One More Contribution to the Debate

It has been some time (it was 1959, to be exact) since the author C. P. Snow gave his influential and exceedingly controversial lecture ‘The Two Cultures’.

The basic thesis of this lecture (I wasn’t able to find the whole text online, unfortunately) was that there existed a huge gulf between the arts and humanities on one side and the sciences on the other. Neither side was capable of understanding the other; they had practically ceased to communicate. Snow also suggested that perhaps the artists were somewhat falling behind:

"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 the scientific equivalent of Have you read a work of Shakespeare. I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question -- such as "What do you mean by acceleration, which is the scientific equivalet 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 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.

So are artists utterly irredeemable snobs? No, I think not. What we have here, I believe, are two closely linked problems.

The first is lack of breadth in knowledge, not something that is new. This affects all people and is perhaps an inevitable consequence of the growth in academia and research. This does not mean, however, that it is a good thing. Communication between people in different fields is essential and to limit oneself to knowledge, expertise or skills in a highly specific area (whether it be quantum chemistry of metal oxides, the early sonnets of Shakespeare or dogme films) is to produce a narrow minded person. Someone once commented that ‘you know more and more about less and less until eventually you know everything about nothing’.

The second problem is specific to the sciences. They are all too often not communicated well. So many people say their involvement with science ended after school and that they found the lessons dull and unimaginative. Indeed, the major complaint was that they were taught as a set of facts to be learned off by rote and as if everything were already known. Lots of them say they couldn't understand what was being taught - no suprise when you consider how the examination system requires rote learning with few principles, less justification and often hardly any practical experience. I have expressed my distaste for this bastardisation of science before and won't bore you by ranting further.

Much controversy was sparked off by Snow’s suggestion that those in the fields of the arts and humanities were somehow putting less effort in. In this, I think he was wrong. But a nerve had been touched and the screams have scarcely died down since then. James Watson (not exactly known for staying out of controversial issues) ranted about how any literary work was seen to be superior to any scientific work (as a writer of scientific work himself, I cannot help but feel that he had something of a vested interest).

A good objection came from many academics in non-scientific fields. They pointed out that, actually, their subjects were not well-understood by scientists or the public. The public may feel that having read a work of Shakespeare is some kind of qualification, but there’s a lot more to literature than simply reading. To appreciate art is not the same as to create it and there is a heck of a lot going on behind the scenes. All everyone else has is an appreciation of the subject, not the knowledge or expertise of the practitioners. Why demand that lay people suddenly learn to become scientists?

But of course, Snow was demanding nothing of the sort. An appreciation of science and understanding of the basic principles that underlie it is not the same as to become a scientist. There is a world of difference, for example, between knowing that in an electric circuit electrons flow through the conducting wires and the friction they create within the lightbulb causes it to glow brightly; and to gain a full understanding to the processes happening at all stages. The former is a qualitative approach – an appreciation of what happens. The latter is a quantitative approach – the expertise of a practitioner.

Richard Dawkins, in one of his own pleas for greater public appreciation of science, used the analogy of music. One can listen to music as an active practitioner within that field – as a musician or a composer. Alternatively, one can simply know a bit about it, be able to talk with reasonable knowledge about Beethoven and gain a qualitative understanding. It may not be as complete as the understanding of the musician, but it’s a lot better than nothing. The music will be all the more beautiful for it.

Something of this sort is already true of literary, historical and artistic pursuits, though I think it needs to be more so. Perhaps it could become true for science also? I hope so.

Here is discussed the importance of scientific understanding for everyday life, in addition to its intellectual and aesthetic pleasures.