The “Two Cultures” Debate Is Long Outdated

Published in China Science Daily (2019-06-28, p. 5, Culture)

In 1959, the British writer C. P. Snow proposed the thesis of the “two cultures” in a lecture, sparking intense debate. Even sixty years later, the topic is still with us, and seems not to have gone out of date.

But I want to put forward a seemingly out-of-place claim: the two-cultures debate is already passé, and there is not much point in still fretting over the issue Snow raised.

First, let us return to the context of the time and see just what split between what two cultures Snow was actually talking about.

Nowadays, when many people talk about the “two cultures,” they immediately mean the opposition between “science and the humanities.” This opposition is actually rather baffling. “Scientific culture” is understandable enough, but what on earth is “humanities culture”? In Chinese dictionaries, “humanities” means “various cultural phenomena”; in Western usage, there is only the humanities, but no such phrase as “humanities culture,” and the humanities means the academic study of human culture.

Looked at this way, humanities is culture, so “humanities culture” is a tautology; the so-called struggle between science and the humanities becomes a struggle between “scientific culture” and culture itself. On closer inspection, the concept just does not hold together.

As for recasting the issue into the so-called scientific spirit versus the humanistic spirit, or scientific thinking versus humanities thinking, and so on, that is not for the present discussion. Let us first make the “two cultures” clear.

In fact, Snow himself put it very clearly: what he meant was the split between “literary intellectuals” and scientists. These are two clearly defined cultural, or rather subcultural, groups—two kinds of groups divided by disciplinary institutions and identity affiliation.

In his lecture, Snow aimed his fire more at literary intellectuals, arguing that they tried to monopolize the identity of “intellectuals,” because they looked down on scientists for reading too little. Snow asked the literary people whether they knew the second law of thermodynamics, and was met with silence. Snow believed that knowing the second law of thermodynamics should be, just like having read Shakespeare—or, for the British, roughly analogous to a Chinese person having read the Four Great Classical Novels—a very basic cultural literacy. Yet literary intellectuals, on the one hand, despised scientists for reading too little, while on the other hand they themselves were not ashamed of lacking scientific literacy; this caused the two groups to look down on each other.

If one puts it narrowly, the problem Snow discussed is nothing more than the old saying that “literati despise one another.” Among cultural elites, there is always mutual flattery and mutual contempt; only in different eras do different camps stand opposed—for instance, Confucians and Buddhists despising each other, or the Old Text and New Text schools despising each other. In mid-20th-century British elite intellectual circles, it happened to take the form of literary people and scientists despising each other.

Of course, Snow elevated this problem of mutual condescension among a particular elite group to the level of human destiny. This was also closely related to the Western understanding of the social responsibility of “intellectuals.” Snow noticed that many people believed scientists were too optimistic in their attitude toward reality, and thus overly rash. Snow defended scientists by saying that, in fact, scientists are more concerned with society’s predicaments, but when faced with predicaments, scientists do not sink into self-pitying sentimentality; instead, they pragmatically seek solutions. Because they always probe for workable options, they are mistakenly seen as blindly optimistic. By contrast, many literary people lack social responsibility. Snow mentioned that literary figures—including great names like Yeats—produced many romanticized and beautifying depictions of the barbaric and outdated Plantagenet dynasty, thereby misleading people’s values.

So, sixty years later, does this problem still exist? Is there still a serious divide between scientists and literary intellectuals in their responsibility toward human destiny?

Of course, the phenomenon of “literati despise one another” still exists, and with further professional differentiation, the “chain of contempt” among elite intellectuals has become much more diverse. It is no longer only a matter of scientists and literary people looking down on one another; there are now innumerable instances of mutual incomprehension and mutual disdain everywhere: between physics and psychology, between the natural sciences and the social sciences, between classical literature and modern literature, between continental philosophy and Anglo-American philosophy. This is far beyond what “two cultures” can encompass.

However, what deserves more attention today is not these divisions within elite intellectual circles, but a new opposition of “two cultures” on a much larger scale. This is the rift between the entire “elite culture” and “popular culture.”

In Snow’s formulation, the split occurred between “two subjects, two disciplines, two cultures, or, as we say, two galaxies.” But today, the so-called “distinguished people” (the elite) are split off as a whole from ordinary people (the masses).

In the first half of the nineteenth century, with the popularity of mass media such as newspapers and radio, the rise of mass culture had already begun to show itself. But on the whole, at least in the eyes of intellectual elites like Snow, the destiny of humanity still depended on a small number of shining galaxies.

Traditionally, shining ones, galaxies, or stars all referred to the most outstanding cultural elites, the most eminent intellectuals. These “stars” bore social responsibility and guided the future of humanity; therefore, the split that emerged among this tiny cluster of elites was a serious problem bound up with human destiny. The so-called struggle of the “two cultures,” in essence, was a struggle over “discursive power.”

But with the prosperity of Hollywood films in the second half of the twentieth century, the popularization of color television, and the rise of social networks at the beginning of the twenty-first century, mass media fully demonstrated their revolutionary power, thoroughly upending the relationship between mass culture and elite culture.

Mass culture no longer needed the guidance of intellectual elites; elite culture became a niche culture that no one cared about. Intellectual elites hid in their ivory towers, vying for fame and gain, but the masses simply did not care. Even the most famous scientist’s number of fans could not compare with a tiny fraction of a traffic-driven celebrity’s.

Today, the masses do not care about Shakespeare, nor do they care about the second law of thermodynamics. What people argue over is whether they like domineering CEOs or pretty-boy idols, whether they worship billionaires or superstars, whether, when a celebrity cheats, they should side with the man or the woman… Who is going to care about what scientists and literary people are up to? Tu Youyou and Mo Yan may still have a little name recognition, but that is about all; at most, internet users “within Beijing’s Fifth Ring Road” may know a little about them, and mostly they are only discussing some external information. Their specific achievements or works still draw no attention.

“Star” long ago acquired a brand-new meaning. People pursue film stars, TV stars, sports stars; in a broader sense, business leaders such as Steve Jobs and Ma Yun can also be called “stars.” But if some research scholar still wants to place themselves in the “star” category, that would surely be laughable.

Under the gaze of popular culture, experts (brick experts), public intellectuals (intellectuals), all become pejorative terms; “loser culture” is openly promoted, while the word “elite” has instead become taboo.

Under such circumstances, these intellectual elites, already marginalized, still droning on and on about the conflict between science and literature is, like staging palace intrigues in a cold palace, a satirical and sad thing.

Therefore, I believe that Snow’s version of the two-cultures debate has long since become obsolete in our age. The most important cultural split we face today is the division between elite culture and popular culture, the predicament of mutual incomprehension and mutual contempt between intellectual elites and ordinary people.

Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.