The Real Two Cultures Debate

On May 7, 1959, Charles Percy Snow delivered The Two Cultures lecture, and academia has been debating it for the half-century following. A review of references to this famous lecture would lead someone who hadn’t read it to think it was purely about the differences between the people educated in the sciences and the humanities, but that debate accounted for only a portion of Snow’s lecture, and it was so poorly argued and narrowly focused that it’s a wonder why it continues to stir feelings today. Unfortunately, this focus on academic stereotypes has masked the much more profound and poignant subject of Snow’s essay and the real two cultures: those who have science and those who do not.

Science publications and public commentators predictably rolled out their analyses of the state of things on this 50th anniversary of the lecture. James Dacey of PhysicsWorld, summarizes Snow’s lecture as the importance of science over snobbery in the humanities. Gary Shu’s opinion in MIT’s The Tech argues for the importance of being educated in both realms of academia. Harvard University’s Gazette covered its two-day symposium on bridging the two cultures. Science Friday did spend a good portion of time on the importance of scientists as popularizers (often alluded to as the “Third Culture”) like Carl Sagan, Chet Raymo, and J.Bronowski, but continued to mull this ignorance academics share of one another’s fields. ABC’s The Science Show celebrated the 50th anniversary with a poem about getting old that didn’t seem to have much to do with science, which it was supposed to merge with the arts. The Editors of The New Atlantis seems to have misunderstood the lecture completely as an argument for prioritizing science over the humanities in order to defeat the Russians, which makes one wonder what they were smoking when they read the Cliff Notes. Seed ran a collection of videos with E.O. Wilson, Steven Pinker, and other big minds, all blah, blah, blahing their perspectives on the state of the Two Cultures academic divide today.

All of this coverage amounts to one great big academic circle jerk. Academics wonder why they are often accused of living in “Ivory Towers?” It’s because you sit around and debate this utter nonsense.

Snow explains why he “christened” the divide as the Two Cultures:

For constantly I felt I was moving among two groups–comparable in intelligence, identical in race, not grossly different in social origin, earning about the same incomes, who had almost ceased to communicate at all…

Of course, what everyone likes to leave out is that Snow was referring to British Academia. He thought American and Russian Academia were rather remarkable for requiring students to be proficient in both the sciences and the humanities. This is true today, where American students must have both science and humanities credits in the core curriculum to graduate from college.

It’s odd that so many Western academics are swept up in Snow’s description of this academic cultural divide, embracing what is basically a false dichotomy. There is science and there is the humanities, but there is also soft science, like psychology, and hard science fiction literature, like Isaac Asimov. There are transhumanists, makers, technical writers, science bloggers, Enlightenment historians, and numerous other academics out there representing the hybridization of the humanities and the sciences to varying degrees. There are two cultures in another sense, those who unthinkingly embrace false dichotomies and those who don’t have their heads up their asses.

Add to this the fact that the portion of Snow’s lecture dealing with the academic cultural split reads like a bad Sinbad act. It’s all “White people dance like this, black people dance like this.” but replace “white” and “black” with sciences and humanities. The sciences are more liberal. The humanities are more snobby. Science embraces the future; humanities wants to live in the past. Humanities laughs at you for not knowing Shakespeare, but do they know the Second Law of Thermodynamics?

Are there two cultures in academia? Sure. During my College days the humanities students put down the science students and vice versa. Just like there are four cultures in the Military: Army, Navy, Airforce, and Marines, and they all put each other down. It’s no wonder I once heard someone at a seminar say, with much exasperation, “The whole two cultures thing is silly and just irritates me.” I agree, let’s get off the playground please.

Snow himself was fed up with the whole debate, and lamented that he did not title the lecture The Rich and the Poor, which was the real subject he was trying to communicate, but is also the two-thirds of the lecture no one ever wants to discuss. Snow lamented the fact that the world was filled with science haves and have nots. Poor countries like India and African nations lacked scientific innovation, and the people in those countries were suffering as a result, while rich nations like America, Europe, the U.S.S.R, and emerging China, through an investment in new Universities to achieve scientific independence, had modern agriculture and medicine.

He quotes J.H. Plumb in arguing this need to bring other countries up to our standard of living:

No one in his senses would choose to have been born in a previous age unless he could be certain that he would have been born into a prosperous family, that he would have enjoyed extremely good health, and that he could have accepted stoically the death of the majority of his children.

Snow acknowledges that it would take an immense outpouring of capital to bring science and innovation to the third world, and was keenly aware of just how politically naive this idea seemed. That was why science needed the help of the humanities, to make the emotional and rhetorically persuasive debate points for bringing first world capital to the third world.

Only two editorials I found online acknowledged this as the core of Snow’s argument, Nature gets to the true essence of Snow’s lecture with Doing good, 50 years on and SciDev’s The real ‘two cultures’ divide. In addition to these academic commentaries, there are hybrid-culture academics working on the issue as well, such as WorldChanging and the OLPC Project, where people are quietly working to solve the true conundrum C.P. Snow illuminated in his lecture and bring the rest of the world up to our standard of living.

Snow wrote a fantastic essay about the importance of bringing science to everyone around the world, and needing the humanities’ eloquence to overcome the political barriers to it. Unfortunately, he alienated half his audience in his opening statements, and neither side has ever forgiven it, but that’s no reason to ignore the message of social responsibility he was trying to stress.

What’s the lesson we should take from the academic Two Cultures debate? Everyone should be aware of their own ignorance.

What’s the lesson we should take from the social two cultures debate? Get out of your head and make a difference.

Note: The Telegraph’s Robert Whelan gets a little bit past the inane Two Cultures debate when he argues that both cultures are united in the defense of education, and Jonathan Jones of the Guardian echoes this fear of declining education in society.