Arts: The Two Cultures

C. P. Snow, as seen by Scientific American.

In very early 1959, I argued with a pompous headmaster who had a Master of Arts degree, because I wanted to continue my studies in Latin, and also study physics. He rejected my request with a crushing dismissal: “Boys who do physics do not DO Latin!” That was how I became the victim of something neither of us would have heard of back then, the notion that learned society was made up of “two cultures”, the Arts culture and the Science culture.

The divided cultures had been around for a century or more, but the name “two cultures” was only proposed in 1958 by C. P. Snow, a physicist who wrote fine novels, making him a member of both cultures. Snow said that, as the Arts people saw it, the “Arts Culture” contained all the witty, urbane and articulate people.

The “Science Culture” was, according to the Arts people, made up of scruffy men (and just a few equally scruffy women back then) who were incredibly clever about extremely difficult things, but who were absolutely useless when it came to dealing with people. Scientists were stolid and uncreative manipulators of objects, lacking in personal skills.

The scientists were often absent-minded, we were told, where the Arts culture people were clear-thinking. Leave us to do the ruling, puffed the Arts people. The scientists and engineers let this go, but in their turn, they puffed that the Real Work should be left to them.

As a bureaucrat, a generation later, I used my scientific and mathematical skills and my underrstanding of technology, to run rings around some of the Arts types,while the rest collaborated with me: in Australia, at least, we had no Oxford mandarins. Mind you, I had half an Arts degree to go with my science degree and my master’s dsegree, in a weird branch of statistics.

According to the divisive Two Cultures pair of stereotypes, creativity is only found in the Arts people, and practicality lies only with the Science people. Fuelled by these notions, the two camps are encouraged to regard each other with a less than friendly contempt. My regard for people who accept that view is far less polite. To survive and do well, it helps to have a foot in each camp. To work in STEM, you badly need the art of debate, the ability to write clearly, sketch neatly, take photos and more. You need STEAM.

And who says scientists cannot do art?

An exploration:

Can you develop an “Arts Quotient” test, and a similar “Science Quotient” test? The idea is to find questions for which an Arts person is far more likely to answer “yes” (or correctly) than a science person, and vice versa.

Assign a score of 1 for a correct answer to questions like the names of the authors of famous works of literature, or for an affirmative to “Have you attended a live theatre performance in the last twelve months?”, and draw on some of your more arts-oriented friends for further ideas. (The aim is to get a stereotype of the “typical Arts type”.)

Then chase your scientific friends, and get ideas for a “Science Quotient”: maybe things like knowing the second law of thermodynamics, listening to science podcasts, knowing the value of π to five decimal places, things like that. Test both sets and choose the most effective items, then slim the list down to about eight questions for each set.

Now you are ready to go out into the highways and by-ways, scoring each person on the two measures, and plotting the results on a grid (x-axis the arts score, y-axis the science score). What you do with the results after that is up to you.

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