BLOGS

The Two Cultures is the title of an influential 1959 Rede Lecture by British scientist and novelist C. P. Snow. Its thesis was that "the intellectual life of the whole of western society" was split into the titular two cultures — namely the sciences and the humanities — and that this was a major hindrance to solving the world's problems.

A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?

I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question — such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? — not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had. (Wikipedia)

I'm afraid little has changed. Our pursuit and fear to avoid the "military-industrial-complex" as warned of by President Eisenhower, has evolved into a cottage industry of conspiracy theorists (that don't have to actually prove their musings; just muse and say them), because myriad of the bewildered herd will purchase their books; attend their seminars; hit their blogs/web sites. We pontificate "Big Bang" and "Evolution" in quotes, and add "theory" as if that disqualifies anything in science (Pythagoras and your geometry teacher would be amused), adding to it machinate controversies from creative, magical thinkers. Must be quite a rush to be an official part of the "dumbing down" of a country.

Sadly, it's not just avoidance of science and/or the conclusions of science: in Snow's day, neither the twain met, and both disdained one another as being without value. His third culture: a merger of science and humanities in the human species, and an appreciation for both (pulled off quite well in Star Trek - take your pick of which version), never materialized.

 

In the chapter titled "The Rich and the Poor," he couldn't be more blunt:

 

"Nevertheless, that isn't the main issue of the scientific revolution. The main issue is that the people in the industrialized countries are getting richer, and those in the non-industrialized countries are at best standing still: so that the gap between the industrialized countries and the rest is widening every day. On the world scale this is the gap between the rich and the poor."