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.
"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."
ReplyDelete― C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength