Snow's words | Snow's essay interpreted | The Two Culture's context | The Redux Essay | Siry essay
The dichotomy between the arts and the sciences, central to Charles Percy Snow's critique of higher education and culture in general has fragmented further over the half century since he stated the fracture’s existence.
- Snow correctly argued that the industrial and scientific changes associated with mechanization and automation created two separate centers of power in society one that guided and understood technological challenges and the other that rejected the merely mechanical solutions to social problems.
- This fracturing of discourse is impeding the technical capacity of a very powerful and automated society to solve the pressing catastrophes faced by the developed world in controlling atomic weapons, narrowing the huge gap between rich and poor, and reforming an outmoded educational system to better apply imagination and problem solving to comprehend the actual pervasive capability of technology.
By focusing on modern biology, nuclear physics and atmospheric sciences, this fracturing reveals a more profound split within the arts and within the sciences that have fed the persistence of anti-intellectualism among the wider culture.
This distrust of expertise, though healthy, can be seen in the misunderstanding of Darwinism, Cloning and Nuclear Fission, though there are other bodies of knowledge in science that have been equally confused by a growing sector of literate, though not well-informed, interpreters of science.
Notes
Richard Dawkins sights an example of this without divulging the author in his recent work The Ancestor’s Tale. We must start from first principles that “biological evolution has no privileged line of descent and no designated end.” (4)
The late Ernst Mayr, Stephen J, Gould and Mark Ridley, who are all evolutionary biologists of impressive repute, share that perspective. Yet there persists some renewed popular hostility to Darwinism from so called “creationists” and just as significant is a misunderstanding of evolution among the learned writers.
This is particularly of an otherwise good book that Dawkins’ rightfully criticizes in this context. Dawkins indicates that the author he is reviewing is wrong when he suggested that Homo habilis was ‘considerably more evolved than Australopithecine's’.
More evolved?” Dawkins asks, “ What can this mean but that evolution is moving in some pre-specified direction?” (5)
What we may have here is a failure to bridge the ever-widening gulf between the expression (arts) of what we know (science) of the world and the methods we have so carefully used to dispel errors in what we know.
Or is it some other failure?
Kenneth Boulding's, critique of The Two Cultures,
Interpreting the essay | Sample writing about Two Cultures
Unexpected outcomes of technical solutions.
Pursell | Pacey | Postman | Eberhart | Kaku
