In the 1950s British scientist and author C. P. Snow remarked on the rift between the sciences and the humanities in the academic and intellectual worlds. “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,” Snow said. “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 scientific equivalent of: have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?”
Snow’s complaint was that science wasn’t getting the respect it deserved. Yet even as he spoke in Britain, things were changing in America. The Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957, ahead of the best efforts of American rocket scientists and engineers, prompted Congress to increase spending on scientific and technical education. The 1960s and 1970s saw the emergence of Silicon Valley and the modern tech industry. The Birkenstock was on the other foot as Steve Jobs and his computer buddies became famous and rich too.
By the early 21st century, STEM studies—science, technology, math, engineering—had swamped the humanities and social sciences in the love they got from legislatures and others responsible for funding education. Students were drilled in the importance of technical skills to their occupational futures. Coding competed with woodcraft and sports on the schedules of summer camps. Tech moguls were the new royalty.
Yet the rift between what Snow called the “two cultures” only widened. Coding was harder to grasp than the second law of thermodynamics, so why should a humanist even try? With the young techies all hustling to create the next unicorn—a company worth a billion dollars before going public—who had time for Shakespeare?
I’ve been thinking about the two-culture problem in the context of redesigning the undergraduate curriculum at the University of Texas at Austin. A committee I’m on is wrestling with the question of what every publicly educated young adult in Texas ought to know. Most members of the committee would agree that Shakespeare and the second law of thermodynamics should make the cut.
But of course those two are just stand-ins for much larger bodies of knowledge and cultures of mind. It wouldn’t be impossible to compile a list of great concepts of the modern world. Suppose the members of the committee agree on a hundred such items. In terms of information conveyed, we could do worse than assign all students to read the articles in the Encyclopedia Britannica on this top hundred.
Until I just wrote that last sentence, I hadn’t thought specifically about how to package and transmit information for this pedagogical purpose. The Britannica, or for that matter Wikipedia, wouldn’t be a terrible idea.
But beyond information lies appreciation and sensibility. Science is based on evidence and logic. Knowledge is always tentative, subject to disproof. Nothing is accepted on faith or authority.
What are the humanities based on? I ask not dismissively but in the spirit of honest inquiry. The second law of thermodynamics has withstood myriad tests. Theorists and experimentalists have tried to outwit it, if only for the Nobel prize that awaits the outwitting.
What has Shakespeare withstood?
The question highlights much of the difference between science and the humanities. What indeed makes Shakespeare worth studying four centuries after his death?
The abiding human themes in his plays, an English teacher might reply.
This is a perfectly good answer. But not even the most devoted Bardian would say no one else has written about those themes.
And it’s hard to make the case that the execution of the themes, via Shakespeare’s command of the English language, renders them worthy of universal study. English has evolved so much as to make Shakespeare almost unreadable in spots and definitely no model for 21st century student writers.
Because we’ve always taught Shakespeare, might be the rejoinder.
This isn’t as empty an answer as it could be made to sound. A literary canon can bind a culture together.
But the response to this is much as above. We can find something closer to our own time and place to serve as social cement.
The purpose here is not to pick on Shakespeare. It’s to underscore the difference between scientists and humanists in approaches to knowledge. Science makes progress. No scientist today looks to Aristotle for scientific expertise. Humanists don’t make progress. They keep asking the same questions. Plato remains as relevant to philosophers today as ever.
Which suggests that this is what the college students ought to learn about. How is physics different from philosophy? Why do physicists make progress while philosophers don’t?
C. P. Snow lamented the existence of the two cultures. He thought educated people should have a foot in both camps. He himself did.
But the two cultures exist for a reason. Maybe Snow’s thoughts on the subject should be a starting point for examining that reason and the other issues his critique raises.
Mark Slouka produced a gem on this issue, the humanities versus science in a Harpers magazine article. “Dehumanized: When Math and Science Rule the Schools”.
https://www.scribd.com/document/519447496/DeHumanized
One very big difference is that in the humanities one does study old texts. So the old poems, etc. But in STEM no one would think of reading Euclid to learn Geometry (his descriptions of shapes are incomprehensible to those who have seen diagrams). Nor would a biologist read Darwin (though he is far more relevant). Possibly a mathematician might be amused at Newton.