1959: C.P. Snow, the British scientist and novelist, delivers his "Two Cultures" lecture at Cambridge University. This talk, and a book that subsequently emerges from it, cause quite a fuss.
The "cultures" referred to were the humanities and the sciences. Snow, with a foot in both worlds, worried that these two pillars of Western civilization were traveling on divergent paths, threatening to undermine society as a whole.
Charles Percy Snow was trained as a physicist but served the British government in several capacities, including technical director of the Ministry of Labour during World War II. He was knighted in 1957 and later made a life peer.
Snow was an accomplished author as well, having published a biography of Anthony Trollope as well as several novels, including a whodunit. His literary reputation, however, rested mainly on his Strangers and Brothers stories, which dealt with contemporary intellectuals navigating the Byzantine worlds of academia and government.
"The Two Cultures" lecture, delivered as part of Cambridge University's ancient Rede Lecture series, naturally reflected Snow's sensibilities and experiences. Consequently, its conclusions were never universally embraced.
Snow's central thesis was that shifting attitudes had caused a polarization between intellectuals of these two great culture streams. The loss of a common culture and emergence of two distinct academic disciplines, he said, could only drive a wedge between scientists and non-scientists, with a resulting negative effect on intellectual life.
The cause, as Snow saw it, was the chauvinism of intellectuals on both sides (but especially those in the humanities), who remained willfully ignorant of the other. He blamed this on flaws inherent in Britain's primary- and secondary-education systems.
Reaction to his lecture was mixed and continues to be debated to this day. Some critics argued that Snow overestimated the gulf between the sciences and humanities, while others suggested that the fragmentation he worried about was actually a good thing.
Snow's theory had plenty of adherents, too, who believed that a cultural divide was not only deleterious but all-too-palpable in the corridors of late-20th-century academia.
Source: Various
Photo: C.P. Snow (undated)
Bettmann/Corbis
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