英国卫报: 无知的新时代

The Guardian on the "new age of ignorance"

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/07/02/the_guardian_on_the_.html

Fifty years ago, CP Snow posited that there are two cultures in modern society, the sciences and the humanities, and that the difference between the two worldviews acted like a wall blocking not only collaboration, but even conversation. Eventually, Snow talked about a "third culture" that bridged the two. Literary agent provocateur John Brockman drew out this idea in his groundbreaking 1995 book The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution. Yesterday's issue of the Guardian has a long article and panel discussion asking "is the old divide between arts and sciences deeper than ever?" The article profiles Brockman, whose online publication and community Edge embodies this third culture through essays, interviews, and books by some of the world's greatest thinkers living at the intersection of science, art, and philosophy. The Guardian piece also reviews New York Times science writer Natalie Angier's new science primer The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science. The article's sidebar is a panel where three writers, three scientists, and two broadcasters were asked to answer six scientific questions that the paper calls "basic." I was surprised how off I was on a couple. From the main story:

'Science is rather a state of mind,' Angier argues and, as such, it should inform everything. 'It is a way of viewing the world, of facing reality square on but taking nothing for granted.' It would be hard to argue that this state of mind was advancing across the globe. We no longer make and mend, so we no longer know how anything works...."

Though Brockman borrowed Snow's phrase ("the third culture"), he did not employ it in the same way: Snow had hoped for a kind of detente between the rival mindsets; Brockman perceived a third way. 'Literary intellectuals are not communicating with scientists,' he suggested. 'Scientists are communicating directly with the general public. Traditional intellectual media played a vertical game; journalists wrote up and professors wrote down. Today, Third Culture thinkers tend to avoid the middleman and endeavour to express their deepest thoughts in a manner accessible to the intelligent reading public.'

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The new age of ignorance

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/visualart/story/0,,2115681,00.html

We take our young children to science museums, then as they get older we stop. In spite of threats like global warming and avian flu, most adults have very little understanding of how the world works. So, 50 years on from CP Snow's famous 'Two Cultures' essay, is the old divide between arts and sciences deeper than ever?

Here we ask a celebrity panel to answer some basic scientific questions

Tim Adams Sunday July 1, 2007 The Observer

It is an immutable law of nature that acute embarrassment can make a few short seconds last pretty much for ever. The longest two minutes of my life occurred in the company of James Watson, one half of the famous double act who discovered the double helix. I was interviewing Watson, then in his late seventies, at his lab in Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island. At one point, I referred blithely to the 'perfect simplicity' of his and Francis Crick's findings about the code of life.

Watson is a mischievous, famously prickly man and that phrase seemed to get under his skin. He raised an eyebrow. He sat back. He thought he would have some fun. Seeing as it was all so perfectly simple, he suggested, maybe I could briefly run through my understanding of DNA base pairing, say, or chromosome mapping.

What followed - a tangled, stuttering stream of consciousness reflecting distant O-level biology and recent half-understanding of Watson's brilliant books, punctuated with words like 'replication' and 'mutation' and meaning nothing much - gave new resonance to the notion of floundering.

Watson, resisting the temptation to laugh, correct or comment, simply moved on, having categorically established our respective levels of evolution. I can still cringe now at the brief pause that concluded my ill-judged aside on the significance of the genome.

Given that science informs so much of our culture, and so many of us have such patchy knowledge, it is surprising that such embarrassments are not routine. It's half a century since CP Snow put forward the idea of the 'Two Cultures', the intractable divide between the sciences and the humanities, first in an article in the New Statesman, then in a lecture series at Cambridge and finally in a book. Back then, Snow, who was both a novelist and a physicist, used to employ a test at dinner parties to demonstrate his argument.

'A good many times,' he suggested, 'I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice, I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold; it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: have you ever read a work of Shakespeare's?'

Fifty years on, and exponential scientific advance later, it seems unlikely that the response of dinner guests would be much different. I was reminded of Snow's test when reading the new book by Natalie Angier, science editor of the New York Times. Angier's book is called The Canon, and subtitled 'A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science'. It is not a long book and it contains, as the title suggests, a breathless Baedeker of the fundamental scientific knowledge Angier believes is the minimum requirement of an educated person.

In many places, I found myself cringeing all over again. I've read a fair amount of popular science, tried to follow the technical arguments that underpin debates about global warming, say, or bird flu, listened religiously to Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time, but still I discovered large black holes in my elementary understanding of how our world works. Angier divides her book into basic disciplines - biology, chemistry, geology, physics and so on - and each chapter offers an animated essay on the current established thinking.

The result is the kind of science book you wish someone had placed in front of you at school - full of aphorisms that help everything fall into place. For geology: 'This is what our world is about: there is heat inside and it wants to get out.' For physics: 'Almost everything we've come to understand about the universe we have learned by studying light.' Along the way there are all sorts of facts that stick: 'You would have to fly on a commercial aircraft every day for 18,000 years before your chances of being in a crash exceeded 50 per cent', for example; or, if you imagined the history of our planet as a single 75-year human life span: 'The first ape did not arrive until May or June of the final year... and Neil Armstrong muddied up the Moon at 20 seconds to midnight.'

Angier also gives as clear an insight as I have read of CP Snow's culture-dividing Second Law of Thermodynamics, the law of entropy, the one that states that in any system inefficiency is inevitable and eventually overwhelming. 'Entropy,' Angier writes, 'is like a taxi passing you on a rainy night with its NOT IN SERVICE lights ablaze, or a chair in a museum with a rope draped from arm to arm, or a teenager.'

Entropy, unusable energy, leads to the law that states that everything in time must wear out, become chaotic, die. 'The darkest readings of the Second Law suggest that even the universe has a morphine drip in its vein,' Angier suggests, 'a slow smothering of all spangle, all spiral, all possibility.' No wonder CP Snow thought we should know about it.

For all of its infectious analogies and charged curiosity, the most telling fact about Angier's book is that it seems to have been written out of sheer desperation. It is something of a cry from the wilderness; impassioned, overwrought in places. It is written in the voice of someone who has spent her whole award-winning career evangelising about this amazing stuff and is facing up to the fact that most people have not even begun to 'get' any of it.

Angier's tipping point, the reason she came to write the book, was a decision made by her sister. When the second of her two children turned 13 the sister decided that it was time to let their membership lapse in two familiar family haunts: the science museum and the zoo. They were, the implication went, ready to put away childish things, ready to go to the theatre and the art gallery, places where there was none of this 'mad pinball pinging from one hands-on science exhibit to the next, pounding on knobs to make artificial earthquakes'. They had grown out of science.

Angier believes this idea - that science is something for kids - still pervades much of our thinking, and characterises the presentation of science in culture. Part of it is the notion that argues science is just a bunch of facts with no overarching coherence. Just as bad are the media, which insist on ghettoising science and serving it up as cliches: scientists as boffins, with permanent bad-hair days; science as controversy, always set up for polarised clashes with religion.

'Science is rather a state of mind,' Angier argues and, as such, it should inform everything. 'It is a way of viewing the world, of facing reality square on but taking nothing for granted.' It would be hard to argue that this state of mind was advancing across the globe. We no longer make and mend, so we no longer know how anything works.

One of Angier's interviewees, Andrew Knoll, a professor of natural history at Harvard's earth and planetary sciences department, suggests that 'the average American adult today knows less about biology than the average 10-year-old living in the Amazon, or the average American of 200 years ago'. I spoke to Angier to find out why she thought that this might be the case.

To some extent, she suggested, that was a political question. 'Here in the US we have had the last seven years of this administration which has made everything about the two-cultures divide seem worse.' But it is not just that. 'Newspapers are getting rid of all their science pages; they are jettisoning all their science staff. The feeling is people don't want to read it.'

The implications of this, and the resultant general scientific illiteracy, she believes, are possibly catastrophic. Forty-two per cent of Americans in a recent survey said they believed that humans had been on Earth since the beginning of time. 'A geophysicist friend suggests we are at a critical crossroads just like the start of the Renaissance,' Angier says, 'where you couldn't just leave reading and writing to the kings and priests anymore. Ordinary people have to keep up. In the world we live in, the new economy, you have to become scientifically literate or you will fall quickly from view.'

It is, apparently, not just America that does not want to hear this news. Foreign rights to Angier's book have been snapped up in auctions by publishers across Asia and Eastern Europe, 'countries that see themselves as the economic future', but she has not, for example, sold her book in the UK, a place, we might remember, where 20 per cent of people still believe that the Sun revolves around Earth. 'I tend to see that as a tiny little sign that some of these more aggressive competitive nations are more aware of what the future looks like,' Angier suggests.

She believes this persistent apathy in matters of science in America and Britain comes in part from a lack of interest in what the future might hold. 'In the 1960s, we had the space race, we had these world fairs and the whole idea of the future was very exciting. Science was something they wanted to be involved in.' You could hope that the apocalyptic panic that attends climate change, the front pages of floodwaters rising, might have a similar effect. 'Whatever you think of him, Al Gore has been great for science,' she says.

Angier's initiation into the 'beautiful basics' was brought about by a professor at the University of Michigan, who taught a 'physics of music' class. The walls between the two cultures came tumbling down every week. 'There were kids from the engineering and physics departments and then there were kids from the music departments. I was just in there on my own. But the way he brought us together was an extraordinary thing,' she recalls. 'Both groups were kind of ecstatic; this guy would get standing ovations at the end of every lecture. So I guess I saw that bridging that gap might be something to strive for in life in terms of engaging people.'

This kind of engagement, a sense of a bigger picture in science, its poetry and mystery, is no doubt all too rare. In a 2005 survey of British teenagers at school conducted by the exam board OCR, more than half said they thought science classes were 'boring', 'confusing' and 'difficult'. Just 7 per cent believed that scientists were 'cool' and when asked to pick out a famous scientist from a list including Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, a fair few chose Christopher Columbus.

Some of this Angier believes has to do with the way science is taught - 'I go through these science books for kids and they are so dull compared to the novels that children read... I think that you have to make it an epic journey, a narrative with heroes and villains, molecules engaging in this struggle for life.' A lot of it, however, is cultural, she believes. Numbers of students still studying science at 18 are falling in Britain and America, perhaps because we are becoming generally less motivated to address difficulty.

As a culture, we allow ourselves too many excuses. 'Western parents are quite comfortable saying their children have a predilection for art or for writing or whatever, and allow them just to pursue that. In the Asian education system, if you are not good at something, it's because you are lazy and you just have to work harder at it. Just because things are hard does not mean they are not worth doing.'

That idea of difficulty, I suggest, cannot really be helped in the States in particular, when all of the presidential candidates of one party stand up in televised debate and say they believe in 'intelligent design' and suggest that the world could well have been created by a bearded God a few thousand years ago. Angier laughs, somewhat bleakly.

'I see all that as a macho kind of posturing. It's like, I can believe the impossible: look, I can lift a tree! It is a Republican initiation ritual, like having a hook pulled through your cheek and not flinching.' But no, she concedes, it doesn't help much.

Some people would suggest that Natalie Angier's enlightenment utopia, in which everyone might one day agree on the fundamentals of the universe, the beautiful basics, is a false ideal; the mass has always believed in mumbo-jumbo. One of these people is John Brockman. Brockman has probably done more than anyone to break down CP Snow's cultural divide. He is the PT Barnum of popular science, a great huckster of ideas. In the Sixties, he hung out with John Cage and Andy Warhol, got an MBA and then made his first fortune selling psychedelia to corporations, turning on marketing executives with 'multikinetic happenings' and showing them how their profits could levitate.

These days, he acts as literary agent for many of the world's greatest minds, including Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Steven Pinker, and achieves for some of them the kind of publishing advances that it takes great mathematicians to compute. It is Brockman who invented the publishing market for quarks and quantum theory and black holes in the 1990s, and it is he who is behind the current boom in atheism. The universe may be infinite, but Brockman takes 15 per cent of it.

He also runs a kind of global online Royal Society called Edge. Edge promotes what he calls the Third Culture, a marriage of physics and philosophy, astronomy and art. The name itself derives from a phrase of CP Snow's outlining his personal hope for the future. Brockman, when launching his Third Culture in 1991, had significant ambition for the project, much of which has been realised. '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,' he suggested, grandly.

Though Brockman borrowed Snow's phrase, he did not employ it in the same way: Snow had hoped for a kind of detente between the rival mindsets; Brockman perceived a third way. 'Literary intellectuals are not communicating with scientists,' he suggested. 'Scientists are communicating directly with the general public. Traditional intellectual media played a vertical game; journalists wrote up and professors wrote down. Today, Third Culture thinkers tend to avoid the middleman and endeavour to express their deepest thoughts in a manner accessible to the intelligent reading public.'

Brockman's cross-fertilising club, the most rarefied of chatrooms, has its premises on his website www.edge.org . Eavesdropping is fun. Ian McEwan, one of the few novelists who has contributed to Edge's ongoing debates, suggests that the project is not so far removed from the 'old Enlightenment dream of a unified body of knowledge, when biologists and economists draw on each other's concepts and molecular biologists stray into the poorly defended territory of chemists and physicists'.

Brockman is at the hub of this conversation. When I phone him, he is waiting for a call from maverick geneticist Craig Venter about an invention that will 'put new operating mechanisms into genes' and radically change our idea of life; earlier, he has been speaking to George Smoot, the Nobel-winning astrophysicist who first identified the background radiation of the Big Bang and thereby invented cosmology.

From where he is sitting, the Two Cultures no longer applies, the Third Culture has long-since prevailed.

'Basically, in terms of whatever war has been going on, I think it has finished,' he says. 'I don't characterise it by saying we've won. I think everybody has won. We are living in a profound science culture and the big events that are affecting people's lives are scientific ones.'

What about Natalie Angier's anxiety that these ideas have not trickled down, that, if anything, scientific thought seems to be on the retreat?

'Since when have the masses of people had any ideas anyway?' Brockman asks. 'It is always a certain percentage of people who do the thinking for everybody else. What is changing,' he argues, contrary to Angier's perception, 'is that the media people, who used to have no thoughts of science, now sit up. Science makes the news.'

I wonder why there are still so few literary contributors to Edge, which has remained a predominantly scientific and philosophical forum. Is there not some evidence there that the divide persists?

Brockman explains how Edge evolved out of a group called the Reality Club that held actual meetings with scientists, artists, architects, musicians. Ten of the leading novelists in America were invited to participate. Not one accepted.

'We are talking about Vonnegut, Updike, Mailer, John Irving,' Brockman says. 'Ian McEwan is one of the first writers to jump feet-first into the world of science and embraced it wholeheartedly. But we still have never had a novelist come to one of these events. Neither have we had a major business person. Maybe getting up in front of a group of Nobel-winning scientists to talk might be intimidating for these people. Maybe they are too busy.'

Brockman's optimism is infectious, and, at his elite level, the battle may have been won, but further down the food chain, the forces of reason are still compromised by the culture.

When I had recovered a little of my composure with James Watson, back in Cold Spring Harbor, I asked him how he thought the climate of scientific research had changed since he made his fateful discovery of the structure of life in 1953. As ever, he came at the question from an unusual angle. He doubted, he said, that in today's world, he and Francis Crick would ever have had their Eureka moment.

'I recently went to my staircase at Clare College, Cambridge and there were women there!' he said, with an enormous measure of retrospective sexual frustration. 'There have been a lot of convincing studies recently about the loss of productivity in the Western male. It may be that entertainment culture now is so engaging that it keeps people satisfied. We didn't have that. Science was much more fun than listening to the radio. When you are 16 or 17 and in that inherently semi-lonely period when you are deciding whether to be an intellectual, many now don't bother.'

Watson raised an eyebrow, fixed me again with a look. 'What you have instead are characters out of Nick Hornby's very funny books, who channel their intellect in pop culture. The hopeless male.'

As James Watson knows perhaps more clearly than anyone alive, biology works in mysterious ways.

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无知的新时代

http://www.zaobao.com/yl/tx070707_501.html

● 陈冰（伦敦）

　　50年前，身兼科学家和小说家的斯诺（ C.P. Snow）在剑桥大学发表了著名的演讲《两种文化》。一个多小时的演讲促成了当代思想史上一场旷日持久的论战，但科学和人文的割裂是世界很多问题不能解决的主要障碍的警钟，似乎并没有为世人所听见。

　　很多人包括美国总统在内的人，实际上都不清楚这世界是怎样运作的。我们正面临着全球气候变暖、禽流感、人的机器化、教育的产品化、民主的霸权、专制的隐蔽等威胁，但总采取不了强有力的措施去消除人类共同的威胁。

　　人类进入了知识爆炸的时代，似乎也进入了一个无知的新时代。这话听起来是不是有些逻辑混乱？不过做个小小的试验，你问周围的人一些再简单不过的问题，比如"盐为什么能在水中溶解？""地球有多少岁了？""为什么开关打开后电灯才亮？"看有多少人能说出准确的答案！

　　50年前，斯诺提出了一个简捷的方式来检测人的无知。他曾多次邀请"受过良好教育"且喜欢用知识分子语言高谈阔论的人聚会，席间他问多少人能表述热力学第二定律，几乎所有的人都是沉默。50年后，好事的英国《卫报》记者重复了这个试验，邀请了科学节目主持人、文化史学者、政治评论员、科普作家、科教系列片撰述者，让他们表述热力学第二定律。这次五个人都没有沉默，但没有一个人答对。接着记者抛出了一个更简单的问题："天为什么是蓝的？"结果仍是没有一个人能准确回答。

一种世界性的现象

　　不要笑话英国人"学习太差"，如果问一个中国人大气变暖、禽流感、太湖藻污染、汽车尾气危害等司空见惯的词汇的含义，结果可能不会太好。美国政客天天在声讨"伊斯兰极端分子"，但问他"伊斯兰"的英文怎么拼写他不一定能写对。

　　世界正在进入一个无知的新时代，或者说新的无知时代。我们所拥有的是"知识的补丁"——不准确、不完整、甚至是错误的知识，所以人人知道和平之路是由对话和协商的"混凝土"浇灌的，但战争的消息却天天占据报纸头版头条；人人高喊环境保护是世界潮流、文明坐标，但布什总统就是宁要石油不要《京都协定书》，中国无锡市委书记遇到灾难后还在振振有词地宣讲"太湖污染是工业化必然问题"。因为无知，所有迟早会付出代价。

　　知识爆炸造就的竟是无知的人，听起来似乎是悖论，但事实就是这么严酷。哈佛大学的自然史教授安德鲁·瑙，对美国人的无知状态有切肤之痛：今天美国成年人对生物的认知水平，低于亚马逊流域10岁的儿童，相当于200年前美国人的平均水平。

　　知名的科普作家安吉尔认为美国的科技在日渐发达，而美国人的整体知识却越来越贫乏，"布什政府把科学和人文的鸿沟拉大了，而媒体把科普专刊和严谨的人文专版都删减了，人流中增加了科盲和文盲的比例。当人们对刊在报纸头版上的天气变暖、洪水飓风消息不再有天然的惊惶时，表明科学精神和人文情怀已被无知及其必然产物麻木所淹没"。最近的科学调查表明，42％的美国人认为人类的产生和宇宙的产生是同步的。

英国的状况一样糟糕。2005年的调查表明，50％以上的青少年认为科学课程"枯燥"、"迷惑"、"困难"，只有7％的人认为"酷"。在科学家身份认定上，多数人选择了牛顿、爱因斯坦，但几乎没人认为哥伦布是科学家。更令人惊讶的是，英国至今有20％的人认为太阳绕着地球转。

　　中国社会因"无知"而"无畏"的荒谬现象也是比比皆是：经济上的"破坏性发展"，赚了钱筑起了高楼大厦，却消灭了文化特色、毁坏了优美环境，还在趾高气扬地宣扬"现代化成就"；文化上的媚俗风尚盛行，博得了廉价的掌声赎回了发行量、提高了叫座率，却冲涮着独立的思想、深邃的远见和对人道的关切。

　　一些 "名流""大腕"居然敢把自己的作品标签为杰作，或者饱满激情地宣称向奥斯卡进军、向世界展示软实力；没读过《论语》的人在大谈孔子；不知道绿色文明的人在高论循环经济；对西方高等教育一知半解的人鼓吹其种种好处，且指手画脚地点拨"我国应借鉴哪些东西"；不知道"中东特使"虚实几何的人，已借着时事热气球手舞足蹈地为布莱尔壮行……到处是头头是道的专家，到处是煞有介事的慷慨陈辞，人们开着黄腔浑然不知还自以为很有功底。

无知产生浮躁

　　当然，更令人焦虑的"无知"是对常识的背弃，比如在财、权和力上稍占优势就可动手打人，发生灾难请几个"专家"说说就万事大吉，权力不受约束从寻租到"包二奶"，以致国务院不得不出台有些令外国人惊异的公务员处分条例，来限制这种丢人现眼的时尚。

　　并不是说过去人们就很"有知"，但处于相对封闭的状态下，已有的科学和人文知识还能比较理性地运用于社会革新、经济发展和生存状态的改善。加上过去的知识传播途径，如书籍、报纸、课堂、电视等，虽然缓慢但很可靠。但在全球化新时代，国家的发展和个人的生活一下子与世界联系起来，人们有限的知识似乎跟不上应付竞争甚至日常生活的需求，于是急急忙忙地在不完整的知识上添加臆想之笔，自以为是地冲向前沿阵地。

　　而对事实真伪天然色盲的互联网，总是提供着虚假的情报，人们来不及鉴别成千上万的信息和说法，顺手牵羊地取其一二作为冲刺的宝剑，浮躁气息因此产生并且蔓延全世界。

　　无知的新时代最显著的特征是"不知为知之"。10年前香港回归，西方多数媒体传播的是骇人听闻的无知和偏见，在没有充分了解中国"一国两制"政策的情况下，便把"香港死了"的大字登在报刊封面，现在在遭受事实的嘲笑。"中国威胁论"成欧美时尚后，且不说把中国发展防卫性军事力量视为"威胁"，就连"孔子学院"、"援助非洲"、"举办奥运会"也被划在"威胁"之列。而中国一些人在对西方政治和社会基本不了解的情况下，也把性开放、家庭伦理混乱、"黄段子" 误会为开放而加以弘扬，把GDP、高楼大厦、靓车美女作为"现代化的标志"不断追求，等尝到沙斯爆发、水源污染、交通拥堵等苦果后才有所醒悟。

　　无知产生浮躁，浮躁促成冒进，冒进制造灾难。相对科学的无知来说，人文的无知所造成的破坏性似乎更大。布什政府在尚未搞清楚伊斯兰历史和文化之前，已打着"十字军东征"的旗号，举着反恐的剑柄，把导弹投放在伊拉克领土。一个尚能维持局面的中东成了恐怖集散地，伊战后患难消。布莱尔更牛，强力制造出萨达姆的大杀伤武器能在45分钟内打到英伦的"准确情报"，陪布什开赴战场。结果是引火烧身，把恐怖爆炸声引入了英伦本土。在他下台后，恐怖袭击又在格拉斯哥和伦敦发生，伊拉克人和英国人都成了"浮躁的受难者"。

科学和人文必须进一步融合

类似这样浮躁和强词夺理的现象经常发生在人们身边，只不过程度不同而已。说到中国房价高，就有人说美国三成人群买房、六成人群租房，所以要改变国人的房产观，以租为主。实际上欧美人和中国农民一样，拥有一座好房子几乎是所有人的理想，况且美国人的住房拥有率是70％。这个"美国例子"是自造的，但在互联网上渐渐传成了"事实"。

　　媒体改制，要让记者编辑按业绩打分实行量化工资，于是有人说这是"国际惯例"，欧美同行都是这么干的。实际上让无法量化的脑力劳动者拿每月浮动的计件工资，是中国人的发明，欧美只对不动脑筋、只看动手速度的工种，如打包装、钉皮鞋之类，才采取计件工资制。但是在中国传媒界，计件工资制可真是当作"国际惯例"在广泛使用。

　　有识之士已看到无知的新时代带来的种种不良后果，解决之道依然是斯诺提出的药方—— 让科学和人文进一步融合。在美国，一些专家学者呼吁现在正处在新的"文艺复兴"的十字路口，不仅要让精英分子在科学和人文的和谐发展上有所作为，还要在大众中间进行科普教育和历史文化教育，否则就可能在新经济中处于劣势，可能产生精英专制。

　　在中国，科学精神和人文思想相结合的"科学发展观"成为新的指导思想，全面认识世界包括民主、法治、人权的风气正在兴起，人文精神建设也已成为深圳等城市的发展战略。

　　在英国，如何让科学教育生动和有趣起来，是布朗政府教育改革的重点之一；把"宣战权"从政府转移到议会的宪政改革，也是致力避免首相和政府的无知与固执给国家利益带来危害。各国的重点不同，但主旋律是一致的，就是要促成国民在认识事物、看待世界时必须面对现实，不能有丝毫的想当然和自以为是。

·作者系中国资深媒体人