The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution [Hardcover]

C. P. Snow (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 58 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press (1960)
• Language: English
• ASIN: B00005X1A3
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #509,297 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lectures that are too true, December 4, 2002

By 

Bruce P. Barten (Saint Paul, MN United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (Hardcover)

This book is so small and old, anyone ought to be able to read through it quickly and see how little knowledge of each other so many people who have to function within our society actually have. The author and lectures were set in England, back in 1959, three years after an article called `The Two Cultures' had been published in New Statesman. "There are about fifty thousand working scientists in the country and about eighty thousand professional engineers or applied scientists. During the war and in the years since, my colleagues and I have had to interview somewhere between thirty to forty thousand of these--that is, about 25 per cent." (p. 12). The norm seemed to be: "The degree of incomprehension on both sides is the kind of joke which has gone sour." (p. 12) This is the basis on which I base my claim that we are all living in a very comic society: the thing that we have in common is that we know different jokes. Any individual who can be characterized can be caricatured to the point of absurdity, and everyone else will understand the absurdity more than any particular aspect of being.

I consider myself a polymorphously perverse form of baby boomer humor: born after World War II, son of the clergy from farm families, educated in engineering and law, draftee with Nam service in the post-Tet quietus, often out of work, intellectually comfortable with books that no one is even trying to understand anymore. I know this book is a classic for sociological thought about modernity. The least surprising thing about this book is that the reference to "the kind of joke which has gone sour" followed a joke, at the beginning, about "one of the more convivial Oxford great dons . . . came over to Cambridge to dine. The date is perhaps the 1890's. . . . He addressed some cheerful Oxonian chit-chat at the one opposite to him, and got a grunt. He then tried the man on his own right hand and got another grunt. Then, rather to his surprise, one looked at the other and said, `Do you know what he's talking about?
" `I haven't the least idea.'
"At this, even Smith was getting out of his depth. But the President, acting as a social emollient, put him at his ease, by saying, `Oh, those are mathematicians! We never talk to them'." (pp. 3-4).

These lectures have a tremendous amount of charm, but they remind me of how poorly society is capable of talking about important things, politics, or things that transcend politics, like a state of collapse that is sure to result from having extremely large short-term financial obligations with high interest rates (mostly demanded from countries which are falling behind) rapidly leading to a situation with absolutely no liquid assets. One of the main reasons this situation can not be discussed is because no one knows who is going to be stuck dealing with it. The suspense is making complacency difficult, if not impossible, as we all wait until everybody sees the whole thing happen in slow motion, which won't be until long after the big collapse. There is no index and the notes to this book are mostly informative. Note 18: "The number of engineers graduating per year in the United States is declining fairly sharply. I have not heard an adequate explanation for this." (p. 57). I'll bet it was because the engineering students found out that most engineers are not highly paid, and the engineering professors didn't know anything that was worth any money to anyone who wanted to work outside of a few major specialties like chemical and electrical that required sophisticated skills. Compare what you know about economic growth with "The latest figures of graduates trained per year (scientists and engineers combined) are roughly U.K. 13,000; U.S.A. 65,000; U.S.S.R. 130,000." (n. 19, p. 57). The lectures were a few years after the space race started when Sputnik went into orbit on October 4, 1957, and America decided to race for the moon. Snow might have been happier if the world had opted for a longer term goal of economic abundance. "This disparity between the rich and the poor has been noticed. It has been noticed, most acutely and not unnaturally, by the poor. Just because they have noticed it, it won't last for long. Whatever else in the world we know survives to the year 2000, that won't. Once the trick of getting rich is known, as it now is, the world can't survive half rich and half poor." (p. 44)