Britain’s academic split: problem-solving v problem-wallowing

FEW LECTURES have had as much impact as C.P. Snow’s on “two cultures”, delivered in Cambridge in 1959. Its thesis was that Western intellectual life was divided into two mutually uncomprehending camps—the sciences and the arts—with arts graduates disdainful of culturally illiterate scientists, and scientists astonished that arts graduates had no clue about the second law of thermodynamics. (Snow, as both a chemist and a novelist, had a foot in both camps.) It provoked a vituperative response from F.R. Leavis, an English-literature don, who described his Cambridge colleague as being “intellectually as undistinguished as it is possible to be”, but was largely greeted with rousing applause as an intellectual landmark and a call to action.