Francis Bacon, in his New Atlantis, could charge his elite scientists in Salomon’s House with practicing self-censorship to avoid publicizing dangero… - Leon Kass

The truths modern science finds—even about human beings—are value-neutral, in no way restraining, and indeed perfectly adapted for, technical application. In short, as Hans Jonas has put it, modern science contains manipulability at its theoretical core—and this remains true even for those great scientists who are themselves motivated by the desire for truth and who have no interest in that mastery over nature to which their discoveries nonetheless contribute and for which science is largely esteemed by the rest of us and mightily supported by the modern state.

Fifty years ago, when Europeans and Americans still distinguished high culture from popular culture, and when classical learning was still highly esteemed in colleges and universities, C. P. Snow delivered his famous Rede Lecture at Cambridge University, "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution." Snow did more than warn of the growing split between the old culture of the humanities and the rising culture of science. He took Britain's literary aristocracy to task for its dangerous dismissal of scientific and technological progress, which Snow believed offered the solutions to the world's deepest problems. In a vitriolic response to Snow, the literary critic F. R. Leavis defended the primacy of the humanities for a civilizing education, insisting that science must not be allowed to operate outside of the moral norms that a first-rate humanistic education alone could provide.

In contrast to 50 years ago, few licensed humanists today embrace any view of the humanities that could in fact justify making them the centerpiece of a college curriculum.