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The Two Cultures
Abstract | Essay | Dialectic? | Bibliography
The page examines the clash of knowledge and practice that demonstrates the division in comprehension between folk intelligence and empirical investigation.
Snow's words | Snow's essay visual | The Two Culture's context
Knowledge may be defined as acquired understanding to sustain a belief:
derived
from testing versus gained from experience and practice
Abstract
In May 1959, Charles Percy Snow gave the Rede Lecture at Cambridge University where he warned of a fatal fragmentation in western industrial cultures concerning the achievements of applied science and the education of literate citizens. The dichotomy between the arts and the sciences, central to Snow’s, critique of higher education and culture in general, has fragmented further over the half century since he addressed the fracture’s existence. By focusing on modern biology, nuclear physics and atmospheric sciences, since 1945, this fracturing reveals a deeply rooted split within the arts and within the sciences that feeds a persistent, debilitating anti-intellectualism among the wider literate culture. Attitudes are debilitating because they mask the reality of the world’s conditions from our education. Snow pointed to “three menaces which now stand in our way—H-bomb war, overpopulation, the gap between the rich and the poor.” (p. 48) He admonished his audience that “This is one of the situations where the worst crime is innocence.”
Charles Percy Snow argued, in answer to Mathew Arnold, that knowledge divided against itself lacks the practical ability and moral capacity to meet the gravest challenges of modernity; these intractable threats of poverty, nuclear war, and population growth still trouble the world and disturb our comfortable, educated faith in learning.
Now, engaged in a great debate over the ownership of ethical imagination
and the means to inspire moral conduct to match both technical abilities
and the enormous growth of knowledge, academicians ask us to choose. They
confront us with selecting a literate versus methodological means by which
to analyze a desired course of action. Meanwhile, we lack the means to
effectively synthesize revolutionary information about our species in
this logically complex biophysical world. The scientific revolution to
which Snow paid so much tribute, after all, has revealed an intricate
quantum uncertainty and a stochastic biological inheritance of such detail
that we yet lack a sufficiently precise explanatory language to describe
technological, social and individual actions in a ceaselessly reactive
universe.
Western educational institutions, while dedicated to free inquiry, refuting
untested assumptions and promoting honest discourse, are profoundly implicated
in and may actually promote the economic gulf and technical paralysis
that Snow sensed as exacerbated by the two cultures divide: expressive
art separated from ethical science.
We are here to divulge this divided heritage and our personal schizophrenic
contributions to the union of intellect and practice that must occur if
human hope in the purposeful acquisition of knowledge for the common good
is to remain a remedy in a secular society widely infused with material,
commercial and individual autonomy. Now climate change and biological
engineering demand a literate science.
Our task is great in that Snow argued we had so little time to act. His
critics additionally charged Snow lacked the inspired visions to motivate
effective action. This new knowledge, in which he invested so much hope,
confronts us now with a profound sense of uncertainty, if not loss. This
sensibility is due not merely a loss of our bearings, but a loss of certainty
about what we are as a species, how well we ought to behave and how effectively
we can curtail our individual and collective behavior’s impact on
others and the life of this planet.
Never has the necessity for change and the need for hope been so mismatched
by a widespread inability to remedy poverty as fast as it emerges or to
reduce the nuclear fissionable means used today to assure western dominance.
Since Snow wrote, nonetheless, women who own about a percent of the world’s
wealth are acting in a innovative manner to both diminish the rate of
population growth by reducing total fertility rates, and calling for ethical
responsibility in raising families by improving social conditions. We
can change, but we shall examine now to what extent we ought to overcome
entrenched obstacles to morally informed action becoming the focus of
a new education?
Snow's words | Snow's essay visual | The Two Culture's context | The Redux Essay | Siry essay
Bibliography
Pages:
1
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