Historical Science Is Not Worse, More Restricted,

Science Is An Integral Part Of Culture. It's Not This Foreign Thing, Done By An Arcane Priesthood. It's One Of The Glories Of The Human Intellectual Tradition.

The Telephone Is The Greatest Single Enemy Of Scholarship; For What Our Intellectual Forebears Used To Inscribe In Ink Now Goes Once Over A Wire Into Permanent Oblivion.

Everything Comes To Us In Fifteen-second Sound Bites And Photo Opportunities. All Possibility For Ambiguity - The Most Precious Trait Of Any Adequate Analysis - Is Erased.

Good Scholars Struggle To Understand The World In An Integral Way (pedants Bite Off Tiny Bits And Worry Them To Death). These Visions Of Reality [...] Demand Our Respect, For They Are An Intellectual's Only Birthright. They Are Often Entirely Wrong And Always Flawed In Serious Ways, But They Must Be Understood Honorably And Not Subjected To Mayhem By The Excision Of Patches.

Anything, Even The Conceptually Most Complex Material, Can Be Written For General Audiences Without Any Dumbing Down. Of Course You Have To Explain Things Carefully. This Goes Back To Galileo, Who Wrote His Great Books As Dialogues In Italian, Not As Treatises In Latin. And To Darwin, Who Wrote The Origin Of Species For General Readers. I Think A Lot Of People Pick Up Darwin's Book And Assume It Must Be A Popular Version Of Some Technical Monograph, But There Is No Technical Monograph. That's What He Wrote. So What I'm Doing Is Part Of A Great Humanistic Tradition.