The Two Cultures: Redux

1
The Two Cultures Redux

• By Joseph Siry
• July 10, 2006, Jesus College, Oxford University,
  England, U.K.

2
Two Cultures

• May 1959, Charles Percy Snow gave the Rede
  Lecture at Cambridge University.
• Three menaces which now stand in our wayH-bomb
  war, overpopulation, the gap between the rich and
  the poor. (p. 48)
• This is one of the situations where the worst
  crime is innocence.

3
Disciplines as bodies of knowledge
Is science or technology the older word?
4
"Part of the problem is

• words change meaning over time
• Technology 1615, meaning ' a discourse or
  treatise on an art or arts'.
• Science 1660, referring to 'a craft trade or
  occupation requiring a trained skill'.
• Neither word reached its current meaning much
  before the mid-nineteenth century.
• Pursell, 1994, p. 121-122.

5
Are we well informed?

• Darwinism
• Nuclear Proliferation
• Global Warming

6
Natural Selection

• Biological evolution has no privileged line of
  descent and no designated end. Dawkins, p. 4.
• Considerably more evolved than
  Australopithecines. More evolved? Dawkins asks,
  What can this mean but that evolution is moving
  in some pre-specified direction? Dawkins, p. 5.
• Darwinism...we mean evolution by (means of)
  natural selection.
• Mayr, pp. 68-69,107.

7
Incapacity to assimilate complex information

• Carbon dioxide levels in the air are increasing
  at two percent per year.
• Carbon emissions remain aloft for a century or
  more after their release.
• Like the interest on an unpaid debt, carbon
  dioxide accumulation is accelerating at an
  ominous rate.
• Destructive weather flooding coastal populations
  could produce a hundred million refugees
  worldwide.

8
obstacles to clear thought

• absence of a common language.
• Inherent skepticism.
• Uncertainty of science.
• Scientific findings are hard to convert into
  coherent policies.
• Conceit in pattern recognition.
• As knowledge accumulates, findings become harder
  to simplify.
• Far more complexity emerges at deeper levels of
  existence -- not simplicity based on fewer
  functioning parts.

9
C. P. Snows observations

• For the sake of the intellectual life, for the
  sake of this countrys special danger, for the
  sake of western society living precariously rich
  among the poor, for the sake of the poor who
  neednt be poor if there is intelligence in the
  world, it is obligatory for us and the Americans
  and the whole of the West to look at our
  education with fresh eyes.
• (p. 51-52)

10
without education, the West cant even begin to
cope.
11
Reforming how well we learn is essential.

• The danger is, we have been brought up to think
  as though we had all the time in the world. We
  have very little time. So little that I dare not
  guess at it.
• (p. 52)
• The conceit of knowledge.
• Ignoring critically complex details.
• Refusal to concede errors in folk knowledge or
  expertise.

12
Unity of knowing

• Closing the gap between our cultures is a
  necessity in the most abstract intellectual
  sense, as well as in the, most practical.
• When those senses have grown apart, then no
  society is going to be able to think with
  wisdom. pp. 51-52.