9th assignment.The Two Cultures: A Response. Visual & Performing Arts

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The Two Cultures: A Response
The intellectual community is not united. According to Snow, intellectual community is divided up into one of science and a second of men of letters or writers. Two cultures, in Snow ‘s language, incomprehensible to one another, intentionally or not, make mutual understanding, if not respect, largely unfeasible. For science community, facts in natural reality defines human experience and condition. For men of letters community, however, social reality does not only define human life but, more important, shape world reality – to a notable exclusion of natural reality. This divide is widening, not narrowing, given current educational system.
The consequences for such a divide are far reaching and numerous. First, knowledge cannot be complete, argues Snow, if understanding world reality perceived from a scientific or literary perspective alone. That is, knowledge, ideally integrated, is becoming more and more specialized in harmful ways: “Somehow we have set ourselves the task of producing a tiny élite
– far smaller proportionately than in any...