Have they been superceded?
And yes, he did miss the Russo-Japanese War, though as he notes, the Japanese were westernizing rapidly at that point.
4 thoughts on “C. P. Snow’s Two Cultures”
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Have they been superceded?
And yes, he did miss the Russo-Japanese War, though as he notes, the Japanese were westernizing rapidly at that point.
Comments are closed.
I don’t know. The problem is that culture has progressed, but in a way unrecognized by the snobs of 1959. It doesn’t really surprise me that this article is in NRO; my general impression is that few on the left, other than Christopher Hitchens, even know the word “erudite” and the NRO and the Weekly Standard are so stiff they struggle to pick up their monacle when dropped.
Art should be defined as what speaks to the people, or what speaks to you personally. It’s not fair to hold up Brittany Spears as a symbol of the failures of culture just to fit a silly narrative. Culture has only failed to advance if you believe that the future of “music” was with John Cage and his silly experiments rather than The Beatles or Metallica. Or that the future of visual arts was with Picasso rather than Stan Lee.
Maybe I’m proving Mr. Snow’s point, because the significant difference between the cultures of Science and Arts seems to be that the establishment Scientists couldn’t keep its advances from the public narrative, but the establishment Arts could keep progress out of its galleries, even if not off of the streets.
I’m actually a Conservative and a Republican, but, honestly, those magazines are WEAK.
Science is anchored to an external reality. In post-modernism the Humanities have rejected any such anchor, making them ultimately irrelevant. It’s just taking the intellectuals a while to realize what everybody else figured out right away.
Another ‘problem’ is that the A-level “languages” students are attracted to commercial enterprises by the potential profits (such as Stevens Jobs & Spielberg; imagine what they might be up to if they didn’t have Apple & Dreamworks to keep them busy, or if they were left to working with marble and oils instead of silicon and silver screen), leaving the University to the B-level minds. That’s how you end up with useless mush like “Critical Race Theory”.
This seems to me to be 2 different articles. First off, you (correctly) point out that there have never been so many great crossover books available, then you talk about the weakness of schools and seem to contradict your first half. I agree that there are huge weaknesses in the education system – but is it really worse than, say, 30 years ago? 50 years ago? Maybe it is, but I haven’t seen any objective, statistical evidence to suggest this. One change that has occurred I think is that less streaming of pupils has led to a weakening of the ‘elite’ – the best pupils (usually from educated families) going on to elite universities. The price of greater egalitarianism is always likely to mean that some of the most talented are not pushed as hard as they might be.
But it does seem to me that this article is unscientific, in the sense that you produce a body of evidence, then come to conclusions that are the opposite to the direction they point.