“The only Luddite computer science major at the University of Texas,” a professor gleefully called me during my years there. In a course on Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near, I was the only one who balked at the prospect of replacing the human species with technological superbeings. For my fellow engineers, it was just the logical next step in the product cycle.
Outside of class, I was preoccupied with the questions popular scientists like Neil deGrasse Tyson, Jared Diamond, and Carl Sagan claimed to answer: Does science show that we have free will? How do love and emotion arise? Is the world as we perceive it real? Where did we come from? If we are progressing, what toward?
Science, I understood, had to be taken seriously because it held the ultimate answers to these questions. Bound by a deep sense of intellectual duty, I drank deeply of its waters. But the taste was bitter: all that’s real is atoms and natural selection, and the rest is a pleasing illusion.
“There is a journal I think you should be reading,” said a friend one day when I was in the thick of these brooding questions. He sent me a link to The New Atlantis.
It was like nothing I had encountered in my education. Yuval Levin’s “The Crisis of Everyday Life,” Leon Kass’s “Ageless Bodies, Happy Souls,” Christine Rosen’s “Why Not Artificial Wombs?,” Robert Zubrin’s “The Human Explorer,” Matthew Crawford’s “Shop Class as Soulcraft” — Here were authors writing with great power about the questions I had been grappling with: questions of meaning, I now understood.
They were not, like philosophers, speaking to people living anywhere in any time. And they were not, like the science writing I was used to, speaking to disembodied brains residing nowhere. No, this was writing for Americans at the dawn of the 21st century, who belonged to an eternal order but were living it out in this particular here and now. The despairing tomes I had read were taken up by name and answered, one by one, with wisdom, humanity, lively prose, and moral force.
It felt to me like a homecoming. It was what I’d been looking for all along, but I would never have been able to say what that was until I found it.
In the years since, I have spoken to many others who’ve responded to our work in a similar way — with welcome relief at finding something they didn’t realize they were looking for.
It’s that sort of reader I often have in mind when we’re deciding on the editorial direction of the journal: readers who sense that staying human is the ultimate question about modern science and technology, and that we still have reason not to despair over the answer.
This note is the first in a series of brief stories we’ll be sharing over the rest of the year on the meaning that the work of The New Atlantis has had in the lives of readers, writers, teachers, builders, and decisionmakers since we launched a generation ago.
It is also the beginning of a case we will make this year for what good The New Atlantis could do if it flourished and grew — not for one more year but for another generation yet. “Get ready to get ready,” as my grandmother used to say: we’ll have more to say soon.
In the meantime, I ask you for two things:
As always, thank you for your readership.
Yours,
Ari Schulman
Editor
Exhausted by science and tech debates that go nowhere?