Article by Richard A. Greenwald: “The “Two Cultures” lecture has aged into one of those texts that everyone mentions and nobody reads. The broad strokes are familiar: in 1959, C. P. Snow, an English chemist and novelist, stood before a Cambridge audience and announced that Western intellectual life had fractured into two distinct camps — scientists and humanists — who had ceased to communicate with one another. The scientists, in Snow’s telling, were optimistic modernizers with the “future in their bones”; the literary men were nostalgic reactionaries who couldn’t describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics and rather wished the future would not arrive. Snow found this tragic. Everyone nodded gravely. The essay became a perennial touchstone for handwringing about disciplinary silos and the need for well-rounded education, eventually landing on the Times Literary Supplement’s list of the hundred most influential books since World War II.
Here’s what’s funny about the whole thing: Snow was worried about the wrong problem. He fretted that humanists and scientists couldn’t communicate across their divide. What he couldn’t have anticipated is that six decades later, neither group would be setting the terms of public discourse at all.
Over the years, various observers have argued that the divide no longer exists, because the scientists won. In 1995, John Brockman claimed in his book The Third Culture that scientists were becoming the new public intellectuals, communicating directly with general audiences while literary intellectuals retreated into irrelevance.
He was half-right. Today a third culture does dominate public discourse, and it is technocratic. But it is not the culture of tweed-jacketed classicists nor of white-coated researchers. Both of those have been absorbed — digested, really — into a culture that didn’t exist when Snow was lecturing: the culture of venture capital, of pitch decks and product–market fit, of founders who look at the accumulated wisdom of human civilization and see a legacy codebase overdue for refactoring…(More)”.
