Two Cultures

Abstract

At the Harvard faculty meeting on South African investments in 1979, Karl Deutsch quoted the British author C. P. Snow commenting on the moral shift from their generation to the young people of the 1960’s and 1970’s, who were “very permissive about the sex life of their contemporaries but would not be caught dead serving South African sherry.” But what C. P. Snow is best known for is not his remarks about changing moral priorities from one generation to another, but rather his analysis of a cultural gulf between people who work in the sciences and technology on the one hand and those who are trained in the humanities and social studies on the other. In his novels, lectures, and 1959 book The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution he discussed the vast differences that he observed between the two groups in background, knowledge, attitude, and outlook.