{"id":6663,"date":"2018-05-10T16:04:44","date_gmt":"2018-05-10T23:04:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/?p=6663"},"modified":"2020-10-18T11:43:27","modified_gmt":"2020-10-18T18:43:27","slug":"c-p-snows-the-two-cultures-the-third-culture-big-history-and-2001","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/2018\/05\/10\/c-p-snows-the-two-cultures-the-third-culture-big-history-and-2001\/","title":{"rendered":"C.P. Snow\u2019s The Two Cultures, The Third Culture, Big History, and 2001"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>C.P. Snow\u2019s \u201cThe Two Cultures\u201d is the famous 1959 lecture and then essay about the divide between the scientific community and the literary \u2018intellectual\u2019 community, an essay much referenced in books about the acceptance of science in modern culture (with, for example, several references in Steven Pinker\u2019s ENLIGHTENMENT NOW, which are what prompted me to buy a copy of Snow and read it for myself). The essay comes in a little book, shown here in a 2013 printing just 58 pages long, that includes additional topics.<\/p>\n

The principal essay is short and to the point. The Wikipedia entry for the lecture, https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_Two_Cultures<\/a>, quotes a key passage, about how traditional intellectuals have no idea what the second law of thermodynamics might be about, nor care; yet would consider a scientist who’d never read Shakespeare to be uncultured, even uneducated. He notes p4 that \u201cat one pole we have the literary intellectuals, who incidentally while no one was looking took to referring to themselves as \u2018intellectuals\u2019 as though there were no others.\u201d As if the work of scientists like Rutherford or Dirac or Einstein was not intellectual.<\/p>\n

Snow describes how he was trained as a scientist, but had become a writer, and so had interactions and friends among both groups. He discusses how scientists are thought unreasonably optimistic and unaware of the human condition, while the literary intellectuals lack concern about the future and would deny the progress of science and technology. An apt quote, p15:<\/p>\n

They still like to pretend that the traditional culture is the whole of \u2018culture\u2019, as though the natural order didn\u2019t exist. As thought the exploration of the natural order was of no interest either in its own value or its consequences. As though the scientific edifice of the physical world was not, in its intellectual depth, complexity and articulation, the most beautiful and wonderful collective work of the mind of man.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There are worlds of commentary about this essay, easily found via Google, from critical responses at the time, to later re-evaluations, to references in contemporary books.<\/p>\n

But I\u2019ll make a couple points myself anyway: Snow lays the situation primarily at the English educational policies of the time, especially those of Cambridge and Oxford, with their high degrees of specialization. He notes that the educational systems in the US, and USSR, are not so severe. He discusses how the \u2018intellectuals\u2019 barely noticed or understood the industrial revolution (Ibsen among writers being an exception), how the poor gravitated toward the factories to improve their lot (a point Pinker makes also, to those who criticize the industrial revolution). And in the final essay of this slim book, he realizes how the industrialized nations are getting richer (and how \u2018intellectuals\u2019 don\u2019t appreciate this rate of change [that rate of change being a central theme of science fiction]) and how the poor nations have noticed and will take any help they can get \u2013 and if the West doesn\u2019t help them, Russia will. And so the gap between the cultures must close.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

This theme about the problems of specialization we\u2019ve seen in essays on SF from the same general era as Snow\u2019s, e.g. three separate essays in Bretnor\u2019s MODERN SCIENCE FICTION (here https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/2018\/01\/19\/sfnf-bretnor-modern-science-fiction\/<\/a>).<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Since Snow there have been a couple prominent developments in this conflict, one relatively recent.<\/p>\n

First, the gap between the cultures — at least among the curious lay public — began to shrink, I think, as books by scientists written for the general audience became popular, especially THE COSMIC CONNECTION and COSMOS by Carl Sagan, Hawking\u2019s A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME, and E.O. Wilson\u2019s ON HUMAN NATURE, not to mention numerous works by Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould and others.<\/p>\n

So by 1995 editor (and agent) John Brockman could publish an anthology of essays, THE THIRD CULTURE, claiming that the culture had indeed shifted, from the literary, classical, and philosophical \u2018intellectuals\u2019 to \u201cthose scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings our lives, redefining who and what we are\u201d (p17). Brockman explores this idea in his introduction, and then fills the book with essays by representative key thinkers on various themes: evolution, the mind, cosmic origins, algorithms, and the singularity. Contributors include Gould, Dawkins, Margulis, Minsky, Dennett, Pinker, Penrose, Rees, Smolin, and many others, and what\u2019s fun is how Brockman lets his contributors comment on each other\u2019s essays. Even as the modern scientific intellectuals agree on the large-scale outlines of evolution and cosmology, they emphasize varying parts, bicker about the importance of details. That’s how science works.<\/p>\n

And in 1998 E.O. Wilson published one of his most ambitious books, CONSILIENCE, subtitled \u201cThe Unity of Knowledge,\u201d that attempted to show how recent understandings in the physical and biological sciences could illuminate issues in the social sciences, in art, in ethics, in religion. (Meanwhile, as one of Brockman\u2019s contributors points out, p27, when traditional intellectual Mortimer Adler compiled a \u2018Synopticon\u2019 index, his entry on consciousness referenced Aquinas, Montaigne, and Aristotle.)<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Second, more recently, a movement known as \u2018Big History\u2019 has appeared, which attempts to put all of human history into the context of cosmological history \u2013 everything from the Big Bang, to the origin of stars and planets, to the development of life on Earth, the evolution of mankind, and eventually the growth of culture and modern human history. This grand scope was written about at least since Bill Bryson\u2019s A SHORT HISTORY OF NEARLY EVERYTHING in 2005 (https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/A_Short_History_of_Nearly_Everything<\/a>), and more technically by David Christian in MAPS OF TIME in 2004, with its sections that steadily zoom in on narrowing, more recent slices of the cosmic timeline. The movement has crystallized into a \u201cBig History Project\u201d led by Christian, with a website (https:\/\/www.bighistoryproject.com\/home<\/a>), a TED talk, a comprehensive coffee table book, endorsements by Bill Gates, and a forthcoming narrative account by Christian called ORIGIN STORY (https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/0316392006\/<\/a>), which of course I\u2019ve preordered.<\/p>\n

And of course, the opening credits of the TV series “The Big Bang Theory” is big history in popular culture.<\/p>\n

The point about \u2018big history\u2019 is that it places the history that the traditional \u2018intellectuals\u2019 know about, the art and literature and philosophy of the past two or three thousand years, into a grander context, one only discovered and appreciated in the last 50-75 years. If you want to know what we know about the age and extent of the universe, or about human consciousness and the mind, don\u2019t look to Mortimer Adler\u2019s references; look to Stephen Hawking and Brian Greene, to Daniel Dennett and Steven Pinker. The best books about what collective humanity knows about the world, through systematic investigation [science], are the latest books, not the most ancient. Because the early philosophers, though their intuitive speculations are fascinating in retrospect, have turned out mostly to be wrong.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Finally, just today, as I\u2019m working my way a chapter at a time through Michael Benson\u2019s history of the making of the film 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, I came across this passage that captures how science fiction is a kind of third culture, a blending of art and science, and how 2001<\/i> in particular captured that combination. P. 264-265:<\/p>\n

At its best, science fiction takes our post-Enlightenment way of understanding the world and extrapolates, using the findings of science and projections concerning the future of technology and putting them at the service of truths expressible through fiction. By the midsixties, astronomy and astrophysics had radically expanded the universe\u2019s dimensions, and the emerging science of paleoanthropology\u2014a discipline rooted in Darwinism, paleontology, and biological anthropology\u2014was starting to revolutionize our understanding of human origins. But rarely had the findings of these broad disciplines been incorporated into artistic expression. Instead, science had effectively been over here<\/i>, and the arts elsewhere.<\/p>\n

It was one of Kubrick\u2019s and Clarke\u2019s great achievements, and a wellspring of 2001<\/i>\u2019s lasting power and continuing significance, that they took the complex, sometimes haunting, sometimes magnificent truths revealed by modern science, polished them with all the care given an expensive piece of Zeiss glass, and used them as a window to view the human condition within that staggeringly vast universe. Projecting back into the past, 2001<\/i>\u2019s authors examined human origins. They weren\u2019t particularly doctrinaire about it. This was fiction, not a peer-reviewed paper in the journal Nature. But they always deployed scientific research\u2014and its miraculous offspring, technology\u2014to define their story, refine it, and expand it to its farthest possible limits It\u2019s how they reached the border between the known and unknown\u2014that place science is always probing like a tongue exploring a broken tooth. It\u2019s where they wanted to take their audience, because beyond it, sometime like magic prevails.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

C.P. Snow\u2019s \u201cThe Two Cultures\u201d is the famous 1959 lecture and then essay about the divide between the scientific community and the literary \u2018intellectual\u2019 community, an essay much referenced in books about the acceptance of science in modern culture (with, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,2,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6663","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-science","category-science-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6663","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6663"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6663\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6691,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6663\/revisions\/6691"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6663"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6663"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6663"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}