A quick recap. Fifty years ago the British Scientist and novelist CP Snow gave a lecture titled The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution looking at the cultural divide between the Sciences and the Humanities. That the chasm between both sides was not only doing harm, but was also one sided:
They give me a pitying chuckle at the news of scientists who have never read a major work of English Literature. They dismiss them as ignorant specialists. Yet their own ignorance and their own specialisation is just as startling.
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 equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?
How far have come since then? Do we still live with an impoverishing division between the two? I'd say yes. The chasm between the two sides serves neither. It prevents either from waking up from the slumber of specialisation and looking at the range of ideas the other has to offer. But the essay wasn't just about the divide. It was about the need for scientists to take their rightful place as academics alongside the humanities.
Some time ago I stumbled across a map of science, based on the reading and browsing habits of academic literature. Meanwhile, they produced another map by colour coding the enquiries based on journal classifications. Split into the two cultures (natural sciences in blue and the humanities and social sciences in yellow). While it does a marvellous job of showing the distinctions and differences between the two, it also highlights how intertwined they are as part of the same system. It's rather illuminating that having the social sciences so highly intertwined, connected and possibly insular, while the natural sciences is much more spread out and evenly distributed.
But to continue to view the world through such a binary serves no one either. Snow himself envisaged a third culture, a group of non-scientists who could bridge the gap between the two. John Brockman wrote an article in 1992 (seemingly at the height of the debate between the Post Modernists and the Scientific Establishment) titled The Third Culture:
In Snow's third culture, the literary intellectuals would be on speaking terms with the scientists. Although i borrow Snow's phrase, it does not describe the third culture he predicted. Literary intellectuals are not communicating with scientists. Scientists are communicating with the general public.
But that was in 1992. His 2002 essay The New Humanists seems more mature, as well as from a victorious perspective. I recommend reading it, not just for the article, but for the highly informative replies, mostly by the new humanists he refers to.
Something radically new is in the air: new ways of understanding physical systems, new ways of thinking about thinking that calls into question many of our basic assumptions. A realistic biology of the mind, advances in physics, electricity, genetics, neurobiology, engineering, the chemistry of materials–all are challenging basic assumptions of who and what we are, of what it means to be human. The arts and science are again joining together as one culture, the third culture. Those involved in this effort – scientists, science-based humanities scholars, writers – are at the center of today's intellectual action.
Which what makes the Seed videos so interesting. They're charming, and well spoken, and by some key thinkers. But it's what I've come to expect from Seed magazine. It's much more exciting (and better looking) than any design magazine I've come across. Which perhaps is the most important thing to take away from this.
