Generation Bubble

The blog ideonexus recently presented some musings on C. P. Snow’s famous 1959 lecture, “The Two Cultures.” Snow, who wore two professional hats (scientist and novelist), argued that both the matter and methodology of science and the humanities stood irreconcilably opposed; because science, which places supreme important on the scientific method and the reproducibility of experimental results, achieves coherence by distancing itself from cultural contexts and individual belief, whereas the humanities achieve coherence precisely by addressing themselves to these things.

The loss of a common culture thus arose as science began to distinguish itself as a mode of inquiry to which subjective, non-empirical factors proved inimical, even damaging. And, as it moved away from them, it soon began to leave the humanities behind.

However, in another one of those instances in which base lags behind superstructure, academic prestige remained with the humanists. Science was deemed inferior, a technical language one could be excused for not speaking, while the humanities — arts and letters, specifically — remained the supreme arbiters of one’s acumen.

Snow, whom ideonexus quotes on this point, claims that the urge to tackle this issue came from his experience as both a scientist and a novelist, which offered him a unique perspective on the situation:

“[C]onstantly I felt I was moving among two groups — comparable in intelligence, identical in race, not grossly different in social origin, earning about the same incomes, who had almost ceased to communicate at all.”

One trusts the irony of Snow’s remarks is not lost on the reader. That he “felt [he] was moving among two groups […] who had almost ceased to communicate at all” means that his entire lecture proceeded from hunch, an intuition — not the sort of rigorous hypothesizing that creatures of the second culture would welcome or even expect.

Catching his drift: "Two Cultures" coiner C. P. Snow.

The folks at ideonexus are a little less circumspect. They dismiss Snow’s “Two Cultures” lecture as ultimately much ado about nothing:

A review of references to this famous lecture would lead someone who hadn’t read it to think it was purely about the differences between the people educated in the sciences and the humanities, but that debate accounted for only a portion of Snow’s lecture, and it was so poorly argued and narrowly focused that it’s a wonder why it continues to stir feelings today.

The enduring, outsized effect Snow’s lecture had on the sciences and humanities suggests to the folks at ideonexus that people in those disciplines found it an opportune excuse to start erecting walls between them, because one can find no other reason why the“two-cultures” assertion, spurious and tangential as it is, could find purchase in the minds of ostensibly educated people. Again the folks at ideonexus:

It’s odd that so many Western academics are swept up in Snow’s description of this academic cultural divide, embracing what is basically a false dichotomy. There is science and there is the humanities, but there is also soft science, like psychology, and hard science fiction literature, like Isaac Asimov. There are transhumanists, makers, technical writers, science bloggers, Enlightenment historians, and numerous other academics out there representing the hybridization of the humanities and the sciences to varying degrees. There are two cultures in another sense, those who unthinkingly embrace false dichotomies and those who don’t have their heads up their asses.

This latter cultural division the folks at ideonexus find as closer to the truth of the situation. At the very least, it offers a more faithful account of the psychological and egoïc factors at work. Boundaries blur; borders shift. One indeed finds in the popular domain all kinds of syntheses and fusions of science and the humanities (a cursory glance at an issue of The New York Times Book Review reveals this). But when it comes to institutional prestige, that most precious source of social capital, the feel-good universe of science-humanities many hybrid forms pointedly takes a back seat, especially when funding is at stake. In this respect, one could argue that in the years since Snow’s factious lecture the hard-nose disposition of science has served it exceedingly well, allowing it eventually to dictate how funding is awarded.

In this, science was inestimably abetted by legislation that changed the complexion of American universities. No longer simply citadels of human learning, they became outsourced research and development for the much maligned military-industrial complex. Science showed itself far more robust to this change, and in fact exploited it in order to consolidate its hegemony over many of the nation’s research institutions. Indeed, the U. S. government, bestower of fat grants, remains far more interested in launching missiles than sonnets into enemy countries. In her 2006 exposé, University Inc., Jennifer Washburn identifies as the catalyzing event for this turn corporate-ward the passage in 1980 of the University and Small Business Patent Procedures Act, now commonly known as the Bayh-Dole Act. The Bayh-Dole Act conferred patent and intellectual property rights on small businesses, universities and nonprofits as a way of promoting sustainable profitability.

Or such was the theory, anyway. Problem was that, in practice, this sustainable profitability amounted to monopolistic double-dipping. Small businesses, universities and nonprofits, which receive public monies in the form of start-up loans or ongoing funding, could upon patenting the fruits this public support made possible and then charge the public for the resulting product. The had to pay twice for the same product, in other words.

Bayh-Dole essentially enabled universities to maximize profit by externalizing as much production cost as possible — the time-honored modus operandi of corporations. As President Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter’s successor in 1981, began his war on big government, ebbing trickles of funds from federal and state legislatures meant Bayh-Dole represented universities’ only means of survival.

Profitability became the watchword as universities became essentially publicly funded, outsourced research and development for defense, technology as pharmaceutical corporate sectors. Any university program that did not directly contribute to patent milling either had to content itself with greater austerity as budget monies flowed away from them or find other ways to pay the bills.

Such fiduciary Realpolitik came to mean that university science programs’ power to generate profit independently of other sorts of funding vaulted these programs to the top of the departmental pecking order. One of this country’s reigning axioms is that to whom much is given more is given. Humanities programs, themselves incapable of putting anything in orbit or through a tank, found themselves derided as unprofitable, and admonished to make do with whatever kindness the sciences deigned show them.

Blinded us with science: Bayh-Dole's patented formula for profit.

Dependent on the kindness of colleagues estranged by the very divorce Snow did much to promote simply by pointing out, the humanities has slowly watched its prestige trickle away with its institutional clout. Humanities, desperate to seize the mantle of technical sophistication that came to rest on science’s shoulders, have kicked against the pricks primarily by abandoning philological and aesthetic methods for the pseudo-empirical ones of the social sciences and the esoteric ones of French literary theory. Yet the makeover did little to persuade the grandees of science that humanist academic inquiries, erudite, often impenetrable, accomplished more than students’ “personal enrichment” or “growth.”

Since then, the humanities have labored under the suspicion aroused by the scientistic Weltanschaaung tirelessly promoted by those who interest lies its hegemony. The humanities, poor relations of the sciences, find themselves increasingly marginalized in both universities and the culture at large. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but the fact remains that the humanities imitate their richer cousin but badly.

One can perhaps seek consolation in noting that a lot has changed since Snow’s 1959 lecture. Though its doubtful how ultimately beneficial the net effect of this change has been. Once upon a time, literacy rates stood as a measure of progress. Now, prevalence of technology serves that function. One could thus plausibly argue that western culture is returning to a single culture, one dominated by science, not the humanities.