Related to my observation that the positions of liberals and conservatives have changed over time, I ran across this Thomas Pynchon essay from 1984. It wanders - not the level of clarity one expects from the NYT Review - and several things Pynchon states emphatically turned out to be not so. Interesting for what it is, a period piece, reflecting how NYT readers thought at the time.
I had commented on CP Snow's Two Cultures before. Of most interest for quick thought is Snow's later modification that it was now Three Cultures, as the social sciences occupied a range not necessarily knowledgeable about either science nor art and literature.
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"His education had been neither scientific nor classical—merely "Modern." The severities both of abstraction and of high human tradition had passed him by: and he had neither peasant shrewdness nor aristocratic honour to help him. He was a man of straw, a glib examinee in subjects that require no exact knowledge (he had always done well on Essays and General Papers) and the first hint of a real threat to his bodily life knocked him sprawling."
― C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength
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