C.P. Snow's "The Two Cultures" in 2023

The essential claim made in C.P. Snow's lecture-turned-essay on "The Two Cultures" of science and letters was that this division of intellectual life between them in the modern West has gone with mutual ignorance, incomprehension and even dislike, between those on either side of the split.

On first encountering C.P. Snow's essay I thought there was a good deal of truth to it and still do. After all, intellectual life is indeed extremely specialized, with the fact underlined by how outside their specialties even exceptionally intelligent and well-educated people often have only the most banal thoughts to offer (as they often show when accorded that kind of Public Intellectual status in which they are given a platform from which to comment on anything and everything). And all of this seems to me to have got worse rather than better with time, as their work has only become more esoteric and minute (how many scientists does it take to publish a single paper these days?), while the pursuit of an academic or research career has become a more harried thing, leaving less time or energy for "extracurriculars," which at any rate are frowned upon. (The "professions," as the root of the word suggests, are indeed priesthood-like in many ways, often living down to the unhappiest and most stultifying connotations of that term, like that disapproval of any outside interest, or indeed any ideas but the orthodoxy imposed by the hierarchs.)

This specialization may have gone so far that those in the sciences and letters alike are doing their jobs less well than they may need to be doing them--with scientists reportedly lacking sufficient grounding in philosophy to understand the scientific method on which their work depends, while, as I discovered struggling with composition textbooks, and their usually clumsy explanations of so basic a matter as "What is a thesis?" (while finding reference to the scientific method, to scientific examples, useful in redressing such weaknesses--in the classroom and in my own book) I have often wondered if the writers would not have benefited from a bit of scientific study themselves.

Still, salient as the division within intellectual life remains there is also the political framework within which that life goes on. To his credit, Snow was sensitive to that. The cultural orthodoxy is a function of the priorities of those who have power--whose concern is first, last and always the bottom line, to which they recognize science as contributing. That is not to say that they actually respect the scientific method, or the work of scientists, even just enough to care about funding scientific education and research properly, let alone make use of the best available scientific advice when making policy--just that they know there is something here they can use, much more than is the case with letters.

All of this would seem to have become more rather than less consequential in the neoliberal era--amid unending austerity, with the pressure to justify everything in terms of short-term corporate profitability the greater, with a predictable result that where neoliberalism has gone, so too has the imperative to reduce education to occupational-technical training (from the Thatcher-era overhaul of educational funding, which has continued ever since, to the requirements of the "structural reform" programs foisted on developing countries). Meanwhile the politics of interest are ever more marginalized, the politics of status in the ascendant--with the resulting era of culture war seeing the humanities demonized, to the point that disdain for the work of historians and the like has right-wingers openly gloating over the prospect of the demise of humanities programs on campus.

It would be a profound mistake to imagine all this does not have consequences for how those of the sciences and letters see each other--with, perhaps, the young indicative of the trajectory. While I think that there is, again, much ignorance and incomprehension on the part of those in the sciences and letters alike, I never actually noticed any actual disrespect. I am less sure that this is the case today--certainly to go by what we hear of the sneering, mocking STEM major openly disdainful of the humanities, an attitude all too predictable in an era where the war cry of "STEM! STEM! STEM!" is unceasing, and unmatched by anything the defenders of the humanities have to say on their behalf.