Dear Stan,
Please add this reference (below) to my previous message. It refers to
an article in the Telegraph, a London newspaper, where they begin:
On May 7 1959, the celebrated novelist C P Snow mounted the podium in
the Senate House in Cambridge to deliver that year's Rede Lecture. The
title was "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution", and his
theme the dangerously wide gap that had opened up between scientists
and "literary intellectuals".
He spoke of scientists who could scarcely struggle through a novel by
Dickens, but more importantly of humanities professors who were
ignorant of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, who sneered at science
as an inferior branch of learning that no really cultured person
needed to trouble with. "If the scientists have the future in their
bones," he claimed, "then the traditional culture responds by wishing
the future did not exist."
Snow compared Britain unfavourably with the US and USSR, in terms of
numbers of young people who remained in education to the age of 18 and
above. The British system, he argued, forced children to specialise at
an unusually early age, with snobbery dictating that the children
would be pushed towards the "traditional culture" and the professions,
rather than science and industry.
He compared Britain with Venice in its decadence: "Like us, [the
Venetians] had once been fabulously lucky. They had become rich, as we
did, by accident… They knew, just as clearly as we know, that the
current of history had begun to flow against them. Many of them gave
their minds to working out ways to keep going. It would have meant
breaking the pattern into which they had crystallised. They were fond
of the pattern, just as we are fond of ours. They never found the will
to break it."
…
The article then wanders from C. P. Snow's theme of the dangerously
wide gap that had opened up between the The Two Cultures into a
discussion about how others reacted to Snow's hypothesis and what
schools in the UK should do about it.
The complete article (with comments) can be found at:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/5273453/Fifty-years-on-CP-Snows-Two-Cultures-are-united-in-desperation.html
Cheers,
Pat Naughtin
PO Box 305 Belmont 3216
Geelong, Australia
Phone: 61 3 5241 2008
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