The recent upswell in two-culture talk around Scienceblogs is driving me nuts (here's a good jumping in point -- oh wait, this one's better). One might question the so very many unquestioned assumptions in the current conversation about "what is science" and "what are the humanities" and "what does it mean to *know* science" and "what does it mean to *know* a poem," but instead I'll repost below something I contributed to The Education of Oronte Churm earlier this year. Call it the problem of the 13 culture divide.
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I've never been a fan of the Two Cultures thing. Maybe it's just C.P. Snow's version that bugs me. Snow was such a bad novelist and, from that, I couldn't avoid thinking he wasn't a very good lecturer either. Thus I could only say his 1959 Rede Lecture at Cambridge (called "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution" when later printed) was fine, as far as it goes. But as far as it goes, it doesn't go far. That is, until it gets literary critic F.R. Leavis all uppity and this little battle between two cultures is off and running again and we get another half century of references and replays and debates slotted into that two-side form. But I don't want to talk about it.
Instead, I'm sure my beef is this: There's just so many ways to undermine the proposition and to cut things in two that it's a shame to allow the Snow variant to hold sway.
We could historicize it and say, oh, what was so different about Snow's 1959 lecture compared to T.H. Huxley's in 1880? Huxley's was called "Science and Culture." It set off a little tiff with Matthew Arnold. Taking a day off from fighting the good fight for Darwin, Huxley said this: "All the subjects of our thoughts. . . may be classified under one of two heads--as matters of science and matters of art." Arnold fired back in the 1882 Rede Lecture (same one as Snow, 77 years earlier), suggesting that scientific knowledge would eventually be "to the majority of mankind, after a certain while, unsatisfying, wearying." Snow himself was a replay.
Or we could debunk by going the route of the "lots of cultures" camp. Folks have done that by and by. What makes physicists and novelists so dichotomous that doesn't make the astrophysicist and geneticist as equally distinct? What common grounds do the poet, sociologist, and media studies scholar have that bind them on one side of a divide (not science) against a polymer processing researcher, computer scientist, and wildlife ecologist (science)? I've sat in talks by ecologists that, I swear, were constructed without the aid of the English language. But I've also seen talks by media studies folks that were equally devoid of the language I'd considered my mother tongue. And poetry? I'm told it doesn't even have to rhyme.
But then there are other ways to cut things in two. There's the science/religion thing; people force that into a two-culture framework. But that's just it, it's forced, as if they had to slot things that way. Consider this, which will get us to a Science/God divide. Here's the Baghavad Gita (Chapter 2, Line 14 [500 b.c.e.]):
From the world of the senses...comes heat and comes cold, and pleasure and pain. They come and they go: they are transient. Arise above them, strong soul.
And then this ominously similar sentiment, by the ill-fated Marquis de Condorcet, who nearly lost his head in another famous two-culture divide between those promoting The Terror and those subject to it (Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind [1795]):
Man is born to receive sensations; to perceive them and to distinguish between the various simple sensations of which they are composed.... Sensations are attended by pleasure and pain; and man for his part has the capacity to transform such momentary impressions into permanent feelings of an agreeable or disagreeable character...
The Sanskrit text encompasses a tale of the human spiritual quest, resulting in a vision of God in all things, and vice versa. Condorcet's text rushes through a tale of physical and social human history, resulting in a vision of perpetual growth of humanity, beyond the realm of God. One story rests with God; the other beyond. One is about identity, of who we are; the other is about progress, of who we will become. All the more curious that Condorcet met the mob and didn't see much of that future. But, lest I leave this as a digression, isn't it more intriguing to wonder why there would only be two choices? 'Who we are' v. 'Who we will become'? A world through God's eyes and one beyond God? We only get two choices?
And why not other divides? What about the solitary thinker versus the team player? Think about Descartes escaping the cold Europe of Christian philosophy, peering out the window of his tiny poele to check on the Thirty Years' War, and collecting his thoughts in a shuttered-up stove-heated room. Reflecting on that (circa 1619) in his Discourse (1637), he says "that there is often not as much perfection in works composed of many pieces and made by the hands of various craftsmen as there is in those works on which but a single individual has worked." And so the God-given rationality of the human mind was sufficient to begin figuring out the world, to let a single individual work it out. He wanted to do it alone. Not very good for conversation, I suppose, to be holed up like that. So why not a divide between the conversationalist and the silent observer? Are we supposed to decide which is better?
And what about the academic stuff straight-on: The guy at the departmental seminar who yammers on about his own interests to the speaker regardless of its relevance to the actual topic at hand, versus the other guy who's asleep in the back row? Is there an arrogant/sleepy divide in academia? What about the divide between the class with PowerPoints and the class with overhead slides? Or, gasp, chalkboards? Or those who prefer the late afternoon lecture to the early morning rise-and-shiner? How about one of the more prominent divides in the engineering school where I work: Those who prefer the chairs that raise and lower with that little lever under the seat versus those who like the plastic chairs with wheels that let you lean back and rock a little bit as you offer a pensive pose to the class? Maybe Snow didn't have that option. Maybe I'm being too presentist.
Is it perhaps not about different cultures at all but about ways of seeing the world, as with the geographer Donald Meinig, who has a dazzling chapter called "Ten Versions of the Same Scene" in The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes, or Wallace Stevens on "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird", Dorie Bargmann on "Thirteen More Ways of Looking at a Blackbird", or Jenny Price, with "13 Ways of Seeing Nature in LA"? So why dichotomies, instead of views of 10? Or 13? Why not 42? Cultural bipartitions all buy into the same easy game. Can't we see farther?
One Culture, two cultures, the new two cultures, beyond two cultures, beyond culture, a third culture, a fourth culture, many cultures, I don't know. I said I didn't want to talk about it. I'm not sure we're getting anywhere.
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Snow was rather apologetic in his Rede lecture about dichotomizing the problem: he accepted that is was a simplification,and there were more alternatives. Reading the rest of the lecture, it is clear that his aim was largely to argue for an increased emphasis on science in (British) society.
The Rede lecture was actually Snow's second or third go at this issue. The earliest that I know of was his New Statesman article of 1956. (You can read a lot of it here
If you read the Rede, you'll see he directly addresses the complaint about dichotomizing. He says, essentially, "Of course it's a simplification, but there's truth behind it and for the sake of brevity and clarity this is the best way to express that truth."
've never been a fan of the Two Cultures thing. Maybe it's just C.P. Snow's version that bugs me. Snow was such a bad novelist and, from that, I couldn't avoid thinking he wasn't a very good lecturer either.
Perhaps you could start by explaining *why* you think Snow was "such a bad novelist" -- not all of his work has aged well, it's true, but "The Masters" has a pretty good reputation even today -- have you read it? Certainly it has a better modern reputation than *anything* of his once-famous rival F.R. Leavis.
I've not read The Masters, Jonathan, and I thank you for the recommendation. You have to treat his work against the best fiction there is (just as, symmetrically, any scientist would evaluate a new contribution against the best there is). It should be set alongside Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Woolf, Flaubert, Proust, Joyce, Faulkner, Bellow, et al.--the all stars--and considered in that frame. Voice, narrative, character, tone, style, detail, imagination, evocation. It certainly betrays the spirit of my post, though, to think that observing the failings of Leavis's writings (I agree on the assessment of his work) has anything to do with judging Snow's.
I'm not quite sure that's a valid comparison. While there probably *is* a universally accepted list of "great scientists" like Einstein and Darwin, the idea of "great authors" isn't quite so straightfoward. For example your list, which is similar to many lists in "comparative literature" courses, contains authors like Joyce and Proust, who purposely wrote to be as obscure as possible. That may be great fun for a literary scholar, who can write papers explaining what a given passage means, but not so much fun for the general reader.
What makes ranking authors different from scientists is that while scientists are the primary consumers of scientific literature, not just literary scholars, but the general public as well, reads novels.
I'm not saying you can't disagree with me about the quality of Snow's novels, but finding them wanting when compared to Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake" is silly. Finding them wanting compared to Kingsly Amis' "Lucky Jim" would be reasonable
You let me bait you into that pretty easily, Jonathan. It's the asymmetry that I don't assume a priori. I demand more from literature and many others do too. I'd also note that most of the science done in the world is work-a-day mediocre science. I don't mean that as a slight, and it shouldn't be taken as denigrating. It's just that when discussing science in public we tend to call on the highest forms and greatest achievements. When discussing literature, anything goes. There are reasons for this, sure, and they mostly have to do with different degrees of cultural credibility (and the very status of literature in public life). But if you can't read Proust, this indicates to me that literature is indeed *not* for everyone, not for general readers. In any case, you recapitalute Snow by proposing the asymmetry (who believed scientists, unlike humanities types, have "the future in their bones"), which it was the post's purpose to call into question.
Oh, I absolutely agree that 90% of scientific papers are mediocre at best, just as 90% of novels are. That's not really the point.
My point is that works of art can have different goals. Both "Bullit" and "Citizen Kane" are considered by film scholars to be excellent films. And yet it is hard to compare a car chase movie to a fictionalized biography of Hearst. All you can really say is that "Bullit" is better than other car chase movies and "Citizen Kane" better than other biographies. Same thing with literature: "A la Recherche du Temps Perdue" is better than other memoirs, "The Lord of the Rings" better than other fantasies, and perhaps "Lucky Jim" better than other university novels.