Fifty years ago C. P. Snow described the gulf between the two cultures. Today we can be more optimistic about bridging it
By William Waldegrave
Leavis was right: C. P. Snow was not a great intellect, or a great novelist. But you do not have to be either to say something that is true: and Snow did say something which was true, in his Rede lecture of 50 years ago, entitled The Two Cultures. There is something wrong with a civilisation, he said, where knowledge is so compartmentalised that people can count as highly educated and yet be wholly ignorant of huge swaths of what other highly educated people know. How could scientists not read Shakespeare? How could literary people never have heard of the second law of thermodynamics?
Obviously, there has always been specialised knowledge: Cicero would doubtless have been out of his depth in the further reaches of Archimedean mathematics; Richard Bentley would probably have found Newtonian calculus as obscure as did some of the classicists of my day who could read his Horace easily enough a century and a half later but not get the hang of dy by dx. Carlyle it was who talked about political economy as the dismal science. There is little new under the sun.
But the high ambition of cultured people was once to know the geography, at least, of all knowledge. Aristotle had a try at actually doing it all; Virgil, in his own great poem about agriculture, wrote that wonderful line about Lucretius, whose epic has the atom as its hero:
Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas (Happy the man who could understand the causes of things).