The Two Cultures: and A Second Look

Originally a speech given at Cambridge, C. P. Snow's The Two Cultures went a long way towards defining the broader intellectual class' discomfort with the rise in industrial-technology and the seeming lack of moral rigor it was being subjected to. A self-described scientist, Snow laments the seemingly unbridgeable gap between his university colleagues in the sciences and the humanities. As he famously put it, it seems that scientists in Cambridge had more in common with scientists at M.I.T. than with their colleagues across the campus. For Snow this was problem that threatened to, not only undermine the pursuits of the educated, but spread to broader concerns of morality and progress in society.

Though their realms of investigation differ, Snow believed that the sciences and humanities had much to teach one another. “As we read our imaginations stretch wider than our beliefs. If we construct mental boxes to shut out what won’t fit, then we make ourselves meaner.” P. 92-3

He believed that this applied for scientists looking to broaden their thinking through the humanities as much as poets and novelists could learn about the world around them through the sciences. As a scientist and writer of fiction, Snow lived what he spoke.

Of course this critique feels strikingly modern, and but for a few asides concerning the communist manner of education it could have been written recently. We should pause to wonder what the purpose of our educational systems are, and if they are accomplishing what we hope?