Drawing Lines (Part I)

Sometimes, you get the most peculiar things said by academics about their own disciplines. The only thing more peculiar of that general kind is the stuff they say about other people's disciplines.

In 1959, C P Snow created a big problem by delivering his infamous 'The Two Cultures' lecture. This created (or highlighted) a divide between the disciplines (or the 'philosophies of the disciplines' as one wag has called it) that has been a problem in the integration and cross-referencing of human knowledge ever since.

To summarise the problem, let me quote Snow himself:

A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: "Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?"

I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question — such as, "What do you mean by mass, or acceleration?" which is the scientific equivalent of saying, "Can you read?" — not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their Neolithic ancestors would have had.

In a technocratic and meritocratic society (i.e. one based heavily on engineering, science, statistics, and other generally quantitative and objectivising disciplines), a parallel but completely different problem may emerge. This problem is one in which the majority (nine in ten of the highly educated) would not recognize names such as Sartre or Kierkegaard, or would scoff at anyone bothering to read J G Ballard, or would wonder why on earth anyone would read plays by Shakespeare for fun and not for the purposes of some official examination.

Sometimes, the problem is actually one of misapprehension (or apprehension from false causes). The engineer or physicist simply doesn't realise that the basis of his discipline is also a narrative, or relies on the incontrovertible meaning of words in a specialised context. Nobody has bothered to show them Macbeth as a problem in particle kinetics. Nobody bothers to take a work such as Hawking's A Brief History of Time and show how it is science, humanities and the arts all at once.

To do such a thing, lines have to be drawn between disciplines to divide them as well as to make bridges between them. Someone with a passion for both sides of the divide and who is familiar with its sociocultural basis must be the bridge builder. He must literally be a pontifex, someone who can pontificate in the ancient sense, and not the modern.

Take for example the question of the divide between the arts and the humanities. Is there one? Yes. What is its nature? Aha, I can bet you not one in a myriad has bothered to think about it.