Luddites revisited 2

[Henry Musikar]

I believe that what we have here is not so much a matter of "two cultures,"
but of the constant acceleration of specialization.  In the USA, people call
people who specialize in technology "geeks."  I have maintained for a long
time that people who have little interest or knowledge outside of one or two
areas of one or two areas are "geeks," no matter what those areas might be.
In the USA, if one of those areas is participation in sports, then that
person is called a "jock," and that is considered not such a bad thing in
many circles.  

Most universities have fewer and fewer requirements for knowledge outside of
a student's major.  They still may house a universe of knowledge, but
individual students are not required to be exposed to any breadth of it.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that even the University of Chicago
gave up its vaunted core curriculum years ago.  Bucky Fuller suggested that
the pirate captain/kings were extraordinary renaissance men, but renaissance
men went out of fashion years ago; they are not well-suffered by the
specialists with whom they toil.

Henry Mu
http://members.dsli.com/cyberia/scuffling.htm 

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-----Original Message-----
From: Otto
Sent: Saturday, March 19, 2005 3:57 AM

Die zwei Kulturen: Literarische und naturwissenschaftliche Intelligenz.
C.P.Snows These in der Diskussion. / hrsg. von Helmut Kreuzer. München: dtv,
1987. ISBN 3-423-04454-3
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._P._Snow 

"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 about 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."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C.P._Snow 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures_and_the_Scientific_Revolution