Know Your Own Bone – Nonprofit Marketing & Online Engagement

Photo from blogs.discovermagazine.com

In a way, the modern-day threat of science illiteracy persuaded me to seek out C.P. Snow’s Rede lecture “The Two Cultures.” The lecture was championed during the last event that I coordinated at Pacific Science Center in Seattle: a panel discussion presented by the Northwest Science Writers Association, titled “Dumb, Getting Dumber? The Cost of Scientific Illiteracy.” Snow’s lecture was recommended during the panel as a classic read for anyone seeking to bridge the gap between the arts and sciences.

Here’s a quick (and vastly oversimplified) summary of C.P. Snow’s 1959 lecture: the hostile divide between the cultures of science and the humanities was an increasing problem of the time. According to Snow, the polarization of these cultures leads to intelligent minds (namely, intellectual minds in the humanities), ignoring the fact that the study of science will lead to scientific revolutions which, in turn, increase our global ability to close the gap between the rich and the poor caused by industrialization.  In (very loose) sum, the  culture divide prohibits those in the arts from aiding scientists in ultimately closing the gap between the rich and the poor.  (It’s no wonder that this book was recommended by science researchers!)  The gap between the rich and the poor is an area of concern for Snow, and he reports in the successor piece, “A Second Look,” that he initially thought to call his famous lecture, “The Rich and the Poor” instead of “The Two Cultures.”

Although generally outdated in terms of the science verses humanities schism, Snow’s lecture uncovers stereotypes that remain polarizing in our current world. However, it is no longer the divide between the cultures of science and the humanities that demands our urgent attention, but the divide between these intellectual cultures and the everyday man.

Snow’s hope was to make science accessible to those in the humanities because, in his mind and at the time, that group was least open to accepting the credibility of the sciences and scientific research. In Snow’s understanding of the world, the intellectually elite must work together in order to evoke change and make the world a better place for everyone else. Today, education-based institutions are one-upping Snow’s ideas in their attempt to make science research accessible to everyone– not just the literary elite.

C.P. Snow. Photo from physicsworld.com/blog

Museums and education-based institutions have long since begun to break down the walls built up by highly specialized intellectuals prior to the mid twentieth century. C.P. Snow’s lecture, though it does reinforce these walls, began a public debate about highly intellectual cultures. At Pacific Science Center alone, there were several programs and grant-based initiatives aimed toward uncovering ways to make current science research accessible to the public. Many of the special events that I coordinated filled these same initiatives in making science– and the scientists themselves– less scary to those who don’t know anything about carbon dating, tsunami detection, or genetic conflict. “The Two Cultures” paints both scientists and those involved in the humanities in that same, potentially scary light that current institutions are still aiming to shed.

But the problem of polarization still exists, though the players have changed and (from this perspective) both of the intellectual cultures are on the same team. How can we make the ideas of those intellectual cultures accessible to the public?

Here are a few generalizations (stereotypes, perhaps) from Snow’s lecture that museum professionals are, in a sense, tying to tackle head-on:

• Snow claims, “Non-scientists tend to think of scientists as brash and boastful…On the other hand, the scientists believe that the literary intellectuals are lacking in foresight, particularly unconcerned with their brother men, in a deep sense anti-intellectual, anxious to restrict both art and thought to the existential movement.”  It is no surprise that this may be the way that the general public views these two highly intellectual cultures as well.

• In regard to his experience as a scientist in the scientific community, Snow explains: “We prided ourselves that the science we were doing could not, in any conceivable circumstances, have any practical use. The more firmly one could make that claim, the better.” I cannot speak as to whether or not this is still true within the field of science, but it is certainly a claim that institutions are tying to smooth out with regard to making science research accessible. It is often easier to make scientific research accessible when there is a way for the public to relate the issue to their everyday lives.

Though hostilities between the intellectual cultures of science and humanities may still exist in the academic realm, I argue that it does not demand as strong a call to action as the gap between these intellectual cultures and the rest of society. Museums and institutions are aiming to cure this polarization, and though the context here my be different, Snow’s original message still holds true: “The polarization is sheer loss to us all. To us as a people, and to our society. It is at the same time practical and intellectual and creative loss.”