The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution

In 1959, a book appeared that immediately sparked controversy because it exposed a problem underlying modern intellectual life: the existence of a split in Western culture. The book was titled The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, and its author was the English physicist C. P. Snow, a disciple and friend of John Bernal, the author of the classic The Social Function of Science. Its argument was that two types of culture coexist in our world, each with its own values and interests, and whose representatives ignore one another: they know little, if anything, about the other, making communication practically impossible. On one side, he identified a culture dominated by the humanities; on the other, the worldview represented by the scientific disciplines. Between them lay a division long perceived but never clarified. The mutual ignorance, and even reciprocal disdain, between humanists and scientists was readily apparent—an absurd and dangerous situation. The thesis was debated, applauded and attacked. Snow developed it further in a subsequent book. But he continued to insist that conservative, aristocratic culture retreats behind outdated values and ignores the fact that humanity is experiencing a revolution that has lasted three centuries and has now become the most profound in its history. Fundamentally, it refuses to acknowledge that this revolution has reshaped the whole of intellectual life. In our own time, others have taken up the thesis. The French thinker Michel Serres, known as “the troublesome philosopher,” argues, for example, that intellectually “hemiplegic” scholars trained in the humanities have failed to recognize that the West’s major undertaking since World War II has been primarily scientific and technological. Consequently, they continue to approach political, moral and legal questions through prescientific frameworks.

Challenges have also come from other directions. In the United States, the technologists who gathered around the Society for the History of Technology inaugurated it with an address grounded in a criticism of the “snobs” of the “liberal arts,” or what they call “the literary subculture.” They argued that these intellectuals fail to realize that dismissing the importance of techniques and technologists makes it impossible to understand American society, which owes an enormous, historically unparalleled share of its national product to the economic achievements of its technology. Snow himself, who attributed Luddite tendencies to “literary intellectuals,” did not spare pure scientists from criticism. Neither group had recognized, for example, the historical and social significance of the first Industrial Revolution and those that followed. Both had remained prisoners of their prejudices. Somewhat unwittingly, because of his mistaken conception of technology as “applied science,” he was acknowledging, alongside humanistic and scientific cultures, the existence of a third, currently dominant culture: the technological-industrial one. Yet voices calling for dialogue also arise from technology. One of the leading figures in American engineering, Samuel Florman, described his own Lehrjahre—his formative years—until he encountered the great humanistic tradition of the West. In The Education of an Engineer, he advocated a university commitment to the humanities so that his country might have “truly civilized engineers,” more aesthetically, morally and socially sensitive, who could inspire a more satisfactory technology.

C. P. Snow was a novelist as well as a scientist. He knew that he moved between two groups of comparable intelligence and identical racial background that had nevertheless ceased to communicate with each other. J. Bronowski, a mathematician and poet, would establish the chronology more precisely. He observed that, in the great periods of culture, a golden age of literature coincided with science and the arts advancing together: classical Greece, when Pythagoras, Aeschylus and Plato flourished; Elizabethan England, with Walter Ralegh alongside Marlowe and Napier; and the Restoration, when the Royal Society was inaugurated with a lecture on astronomy and the poet John Dryden supplied the praise. In all those periods, science and art shared the same language. That is the key—a common language—lost since Victorian times, when the prejudice of a materialistic and spiritual science took hold. For the author of The Ascent of Man, what is needed is to restore a language capable of bringing humanists and scientists together. One way to begin is through knowledge of the history of science, which reveals the architecture of scientific growth, bridges the humanities and thus ensures the unity of history and knowledge. The physicist Steven Weinberg, a 1979 Nobel laureate, agrees. In considering the role of science in a university liberal education, he emphasizes its importance for students themselves, for their growth as individuals. He likewise finds that the best way to teach science to nonscientists in the university curriculum is through its history. Science is, after all, part of human history—and certainly not its least interesting part.

There remains, naturally, the most obvious reason for recommending the study of science within the liberal arts curriculum: the need to help those who will participate in public administration understand the technological background of modern society. This applies, a fortiori, to humanists who feel the urge—first expressed by the philosophers of the Encyclopédie—to understand technology and help “humanize” it. But such an analysis would exceed the scope of this article. A local reference is also appropriate.

In our country, the problem is naturally smaller in scale and different in character. Here, too, there are two cultures: a very extensive humanistic one and a smaller one rooted in science. In the first quarter of this century, an ideological struggle took place between what had come to be known as “positivism,” more closely identified with scientific culture, and the “Arielist” reaction that eventually replaced it. The “scientistic” university of the 1956–66 period met a similar fate, displaced by the ideological groups that directed the “long batons” from a distance. What is the situation now? One way to find our bearings is to listen to compatriots who have gained a voice abroad, where doing so is difficult, and who express their opinions about the country without obligations. They generally agree that the heart of the problem lies in education. From his strongly pro-science position, our own “troublesome philosopher,” Mario Bunge, also emphasizes the educational deficit. Argentines, he says, want industrial and social progress without paying the necessary price: learning at least the fundamentals of science and technology. They want “milk without a cow,” as his teacher Guido Beck always used to say. In his view, the main cause of our cultural backwardness is not economic but psychological and ideological. We are interested in neither science nor industry. Why? Because we tend to teach them too little and poorly in schools; because schools demand much more in literature and history than in science; because the outstanding figures we take as models are not scientists or technicians but politicians, businesspeople, lawyers, economists or, “at most, literary figures.” All of this rests on the burden of a dual tradition, before and after political independence, that has been unfavorable to science and technology.