One of the prized teachers of my past, the philosophic naturalist George P. Conger, liked to remind us of a cartoon of two dogs sitting on a hilltop by a roadside clogged with Sunday drivers. One turned to the other and said, "Gosh, a fella can’t bark at every one, can he?" I have always viewed this as a prime cautionary image. So many things evoke the righteous ire and unslaked desires of humanists, so many causes cry for our attention. Which should we choose?

My criteria have come to include: things that we are most uniquely acquainted with, and things that will go undone if we don’t attend. Given the educational, class, and ethnic ‘spaces’ occupied by most humanists, these criteria would lower many priorities. Most of us do not live with the poor and their problems, or with the socially marginalized. [I can imagine some of my readers objecting that our godlessness also marginalizes us, but our lack of belief is not immediately visible to our neighbors. As the late, and great, Justice Thurgood Marshall used to say, there was never a day in his life when he would have had to look at his own hand to determine his ‘race’. Humanists, on the other hand, tend to blend into the social fabric until they choose to make themselves known].

I am by no means endorsing any kind of conservatism here. Humanists of course support the equality values of the Enlightenment. I am only reminding us that this particular struggle is one where we have many allies who are often better equipped than we to lead. Humanist organizations have a somewhat sorry history in trying to become ethnically more inclusive, but this is a somewhat different issue and one that requires continuing effort. Similarly our record on gender-inclusiveness is less than stunning. These issues are internal, however.

What are those external matters that can use our particular wisdom and strengths, and may falter if we spread ourselves too thin in other directions? I nominate humanistic education and science-in-society.

By humanistic education, I mean all those channels and institutions that broaden the vision of persons regarding life’s possibilities. Financial stringencies beset all levels of schools, from Head Start to graduate schools. The easy temptation for bureaucrats is to trim humanistic programs--art, music, literature, philosophy, comparative literature. The battle cry is often a "return to the basics." But the most basic matters are those which expand imaginations, which expand alternatives, which humanize learners. We might all do with an annual rereading of John Dewey on such issues.

On more theoretical levels, various aspects of postmodernisms introduce critiques of culture which need to be answered. There are profound differences between the kinds of anti-absolutism that humanism has championed and the kinds of absolute relativism in vogue in some contemporary circles. Russell Jacoby’s Dogmatic Wisdom: How the Culture Wars Divert Education and Distract America (Doubleday, 1994).

This emerges most sharply in relation to science-in-society, my second concern. The correlations between reason and science have been central since the Enlightenment (a connection underscored by postmodern attacks on both). At the same time, humanism has always allied itself with science as our prime way of knowing and with its engine-and-resultant, technology. Humanists have seldom fallen into positivistic positions wherein science was morally neutral and irrelevant.

This is precisely the point being made by various religious fundamentalisms which would dictate what sciences can and cannot explore. By their backgrounds, education, and ideology, humanists can make unique contributions here. We need to keep at our homework, and I have some suggestions to make. Start with Philip Kitcher’s The Advancement of Science: Science without Legend, Objectivity without Illusions (Oxford, 1993). Parts of this are tough going, but this brilliant philosopher of science sifts current controversies in comprehensive ways. See particularly his discussions of Darwin, reason, and progress. Also valuable is Gerald Holton’s Science and Anti-Science (Harvard, 1993).

Philip Regal’s The Anatomy of Judgment (Minnesota, 1990) moves more directly into the policy issues surrounding science in our world, and does an excellent job laying out the gray areas where knowledge and policy intersect.

Also on my must-read list is Paul Gross & Norman Leavitt, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science (Johns Hopkins, 1994). Theirs is a brilliant and necessary book (representing years away from the bench and study. They have plowed through vast bodies and anti-science&endash;feminist, postmodern, environmentalist, Afro-centric&endash;to give us this devastating critique. A bonus is that it is written in high literary style!

The books I have been mentioning are valuable in mapping the field. But as a bonanza of new ideas, let me suggest John Brockman The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution (Simon & Schuster, 1995). This book and some of its auxiliary readings, will keep you stirred up for years. Brockman owns a literary agency and describes this as an oral history, condensed from long taped interviews with such innovators as Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose, Richard Dawkins, Murray Gell-Man, Stephen Jay Gould. He sees them as unusual scientists in their ability also to relate to a larger world and to make their ideas understandable as relating to those relationships.

Robert Tapp