I don’t doubt the sincerity of your lament, although I’m quite surprised to hear that engineering (which I know next to nothing about) has also been affected. I’d be interested in hearing you draw that out. How do opposites rule in engineering? What, in your mind, would be a middle for engineering?
“Normal” is not easily defined these days, as I’m sure you know. In terms of culture, I think what we have today is the result of technology doing it’s thing and the backlash of marginalized segments of society. I would say that what was once the “red-blooded American” version of normal distribution marginalized an awful lot of people—women, minorities, gays, atheists, youth etc. For those marginalized groups, the advent of network technologies and other factors (which I can’t think of) gave these marginalized groups the opportunity to form their own hierarchies and assert some degree of power in the cultural sphere. I would say that you see a lot of fragmentation, in this regard, as opposed to polarization. Again, what, in your mind, is a normal distribution for culture? Is it a daily newspaper, three network news programs, church, theater, movies and books, or is it something else. (I don’t mean to pigeonhole you with that list; I’m just taking a guess.)