Comments on: The Two Cultures, 50 years later

By: Sage

Sage — Sun, 17 May 2009 14:48:00 +0000

Mike, you’re right to sceptical here and I don’t want to overstate my point. Scientific illiteracy is still widespread (just as all kinds of specialist illiteracies exist even just within the humanities or within the sciences; this is the nature of the modern super-specialized academy), just somewhat less so (and somewhat more so for most kinds of humanist literacy).

But the class of people Snow was talking about, “literary intellectuals”, had already passed their peak of cultural significance in 1959, and the few who might merit that title today are a different breed.

By: Mike Christie

Mike Christie — Sun, 17 May 2009 11:13:00 +0000

You’re right, of course — you do mention that point. Perhaps I should have said that Snow seemed to me to make it more central to his argument than you make it. However, that’s moot, if, as you say, scientific literacy has really become more widespread since Snow’s day. I am still sceptical about the extent to which this has happened, but any movement in the right direction is a good thing.

Thanks for a thought-provoking post.

By: Sage

Sage — Sat, 16 May 2009 23:25:00 +0000

Thanks, Mike. In the paragraph beginning "Snow's original idea", that complaint is what I was trying to describe, that literary intellectuals didn't understand science and didn't care to.

But I think the fact that there still is such a thing as the humanities, separate from the sciences, obscures how different the place of science is today versus 1959. Actually, I think it's tough to be considered a broadly learned scholar even in the humanities without a basic level of scientific literacy.

Certainly, the disdain that Snow describes is much rarer; the humanists who don't know any science don't flaunt it and aren't proud of it, by and large.

Just as an anecdote: two people for me sort embody what it is to be a humanist savant in academia today, carrying on the tradition of the literary intellectual: Anthony Grafton and Jean-Cristophe Agnew. These are cultural historians (whose work has focused on the early modern period), and one wouldn't expect them to be deeply knowledgeable about the modern sciences, and yet they are. I see that to a greater or lesser degree in much of the humanities; one can no longer make a serious argument that science is irrelevant for understanding culture.

Part of that, I think, has to do with the fact that there is hardly anyone left who was trained pre-Sputnik. Beginning in the 1960s, science became much more significant in high school, and also became more significant in liberal arts curricula in colleges. So since the 1960s, many more humanists have both rudimentary training in the sciences and many more opportunities to experience science-related cultural expressions.

By: Mike Christie

Mike Christie — Sat, 16 May 2009 21:55:00 +0000

It’s been a while since I read Snow’s essay. I like your point about the people who now have the future in their bones, but you don’t mention one point that Snow emphasized: that someone who did not know the fundamental scientific facts he mentioned (Newton’s laws, the laws of thermodynamics) was ignorant — illiterate even — in the world of science, and that this was a problem unacknowledged as such by cultural academe. That doesn’t seem to me to have changed a great deal. Resolving it would not be a panacea for anything, of course.

Perhaps the reason that there is now more acceptance of the nature of the future among some cultural academics is precisely because it is easier to understand it — even literature professors surf the web and download music.