Sam Dresser at Aeon:
When Charles Percy Snow rose to deliver the Rede Lecture at the University of Cambridge in 1959, he had good reason to be satisfied with himself. By sensible tenacity he had reached an upper station of English society, an unlikely terminus for one raised by a lower-middle-class family from a suburb of Leicester. He had grown up surrounded by artisans and labourers, a distant but kindly father, three beloved brothers, and a smothering mother. But by his 55th year, around the time he presented his Cambridge lecture, one could find Snow living in the only red-brick building on Eaton Terrace in one of London’s prestigious neighbourhoods, issuing calmly authoritative opinions on books and politics and science. He was, to his happiness, considered a serious man, with opinions worth hearing.
Of the many opinions he expounded at formidable length over his lifetime, only the phrase he introduced in his Cambridge lecture remains relevant: the ‘two cultures’. Within a few years, his term passed into common speech, and it is still quoted, a lifetime later, by people who have never read a word of Snow. But after more than half a century of overuse, it’s largely been wrung of its original meaning so that today the two cultures refer rather blandly to distinctions between the sciences and the humanities, calling attention to two apparently incommensurable ways of going about understanding the world.
But this is a thin, surface reading of what Snow actually said.
More here.
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