Two Culturei

The phrase two cultures refers to a worldview difference between the humanities and the natural sciences that has been remarked on at least since the 17th century but was named as such by the British physicist-novelist C. P. Snow in his 1959 Cambridge Rede Lecture, titled “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.” The exact nature of that difference has shifted over time, and nowadays it is perhaps most visibly felt in the so-called science wars. Many of the educational and media-based initiatives that have been spawned over the past quarter-century in the name of “public understanding of science” and “science communication” may be seen as trying to bridge this most recent version of the two cultures problem.

A two cultures problem of the arts versus the sciences first emerged in the 17th century as a dispute over the appropriate standard of criticism. Back then it was portrayed as a continuation of a late medieval dispute between the ancients and the moderns. The ancients argued for using entire works as “touchstones” in terms of which any new work would be judged. This hermeneutical approach became central to the humanistic disciplines. It was typically accompanied by a view that recent works either elaborate the details of earlier works or otherwise fall short of the standards set by those “originals.” In contrast, the moderns argued that entire works are valuable only as “archetypes” that may be better presented and developed in later works. Here lies the basis for the progressive stance of the natural sciences, which regard works as testable hypotheses, or rough drafts, that are expected to be superseded over time.

The German sociologist Wolf Lepenies has studied the attempts, starting in the 18th century, to bridge the vast difference in temporal horizon between the backward-looking arts and the forward-looking sciences. He characterizes the results in terms of an aspirational “third culture,” whose historic disciplinary home is sociology, a field that remains marked by various methodological disputes between “humanists” and “naturalists,” most prominently between qualitative and quantitative approaches. But even before the controversial emergence of sociology in the 19th century, the fields of “natural history” and “civil history” had generated a more widely accepted hybrid style of inscribing organized inquiry, as exemplified in the writings of such British Enlightenment figures as Erasmus Darwin and Adam Ferguson. This spirit arguably survives today, for example, in literary agent John Brockman's Web site “Edge” (http://www.edge.org), which is specifically dedicated to the [Page 913]promotion of a “third culture” in a sense that is more receptive to the speculations of sociobiolo-gists and evolutionary psychologists than to the theories and findings of social scientists who descend from Karl Marx, Max Weber, and mile Durkheim.

The two cultures problem acquired a special resonance in 19th-century Britain because the arts/ sciences distinction clearly corresponded to a class distinction. In the third quarter of that century, the schools inspector and poet Matthew Arnold, normally credited with Anglicization of “culture” from the German Kultur, also popularized the words barbarian and philistine to describe pathological versions of the “arts” and “sciences” mentalities, respectively, once they were projected onto the political and cultural arenas. For Arnold, the barbarian was a product of upper-class “public” (that is, in U.S. usage, private) schools who went into the military to relive Roman glories in the British Empire without understanding the differences in circumstances that marked the two periods. This resulted in reckless adventures that benefited no one. In contrast, the philistine came from the emerging middle classes and had a discerning sense of which policies were likely to work (or not) but not a sufficiently deep sense of the value weighting to assign to these outcomes. Thus, the philistine gravitated to sheer efficiency as the ultimate value, which resulted in a coarsened, albeit more peaceful, sense of life, one that is nowadays identified with consumer culture. Arnold's casting of the two cultures reflected widespread Victorian attitudes that were even enshrined as a dual-phase theory of historical sociology by Herbert Spencer, who spoke of endless cycles of “industrial” and “military” cultures, corresponding to Arnold's more pejorative philistines and barbarians.

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