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{{Short description|Lecture and book by C. P. Snow}}

'''''The Two Cultures''''' is the title of an influential [[1959]] lecture by [[United Kingdom|British]] scientist and novelist [[C.P. Snow]].

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| author = [[C. P. Snow]]

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| published = 1959

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"'''The Two Cultures'''"<ref>Snow, Charles Percy (1959), "[https://web.archive.org/web/20170508085255/https://www.rbkc.gov.uk/pdf/Rede-lecture-2-cultures.pdf The Two Cultures (The Rede Lecture)]".</ref> is the first part of an influential 1959 [[Rede Lecture]] by [[United Kingdom|British]] scientist and novelist [[C. P. Snow]]. The lecture was published that same year in book form as '''''The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution'''''.<ref>{{cite book | last = Snow | first = Charles Percy | title = The Two Cultures | year = 2001 | orig-year = 1959 | publisher = Cambridge University Press | ___location = London | isbn = 978-0-521-45730-9 | page = [https://archive.org/details/twocultures00snow/page/3 3] | url-access = registration | url = https://archive.org/details/twocultures00snow/page/3 }}</ref><ref name = TLS /> Snow's thesis was that [[science]] and the [[humanities]], which represented "the intellectual life of the whole of western society", had become divided into "two cultures", and that the growing division between them was a major handicap in solving the world's problems.

==The lecture==

Its thesis is that the breakdown of communication between the "two cultures" of modern society - [[science]]s and the [[humanities]] - was a major hindrance to solving the world's problems. As a trained scientist who was also a successful [[novelist]], Snow was well placed to pose the question, though his ideas were derided by the literary establishment led by [[F. R. Leavis]], in ''[[The Spectator]]'' who dismissed Snow as a "public relations man" for the scientific establishment. Published in book form, Snow's lecture was nonetheless widely read and discussed on both sides of the Atlantic, leading him to write a follow-up, ''The Two Cultures: A Second Look,'' five years later.

The talk was delivered 7 May 1959 in the [[Senate House (University of Cambridge)|Senate House]], [[University of Cambridge|Cambridge]], and subsequently published as ''The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution''. The lecture and book expanded upon an article by Snow published in the ''[[New Statesman]]'' of 6 October 1956, also titled "The Two Cultures".<ref>{{cite magazine |title=The Two Cultures |last=Snow |first=Charles Percy |magazine=[[The New Statesman]] |date=2 January 2013 |url=https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2013/01/c-p-snow-two-cultures}}</ref> The book form of Snow's lecture was widely read and discussed on both sides of the Atlantic, leading him to write a 1963 follow-up, ''The Two Cultures: And a Second Look: An Expanded Version of the Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution''.<ref>{{cite book |title= The Two Cultures: And a Second Look: An Expanded Version of the Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution |last=Snow |first=Charles Percy |publisher= Cambridge University Press |year= 1963}}</ref>

Snow's position can be summed up by an oft-repeated passage from his lecture:

The term has entered the general lexicon as a shorthand for differences between what might be called the qualitative and quantitative outlooks on life."The phrase has lived on as a vague popular shorthand for the rift—a matter of incomprehension tinged with hostility—that has grown up between scientists and literary intellectuals in the modern world." (Kimball, see link)

{{Quote |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]]. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: ''Have you read a work of [[Shakespeare]]'s?''<ref name= Nature>{{cite journal |title=Across the Great Divide |journal=Nature Physics |year=2009 |volume=5 |issue=5 |page=309 |doi= 10.1038/nphys1258|bibcode=2009NatPh...5..309. |doi-access=free }}</ref>

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.<ref name=Nature />}}

==Famous quotes==

In 2008, ''[[The Times Literary Supplement]]'' included ''The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution'' in its list of the 100 books that most influenced Western public discourse since the [[Second World War]].<ref name = TLS>{{cite news| url = http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article5418361.ece | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20100619010636/http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article5418361.ece | url-status = dead | archive-date = 19 June 2010 | ___location = London | work= The Times | title= The hundred most influential books since the war | date=30 December 2008}}</ref>

: "I remember [[G. H. Hardy]] once remarking to me in mild puzzlement, some time in the 1930s, ''Have you noticed how the word "intellectual" is used nowadays? There seems to be a new definition which certainly doesn't include [[Ernest Rutherford|Rutherford]] or [[Arthur Eddington|Eddington]] or [[Paul Dirac|Dirac]] or [[Edgar Douglas Adrian|Adrian]] or me? It does seem rather odd, don't y'know.''"

Snow's Rede Lecture condemned the [[British education]]al system as having, since the [[Victorian era]], over-rewarded the humanities (especially [[Latin]] and [[Greek language|Greek]]) at the expense of scientific and [[engineering]] education, despite such achievements having been so decisive in winning the [[Second World War]] for the Allies.<ref name=Jardine>{{cite journal | title = CP Snow's Two Cultures Revisited | last = Jardine | first = Lisa | author-link = Lisa Jardine | journal = Christ's College Magazine | year = 2010 | pages = 48–57 | url = http://www.christs.cam.ac.uk/cms_misc/media/Publications_Christs_Magazine_2010_web.pdf | access-date = 13 February 2012 | url-status = dead | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20120417151018/http://www.christs.cam.ac.uk/cms_misc/media/Publications_Christs_Magazine_2010_web.pdf | archive-date = 17 April 2012}} Jardine's 2009 C. P. Snow Lecture honored the 50th anniversary of Snow's Rede Lecture. She places Snow's lecture into its historical context, and emphasizes the expansion of certain elements of the Rede Lecture in Snow's Godkin Lectures at Harvard University in 1960. These were ultimately published as {{cite book |title = [[Science and Government]] |publisher=New American Library |year=1962}}</ref> This in practice deprived British [[elite]]s (in politics, administration, and industry) of adequate preparation to manage the modern scientific world. By contrast, Snow said, [[German education|German]] and [[American schools]] sought to prepare their citizens equally in the sciences and humanities, and better scientific teaching enabled these countries' rulers to compete more effectively in a scientific age. Later discussion of ''The Two Cultures'' tended to obscure Snow's initial focus on differences between British systems (of both schooling and [[social class]]) and those of competing countries.<ref name=Jardine />

: "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 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]]. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is 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."

== Implications and influence ==

The literary critic [[F. R. Leavis]] called Snow a "public relations man" for the scientific establishment in his essay ''Two Cultures?: The Significance of C. P. Snow'', published in ''[[The Spectator]]'' in 1962. The article attracted a great deal of negative correspondence in the magazine's letters pages.<ref name=kimball>{{cite journal |last=Kimball |first=Roger |url = http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/-The-Two-Cultures--today-4882 |title=''The Two Cultures'' Today: On the C. P. Snow–F. R. Leavis controversy | journal=[[The New Criterion]] |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100825152634/http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/-The-Two-Cultures--today-4882 |archive-date=August 25, 2010 |date=12 February 1994}}</ref>

In his 1963 book, Snow appeared to revise his thinking and was more optimistic about the potential of a mediating third culture.{{sfn|Snow|1963|pp=67, 75}} This notion was further developed in [[John Brockman (literary agent)|John Brockman]]'s ''[[The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution]]'' (1995).

[[Simon Critchley]], in ''Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction'' (2001) suggests:<ref>{{cite book |title= Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction | last= Critchley | first= Simon | publisher = Oxford University Press |year=2001 |isbn=978-0-19-285359-2 |page = 49 |url =https://books.google.com/books?id=syhsLJ1eMOEC&q=%22diagnosed%20the%20loss%22&f=false}}</ref>

{{Quote |[Snow] diagnosed the loss of a common culture and the emergence of two distinct cultures: those represented by scientists on the one hand and those Snow termed 'literary intellectuals' on the other. If the former are in favour of social reform and progress through science, technology and industry, then intellectuals are what Snow terms 'natural [[Luddites]]' in their understanding of and sympathy for advanced industrial society. In [[John Stuart Mill|Mill]]'s terms, the division is between [[Jeremy Bentham|Benthamites]] and [[Samuel Taylor Coleridge|Coleridgeans]].}}

Critchley argues that what Snow said represents a resurfacing of a discussion current in the mid-nineteenth century. Critchley describes the Leavis contribution to the making of a controversy as "a vicious ''ad hominem'' attack"; going on to describe the debate as "a familiar clash in English cultural history", citing also [[T.&nbsp;H. Huxley]] and [[Matthew Arnold]].{{Sfn | Critchley | 2001 | p = 51}}<ref>{{cite book | contribution = Introduction | title=The Two Cultures | editor-last =Snow | editor-first = Charles Percy |last =Collini |first =Stefan |publisher=Cambridge University Press |year=1993 | isbn= 978-0-521-06520-7 |page = xxxv}}</ref>

[[Stephen Jay Gould]]'s ''[[The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox]]'' (2003) provides a different perspective. Assuming the [[dialectical]] interpretation, it argues that Snow's concept of "two cultures" is not only off the mark, it is a damaging and short-sighted viewpoint, and that it has perhaps led to decades of unnecessary fence-building.

In a ''New York Times'' retrospective on the 50th anniversary of the lecture, Peter Dizikes situated Snow's thesis in a [[Cold War]] context. Snow had geopolitical concerns, according to Dizikes, that the worsening split between science and the humanities was placing the West at a disadvantage in its struggle with the [[Eastern Bloc]].<ref>{{cite news |last=Dizikes |first=Peter |title=Our Two Cultures |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/22/books/review/Dizikes-t.html |newspaper=[[The New York Times]] |date=March 19, 2009}}</ref>

In his opening address at the [[Munich Security Conference]] in January 2014, the Estonian president [[Toomas Hendrik Ilves]] said that the current problems related to security and freedom in cyberspace are the culmination of absence of dialogue between "the two cultures": {{blockquote|Today, bereft of understanding of fundamental issues and writings in the development of liberal democracy, computer geeks devise ever better ways to track people... simply because they can and it's cool. Humanists on the other hand do not understand the underlying technology and are convinced, for example, that tracking meta-data means the government reads their emails.<ref>Ilves, Toomas Hendrik: "[http://www.president.ee/en/official-duties/speeches/9796-qrebooting-trust-freedom-vs-security-in-cyberspaceq/index.html Rebooting Trust? Freedom vs Security in Cyberspace] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140223112412/http://www.president.ee/en/official-duties/speeches/9796-qrebooting-trust-freedom-vs-security-in-cyberspaceq/index.html |date=23 February 2014 }}" Opening address at Munich Security Conference Cyber 31 January 2014. 31.01.2014.</ref>}}

==Antecedents==

Contrasting scientific and humanistic knowledge is a repetition of the ''[[Methodenstreit]]'' of 1890 German universities.<ref name="Brint2002p212">{{Citation | last = Brint | first = Steven G | year = 2002 | title = The Future of the City of Intellect: The Changing American University | url = https://books.google.com/books?id=TDfrzER0obYC&pg=PA212 | pages = 212–3 | publisher = Stanford University Press | quote = positivism-versus-interpretation language [...] these fractal distinctions are generally quite old. Most of them have been around at least since the celebrated ''Methodenstreit'' of the German universities in the late nineteenth century. CP Snow's "two cultures" argument captures a later instantiation of them. [...] In negotiating the complexities of social scientific and humanistic knowledge, it is extremely helpful to have a dichotomy like positivism versus interpretation, because it saves our having to remember the exact degree of positivism of any scholarly group. [...] Every single social science discipline has internal debates about positivism/interpretation, narrative/analysis, and so on. The narrative/analytic debate may look very different in economics, anthropology, and English. But underneath all the surface differences it is quite similar.| isbn = 9780804745314 }}</ref> A quarrel in 1911 between [[Benedetto Croce]] and [[Giovanni Gentile]] on the one hand and [[Federigo Enriques]] on the other one is believed to have had enduring effects in the separation of the two cultures in Italy and to the predominance of the views of (objective) idealism over those of (logical) positivism.<ref>{{cite book|last1=Dauben|first1=Joseph W.|last2=Scriba|first2=Christoph J.|title=Writing the History of Mathematics: Its Historical Development|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=oXjMYIonXTYC&pg=PA422|year=2002|publisher=Springer Science & Business Media|isbn=978-3-7643-6167-9|page=422}}</ref> In the social sciences it is also commonly proposed as the quarrel of [[positivism]] versus [[Antipositivism|interpretivism]].<ref name="Brint2002p212" />

==See also==

* [[AldousCulture Huxleywar]]

* ''[[The Third Culture]]''

* [[Science wars]]

* ''[[Consilience (book)|Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge]]'', a 1998 book written by biologist [[Edward Osborne Wilson]], as an attempt to bridge the gap between "the two cultures"

* [[Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns]]

* [[Interdisciplinarity]], a movement to cross boundaries between [[Discipline (academia)|academic disciplines]], including the divide between "the two cultures"

==References==

{{Reflist |33em}}

==Further reading==

* Burguete, Maria, and Lam, Lui, eds. (2008). Science Matters: Humanities as Complex Systems. World Scientific: Singapore. {{ISBN|978-981-283-593-2}}

* {{cite journal|last1=James|first1=Frank A. J. L.|title=Introduction: Some Significances of the Two Cultures Debate|journal=Interdisciplinary Science Reviews|date=29 November 2016|volume=41|issue=2–3|pages=107–117|doi=10.1080/03080188.2016.1223651|bibcode=2016ISRv...41..107J |url=https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1508367/3/james_Introduction.pdf|doi-access=free}}

* Sinclair, Andrew (1987). ''The Red and the Blue. Intelligence, Treason and the Universities'' (Coronet Books, Hodder and Stoughten, U.K.) 211 pages {{ISBN|0-340-41687-4}}

==External links==

* {{Cite web | publisher = [[BBC Radio 4]] | type = discussion | title = The Two Cultures | first = Melvyn | last = Bragg | author-link = Melvyn Bragg | url = https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01phhy5 | place = [[United Kingdom|UK]]}}

==External link==

* {{Cite news | first = Timothy | last = Ferris | url = https://www.wired.com/2011/10/intellectual-vs-engineer/ | title = The World of the Intellectual vs. The World of the Engineer | newspaper = Wired | date = 13 October 2011}}

*[http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/12/feb94/cultures.htm Roger Kimball, "The Two Cultures today"]: a critical essay

* {{Cite web | url = http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Extras/Griffiths_two_cultures.html | place = UK |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20071102063251/http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Extras/Griffiths_two_cultures.html |archive-date=November 2, 2007 | first = Phillip | last = Griffiths | title = Phillip Griffiths looks at 'Two Cultures' Today | date = 13 September 1995 | publisher = St Andrews}}

* {{Cite web | first = Richard David | last = Precht | author-link = Richard David Precht | publisher = [[YouTube]] | url = https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7teDlrJDHU | title = Natural Sciences and Humanities: Genesis of two Worlds | format = Webvideo | series = ZAKlessons | year = 2013}}

* {{Cite news | newspaper = [[Seed (magazine)|Seed]] | url = http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/are_we_beyond_the_two_cultures/ | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20090510065231/http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/are_we_beyond_the_two_cultures | url-status = unfit | archive-date = 10 May 2009 | title = Are We Beyond the Two Cultures? | date = 7 May 2009}}

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[[Category:Dichotomies]]

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