CP Snow's Two Cultures Today

Reposted from eleven years ago. Still true. I would change a few things now, but have decided I usually won't as I repost.

Scientist and novelist CP Snow declared fifty (now sixty) years ago that the educated classes were becoming two cultures, literary and scientific.

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, law of entropy. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about 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.

This was controversial, not least because literary people felt put down and insulted. Criticism fell into four broad categories: Snow had overstated the case; the divide was not new; a third culture was developing even as he had spoken; and Snow had helped worsen the divide by building fences. Snow came to partially agree with all these, while retaining his original view as essentially correct.

The cultural landscape has changed in the last fifty years, but there remains a core truth in Snow’s proposition. I have been writing much about the Arts & Humanities Tribe over the last few months which bears directly on the issue. For any new readers, a quick review. I was raised in the Arts & Humanities Tribe which is now so anti-Bush, anti-conservative, anti-neocon. Many groups might criticise this administration for other reasons. There are conservative and libertarian criticisms of the current administration, but the critical groups generally consitute the Democrat coalition: government unions, African-Americans, and liberals. The A&H Tribe constitutes much of the proud-to-be-blue-state liberals. I have criticised their position as being founded on emotion and tribalism more than reason. Their criticism of Bush and the red-state voters is often ill-concealed social criticism and cultural disdain.

I am not completely satisfied with my own choice of words in designating this group as the Arts and Humanities Tribe. Those in the social sciences are overwhelmingly in this group, yet many of those have little actual knowledge of arts and letters. Their philosophies are watered-down from A&H originals, and they adopt the language and attitudes of that tribe. Flowing in the other direction, the liberal arts have become suffused with the social sciences: much of history and literature are now warmed-over sociology, anthropology, and bad economics.

Confusing the terms further is the strong grounding many conservatives have in the traditional arts and humanities of Western Intellectual thought. They read history and literature, they know art and music. To exclude William F. Buckley or Victor Davis Hanson from the A&H designation would seem to dissolve the entire construct. In knowledge of literature and history before 1900, in fact, conservatives perhaps exceed liberals.

The enormous tectonic shifts over the last fifty years, and especially the last twenty, have come from the science and technical side of the culture. Science geeks read a lot of science fiction, a much-despised genre that has provided most of the original thought of the second half of the 20th Century. Certainly, it has provided enormous amounts of crap in the form of half-baked philosophy, formulaic adventure stories with science accessories, and ill-disguised fantasies of omnipotence. But in a world in which technical marvels are increasingly invading the cultural environment and changing behavior, science fiction often provides the only examples of near-future problems even being addressed.

Early on, science fiction was also called “speculative fiction,” and I wish that name had caught on better, as it retains a good deal of what is important. It is science fiction to imagine a mechanism by which someone could read minds and create an adventure about it. It is speculative fiction to try and work through the real consequences in a culture. How would friends and family react? What balances of power would be upset? Could a human personality endure the knowledge? It is one thing to imagine what fun people would have if machines did all our work; quite another to to imagine what this would do to the human character and what we might attempt in response. It is this speculative aspect that makes science fiction important intellectually. It is the lack of this that makes alienation in chicana fiction, or irony in Queer Studies barely worth mentioning. Speculative fiction has wildly explored the alienation of sentient beings which are different life-forms from each other, and societies where there are four distinct sexes, or parthenogenesis. Modern literature and high art seem tepid and timid in comparison, which is why they have needed to rely increasingly on sexual shock, predictably leftist sentiments, and social transgression to attract any attention at all.

Science fiction is predominantly Anglospheric, especially American, as well. The Europhilic and oriental fascination of the A&H crowd derives directly from the transnational nature of their studies. This is much less evident in science fiction, or science in general.

The science and technology crowd has made another enormous inroad into the arts; letters as well. The production of art for audience has become increasingly technical. Music, film, and theater have increasingly required not only technicians, but artists who understand the technology, and technicians who understand the art. It is still possible to carve out a career in the arts with little technical knowledge, but those opportunities are increasingly local. Technology has always driven the arts, but the changes were always slow enough that a person could absorb the necessary technical aspects early on and adapt very little over a career. The changes in acoustics or piano construction over Bach’s long lifetime were incremental, but the Moog synthesizers which were gloriously cutting-edge in the 1970’s are laughable antiques now. You might think that all one has to do is get up and sing, but microphones, lights, synthesizers, monitors, and editing effects are all part of the package. If you the performer do not understand these things, then you are dependent on those who do.