Revisiting Snow's Two Cultures

New Scientist asked several prominent people for an update on C.P. Snow's Two Cultures: Science and Art: Still Two Cultures Divided?  I finally got around to reading Two Cultures a few months ago. What I liked best was Stefan Collini's historical introduction (which takes up about half the book and is worth the price).

Collini is the first respondent in New Scientist's article:

C. P. Snow intended to call his lecture "The Rich and the Poor" - and regretted not doing so. This title points to what remains valuable about the essay now. Helping the world's impoverished majority meet their basic needs remains an obligation of richer societies, and applied science is a vital tool.

In other ways, though, Snow's lecture is superficial and misleading. Despite its subsequent reputation, it does not make useful distinctions between types of enquiry or discipline, making a thin contrast between "physicists" and "literary intellectuals" (mostly modernist poets and novelists, not scholars in the humanities). It also identified a rather outdated element of English cultural attitudes and snobbery, rather than a true divide between disciplines. It makes better sense to talk of "two-hundred-and-two cultures" than of "two cultures". [...]

The more damaging influence of Snow's lecture has been to encourage the prejudice that natural science is the only reliable source of "objective" knowledge, and to support the misguided belief that science and technology are undervalued in the UK and so should receive preferential treatment.

Update: Seed Magazine has a similar feature about Two Cultures, but theirs is video  because Seed is all hip and youthful: Are We Beyond The Two Cultures?

Comments

[Scott Berkun]

I hadn't heard of Two Cultures before, but it reminds me of Art and Physics by Shlain, which I thought was excellent.

http://www.artandphysics.com/

There are some stretches of logic, but the premise, the writing and the examples are always interesting and often fascinating.

[Kevin Arthur]

Thanks Scott -- I'll have to check out Shlain's book.

[runescape money]

I feel like time is going incredibly fast and slow at the same time. The weeks/months seem to be crawling...but at the same time, I turn around on Monday and suddenly it is Sunday again

[runescape money]

I feel like time is going incredibly fast and slow at the same time. The weeks/months seem to be crawling...but at the same time, I turn around on Monday and suddenly it is Sunday again

[psikeyhackr]

It has gotten to the point that now most people don't know what questions to ask about a grade school physics problem.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXAerZUw4Wc

How do you build a 1360 foot skyscraper without figuring out how much steel and concrete to put on every level? Why do people expect it to be possible to figure out whether or not a NORMAL airliner can destroy it in less than 2 hours without that information?

And yet now we can make NETBOOK computers more powerful than the mainframes from the 1980s for less than $300. So how many people can figure out what to do with technology this powerful?

40 years after the Moon landing and our so called scientists don't talk about the Planned Obsolescence of automobiles and our economists don't tell consumers how much they have lost on the depreciation of that garbage. John Kenneth Galbraith talked about PO in 1959 also.

psik