Our Two Cultures

[Dave Monroe]

Our Two Cultures
By PETER DIZIKES
Published: March 19, 2009

Few literary phrases have had as enduring an after­life as “the two
cultures,” coined by C. P. Snow to describe what he saw as a dangerous
schism between science and literary life. Yet few people actually seem
to read Snow’s book bearing that title. Why bother when its main point
appears so evident?

It was 50 years ago this May that Snow, an English physicist, civil
servant and novelist, delivered a lecture at Cambridge called “The Two
Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” which was later published in
book form. Snow’s famous lament was that “the intellectual life of the
whole of Western society is increasingly being split into two polar
groups,” consisting of scientists on the one hand and literary
scholars on the other. Snow largely blamed literary types for this
“gulf of mutual incomprehension.” These intellectuals, Snow asserted,
were shamefully unembarrassed about not grasping, say, the second law
of thermodynamics—even though asking if someone knows it, he writes,
“is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of
Shakespeare’s?”

In the half-century since, “the two cultures” has become a
“bumper-sticker phrase" ...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/22/books/review/Dizikes-t.html

October 28, 1984
Is It O.K. To Be A Luddite?
By THOMAS PYNCHON

As if being 1984 weren't enough, it's also the 25th anniversary this
year of C. P. Snow's famous Rede Lecture, ''The Two Cultures and the
Scientific Revolution,'' notable for its warning that intellectual
life in the West was becoming increasingly polarized into ''literary''
and ''scientific'' factions, each doomed not to understand or
appreciate the other. The lecture was originally meant to address such
matters as curriculum reform in the age of Sputnik and the role of
technology in the development of what would soon be known as the third
world. But it was the two-culture formulation that got people's
attention. In fact it kicked up an amazing row in its day. To some
already simplified points, further reductions were made, provoking
certain remarks, name-calling, even intemperate rejoinders, giving the
whole affair, though attenuated by the mists of time, a distinctly
cranky look.

Today nobody could get away with making such a distinction....

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-luddite.html
http://www.themodernword.com/Pynchon/pynchon_essays_luddite.html
http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/uncollected/luddite.html




http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-luddite.html