the work of my KRAKEN group (my last work in the theater, started at Cal Arts, after The Actor's Workshop of San Francisco and the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center in New York). But if you were to look at the first chapter, about my growing up in Brooklyn, on the streets of Brownsville (now prefixed with Ocean Hill, with or without the prefix as bad as a neighborhood gets), you’d see that the prospect of my being in the theatre, no less writing about it theoretically, was about as inconceivable as my eventually being a dean. The fact is I wanted nothing more than to be a ballplayer. That was my real ambition, all through high school and even into college, but as it turned out I was a dean, twice, and a provost, though even more anomalously in over half a century of teaching (still unretired), I did have that parallel career in the theatre, but outside the university. And when I’ve taught, it’s not been in drama departments, but—except for Cal Arts, which I mostly conceived as founding Provost, while also Dean of the School of Theatre—in English and Comparative Literature. There were periods when, exhilarated beyond exhaustion, I was working full-time directing and full-time teaching (four courses per semester, two in freshman comp), all the more anomalously because my first degree was in chemical engineering, which I really liked, was very good at, and intended to pursue—having finished at NYU, going on to MIT.

And I might very well have done that had it been more theoretical at the time. But in those days, gearing up for the war effort—and particularly the Manhattan Project, for which chemical engineers did the fluid mechanics—the stress was on problem solving. I had no trouble with that, though there was another kind of problem. In thermodynamics, for instance, I could work with the function of entropy, but I never quite knew what it meant until, as I wrote in The Impossible Theater: A Manifesto (a chapter called "Growing Up with Entropy"), I began to think seriously of certain dramatic figures like Orestes or Hamlet, who in his "ratiocinative meditativeness" (as Coleridge called it) is a measure of the unavailable energy of the universe. Which, of course—along with the post-Brechtian critique of tragedy (see Derrida on Artaud and the fate of representation which remains, despite all desire for closure, the representation of fate)—they’re now trying to ameliorate or redeem in terms of chaos theory.

49:10 Richard Farson I love these biographical sketches from Doug, Sandy and Herb, pictures we could only get from them. I do feel that all our participants should at least be introduced to each other, and I hope that they will expand on what I write here. First, our guests:

Herbert Blau you have just met and know that he was my Provost (and Dean of the theater school) when I was dean at Cal Arts. He headed the acclaimed Actor's Workshop in San Francisco, and then the Repertory Theatre at Lincoln Center. He's now holding a named chair in humanities at the University of Washington.

Kaveh Moussavi is Convenor, International Human Rights Seminars, Head of Public Interest Law and Policy Programmes at the Center for Socio-Legal Studies at Oxford University (whew!) and one of the people most helpful to Carol Anne as she developed the ideas for this task force.

David Gladstone, a career diplomat, has been British Ambassador to several countries, most recently Sri Lanka and the Ukraine.

Richard Cassín (really Ricardo because he's of Mexican descent), a friend from

La Jolla, has PhDs in Molecular and Cellular Biology (Stanford) and in Economic History (University of New Mexico) so he has a foot in both cultures we are examining. Now a venture capitalist, he heads Windansea Capital Partners. But has also headed several other organizations, including the Ocean Sciences Research Institute and Public Interest Economics, Inc.

A special welcome, all of you. And now the ILF Fellows:

Walt Anderson, author, political scientist and social psychologist, is currently President of the World Academy of Art and Science.

John Seely Brown, author, former Chief Scientist at Xerox and head of the Palo Alto Research Center (Xerox PARC), the famous laboratory that developed many of the advances in computer technology, now retired to a consulting practice.

Herbert York, nuclear physicist, former head of the University of California's Livermore Laboratory, Assistant Secy. of State, US Ambassador to the Test Ban Treaty, Chancellor of the University of California, San Diego, director of UC's Center for the Study of Global Conflict and Collaboration.

Jane Alexander, whom you've met, and undoubtedly already know her as the distinguished actress of stage, film and television, and former Director of the National Endowment of the Arts. I would have said "award-winning actress" because she certainly has them all, but since ILF Fellow Ralph Keyes and I wrote an article on failure and success for the Harvard Business Review that, among other subjects, argued that awards are counter-productive, I thought I'd refrain. By the way, our article won the McKinsey award.

Mary Douglas, author, noted British anthropologist, principal developer of Cultural Theory, and Professor Emeritus, University of London.

T. George Harris, former journalist with Life and Look magazines, editor of Psychology Today and founder and editor of American Health (both named magazines of the year) and more recently editor of the Harvard Business Review and founder of Spirituality and Health magazine. He’s now here in La Jolla with the University of California San Diego.

Douglass Carmichael, psychoanalyst. Now you are forewarned. Just kidding. Doug has been very helpful currently in the redesign of our conferencing system, and is one of the pioneers in this medium, having headed Metasystems, Inc., and other organizations. He also consults with industry and government.

Sandy Mactaggart. I met him when he was President of the Harvard Alumni, headed his own real estate company in Canada, MacLab, was Treasurer and board member of the American University in Beirut, and then Chancellor, University of Alberta. He and his wife have one of the largest collections of Asian art in the world.

Harlan Cleveland, former Assistant Secretary of State, US Ambassador to NATO, President of the University of Hawaii and holder of many other key appointments.

Douglas Strain, a product of Caltech in science and engineering, is founding chairman of Electro-Scientific Industries in Portland, Oregon. He’s involved in the leadership of many organizations and is a great promoter of the work of Linus Pauling, having helped start the Pauling Institute and created the Linus Pauling chair at Caltech.

Finally, I'm very pleased to introduce Rosalyn Hansrisuk, a recent product of the University of California San Diego, who is the volunteer staff member facilitating this conference, and preparing weekly summaries that will be communicated to the larger body of ILF Fellows in a plenary session. We are indebted to her for taking on this assignment.

49:11 Mary Douglas The self-introductions are a great start. I am glad we have several theatre people here as well as the distinguished science and philosophy (meaning Dick) people.

Let me add to what Dick said on my behalf. I am basically an anthropologist, specialized in Central Africa with Congo experience. In the '80s I retired from university work, and switched to applying Anthropology to reading the Bible, specially Leviticus and Numbers.

49:12 Mary Douglas I have always been very interested in the way that the word 'culture' works in the humanities and social sciences.

We are a 'virtual (electronic) community', come together to explore the vision of Jonas Salk, C.P. Snow, Linus Pauling and many other great minds a vision in which science and humanities are not two worlds, but one, in which we are able to understand each other, to talk and read together.

The beginning may be the right moment to throw a spanner into the works. Let us decide if we hope to make the two cultures into one, with the same assumptions, the same prime values, and the same vocabulary of shared understandings. I am going to argue that that is an impossible dream—a mistake. A live culture flourishes on opposition. Its members pride themselves on not being like those other people out there.

I myself don't know the answer, but I hope it will emerge this week as we read each other’s visions of how science and humanities should come closer together. My first stab at a solution will be about how we organize ourselves as a virtual community. ILF seminars are famously polite: no one sneers, or jeers, or angrily disagrees. If we do become a real 'virtual' community we will find ourselves aligned, each joining up with one of several sub-cultures, each deeply committed to a particular point of view. Fur and feathers will begin to fly! Dick will try to keep us calm.

49:13 Douglass Carmichael So, I guess we just step in. What an awesome crowd! We are all sort of tenured, no reason to hold back. I find myself actually scared, so profound are the questions, while the US is falling apart. Me, others. The world. Why does science take such a reductionist path through that nexus?

We have ourselves and the world. Knowing our self inwardly and the world outwardly seem two sides of the same opportunity. But science and the humanities have to a large extent (nothing is black and white but a few like the chessboard) diverged. One angle is the cold war and the struggle against communism, which, for same conservatives, was also a war against social feeling of any kind. Science culture and scientists tend towards a belief in free inquiry and free minds. How did that play?

In the Soviet Union, science was seen as part of social reinvention. In the west science was seen as "pure research". Michael Polanyi was appalled (in his book Tacit Dimension) he was shocked to the core when Bakunin told him that in a socialist regime there would no longer be anything like "pure science." The western science community fought against being seen as critical of the west by forwarding the notion of neutrality, and pure research. The result was, being "value free" it could not easily resist being co-opted into the west's military and commercial spheres of activity and funding. (I made it through undergraduate work on money from the AEC). The result is that science has increasingly become a narrower subset of interesting questions, the subset that has commercial or power implications. Many interesting questions, especially those that undermine the corporate state and its need for personal alignment, have been pushed to the side. Close to my own field of psychotherapy, the pressure from the drug companies, colluded in by state bureaucracies and insurance companies is to reduce mental problems in living to mental problems that are "dis-orders" with the idea that each person should have a cocktail of drugs that bring them back to the undefined but obviously conventional "ordered". The simple logic that modern life is stressful and investigating the conditions of modern life is totally avoided. Money power dominates the decision making and forces careers to align.

What we are learning from science studies (in philosophy, history, sociology) is that science contains first a strong mixture of past culture (such as the Christian idea of dominating nature)and second a strong mixture of current political ideology, as in the idea that thought can be reduced to reason, reason to logic, logic

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