The Two Cultures - Implications and Influence

Implications and Influence

The term two cultures has become a shorthand in certain academic circles for differences between two attitudes;

The phrase has lived on as a vague popular shorthand for the rift—a matter of incomprehension tinged with hostility—that has grown up between scientists and literary intellectuals in the modern world. —Roger Kimball

Snow himself, in his reconsideration, backed off some way from his dichotomized declarations. In his 1963 book he talked more optimistically about the potential of a mediating third culture. This concept was later picked up in the 1995 book The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution by John Brockman. Introducing the reprinted The Two Cultures (1993), Stefan Collini has argued that the passage of time has done much to reduce the cultural divide Snow noticed; but has not removed it entirely.

The literary critic F. R. Leavis was critical of this work, calling Snow a "public relations man" for the scientific establishment in an essay published in The Spectator, which was widely decried in the British press.

Stephen Jay Gould's 2003 book The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox provides a different perspective. Assuming the dialectical interpretation, it argues that Snow's concept of "two cultures" is not only off the mark, it is a damaging and short-sighted viewpoint; and that it has perhaps led to decades of unnecessary fence-building.

Simon Critchley, in Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction suggests:

diagnosed the loss of a common culture and the emergence of two distinct cultures: those represented by scientists on the one hand and those Snow termed 'literary intellectuals' on the other. If the former are in favour of social reform and progress through science, technology and industry, then intellectuals are what Snow terms 'natural Luddites' in their understanding of and sympathy for advanced industrial society. In Mill's terms, the division is between Benthamites and Coleridgeans. —Simon Critchley

That is, Critchley argues that what Snow said represents a resurfacing of a discussion current in the mid-nineteenth century. Critchley describes the Leavis contribution to the making of a controversy as 'a vicious ad hominem attack'; going on to describe the debate as a familiar clash in English cultural history citing also T. H. Huxley and Matthew Arnold.