A Complete Education

A Theory of the Two Cultures: A Polemical Introduction

I.

Why is it, these days, that scientists and humanists seem so often baffled by each other?

A little reading suggests this wasn’t always so. In the not-too-distant past, the kinds of human inquiry exemplified by the Two Cultures were enjoined in a single system, a framework in which there was “a place for everything, and everything [was] in its right place.”

Of course, this system takes different forms in different cultures. The form it took in western society was the Church.

For a long time the Church was the institution which offered relatively balanced meals of the mind, with options should a person prefer one part of the meal to another. There was the elaborate, many-course, doctrinal cuisine for those with more scholarly tastes, those who tried to understand what, exactly, the nature of God, the world, and belief consisted in; the very same institution also fed and satisfied adorers of the hearty soup of the soul— those who especially loved the art and music, the ecstasy of simulating Pentecost.

Most importantly, however, despite any differences in ability or temperament, those who dined together were discouraged from denigrating their neighbors — the logician served the Church one way, the hymnist another — because at the end of the day they sat at the same table of worship. Exclusion from the table, in those days, was a grave error.¹

This repast table wasn’t always a metaphor, though I’ve used it that way.² What the table really stands for is the unifying cultural framework of a society. And as this repast table may well be regarded as a cognitive artifact, I think it is fair to call it a “Superstory”. A Superstory is the socio-cognitive place where everyone sits.

Superstories cohere societies by acting as surfaces on which to rest statements of natural explanation and psychological assurance, among other things — and not just by forming distinct “bowls” for each “food group”, but also by bringing all those bowls into one place.

But this doesn’t seem to be the case anymore.

Lately we’ve come to see assurance and explanation as separate and non-overlapping things— as distinct cognitive nutrients, so to speak. While we today indeed nibble on a variety of cognitive food groups, ne’er again, we seem to have decided, shall they all be found on the same table.

Now logicians and hymnists jeer at each other from across the cafeteria, each eating the sparse diet prescribed by their peers. Imbibing anything less than perfectly logical thought is wasteful for one; anything which lacks apparent beauty is believed to be soul-corroding by the other. If anything still seems to bind the two… it is probably malnutrition.

Having noticed this split in modern thought, as well as recent cultural misapprehensions, some have recently asked: why is it that our own society lacks its own all-encompassing Superstory, one which unites the best of recent scientific ideas with the best of current moral and psychological insight?

As it turns out, answers to this question have been around for a while. Within secular quarters (where declining church attendance may not be so concerning), such answers can be found in a blame game between the Two Cultures.

One kind of answer squarely lays the fault with “literary intellectuals”. After all, they’re who we think should collect and expand cultural sentiments by, for example, writing things like civilization-defining epics. As Samuel Johnson put it in his Lives of the Poets entry on Milton:

“By the general consent of criticks, the first praise of genius is due to the writer of an epick poem, as it requires an assemblage of all the powers which are singly sufficient for other compositions. Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth, by calling imagination to the help of reason. Epick poetry undertakes to teach the most important truths by the most pleasing precepts, and therefore relates some great event in the most affecting manner.”

An epic is a strange, perhaps archaic, measure of artistic caliber. Do we really need it today? Nonetheless I think there’s some truth to what Johnson says, and we can read of the changes in thinking which epics brought about in the societies they emerged in. Yet few such epics have recently swept the (ever-dwindling) board of popular readership. So perhaps our own literary intellectuals must not be doing their jobs; or maybe, for whatever reason, the best of them aren’t emerging into the limelight.

But maybe this task is impossible in this day and age! Maybe there just aren’t genuinely new moral or psychological insights uniquely suited to our time, and which are large enough to merit the adjective “universal”. The only place ideas like ‘universality’ or ‘objectivity’ belong now is in science or math, right? So why is it surprising that writers and poets now pen diminutive books in which they magnify the small and add weight to the domestic, all the while leaving Nature and our technological surroundings still undressed with human meaning?

An accuser of literary intellectuals may also point out the usual reply of a wordcel pressed into a corner, who out of habit repeats the notion that “people have always been people” and that “technology doesn’t change our psychological needs”— and so, therefore, that a new kind of literature to “assure” us in our technological age isn’t produced because it isn’t needed. There are plenty of written epics to choose from, and they are in no way deficient at what they set out to do; why do we need new ones?

So we come to the second sort of answer as to why we postmoderns don’t have a Superstory; this time, the finger is pointed at the second, “scientific” Culture.

Technologists, we hear, are bulldozing human feeling in their attempts to advance progress; they routinely fail to notice the hazards of the spark of “civilizational agency”, and forget the terrible responsibility required to leash the immense power unearthed by exploration— the cost of losing our grip is paid by people, of course, as well as this one here planet of ours.

A well-read accuser of the scientific Culture may even acknowledge that attempts at secular Superstories were or are being made, often by technologists themselves, but that their maybe-sound ideas tend to be limited by poor presentation— that their solemn scientific thoughts are mired in constipated prose and bound by kitschy covers, attracting the bug-eyed denizens of comic-book stores but not the polished literati who have real taste, and who really know what being human is like.

All venom aside (and there is plenty of venom), the literati probably have a point. It’s probably true that even the most earnest technologists remain ineffective because they haven’t touched what really spurs people to action: not knowledge or complicated models, but love and cameraderie, and a sense of at-homeness in the universe. Only once such common feelings have been produced can threats to such feeling be viewed with necessary urgency.

The Superstories of the second culture, in other words, lack the property of psychological assurance. And what’s needed for this, at a minimum, is a delicate but sure command of language.

Some affiliates of the scientific culture, in reply to these charges of unsophistication, say they’ve resorted to unfamiliar arts because humanists of recent times don’t seem cut out to do their jobs. That is, literary intellectuals today don’t seem to have grasped the sciences firmly enough to do poetry with them.

Take for example this snippet from J.B.S Haldane (one of the foremost scientists of the 20th century), who presaged the “two cultures” in a piece written almost 100 years ago:

…I should like to consider very briefly the influence on art and literature of our gradual conquest of space and time. I think that the blame for the decay of certain arts rests primarily on the defective education of the artists… Now if we want poets to interpret physical science as Milton and Shelley did (Shelley and Keats were the last English poets who were at all up- to-date in their chemical knowledge), we must see that our possible poets are instructed, as their masters were, in science and economics. I am absolutely convinced that science is vastly more stimulating to the imagination than are the classics, but the products of this stimulus do not normally see the light because scientific men as a class are devoid of any perception of literary form…

…Not until our poets are once more drawn from the educated classes (I speak as a scientist), will they appeal to the average man by showing him the beauty in his own life as Homer and Virgil appealed to the street urchins who scrawled their verses on the walls of Pompeii. [bolds mine]

J.B.S. Haldane — “Daedalus; or, Science and the Future”

If Haldane is right, we lack a “modern synthesis”³ of science and poetry because of a weakness in modern poets. And although I’ll refrain from endorsing Haldane’s accusation straight out, it has, I think, some truth to it. There does seem to be a quality of exceeding complication and abstraction to the science of the last century, compared to what came before. Maybe technology has grown so dramatically complex that fewer modern artists are able to perform one of their ancient roles— that of renovating our inner worlds to accommodate the material change around us.⁴

So maybe it’s true that artists need a firmer grip on what exactly recent material change consists of; perhaps they need a stronger basis in natural explanation. The diminutive turn in the arts I mentioned above could be a direct result of feeling locked out of the physical universe, of feeling that the project of psychological assurance has nothing whatsoever to do with whatever scientists and technologists are doing.

And this is just the attitude that at least I, personally, am tired of.

So the following study is my attempt, the result of some limited, solitary, but careful reading, to get to the bottom of how the aforementioned Cultures became two. This study will involve theories of what connects the humanities and sciences as well as considerations of why their operations differ so much.

This study will partly consist of an exploration of the function of poetry, our most ancient medium for myth (and, probably, the most ancient member of the humanities). I see my project as an extension of what the literary critic I.A. Richards outlined in his 1926 book Science and Poetry (bolds mine):

For in order to show how poetry is important it is first necessary to discover to some extent what it is. Until recently this preliminary task could only be very incompletely carried out; the psychology of instinct and emotion was too little advanced; and, moreover, the over-simple assumptions natural in prescientific enquiry definitely stood in the way.

Neither the professional psychologist, whose interest in poetry is frequently not intense, nor the man of letters, who as a rule has no adequate ideas of the mind as a whole, has been equipped for the investigation. Both a passionate knowledge of poetry and a capacity for dispassionate psychological analysis are required if it is to be satisfactorily prosecuted.

To unite modern “ideas of the mind” with certain critical formulations of poetry is just my aim in this series, much as it was (to a more rudimentary extent) for Richards. The study of the mind has come a long way since the 1920s, though still, perhaps, not far enough; as such even 100 years on I can’t claim to speak with the voice of consensus, merely the voice of curiosity.

And because my purpose here is so open-ended, I won’t be critiquing either of the frameworks I’ll bring to bear in what follows, not the theory of mental function (predictive processing) nor the theory on the function of poetry (what’s been called the Horatian formula). Both ideas have their own issues, but my task will simply be to see how far we get taking them together.

This forthcoming series will also include an attempted revision (or update) of Sellar’s ideas of the manifest and scientific images; I will try to define what math and poetry have in common as kinds of languages for summoning certainty, while distinguishing between what they do differently; I will compare the works of thinkers living at the end of the medieval period, mainly Milton and Galileo, to discuss the fragmentation of that bygone time of intellectual harmony; and it’s currently my intent (though I’m unsure what final form it will take) to finish the series by considering the proper place of wonder in science and society.

But before I close this introduction, I think it’s worth making some small gestures at the true size of the problem I’m interested in here.

The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw rapid mechanization—technology that was mainly atom-based—causing disruptive changes to the daily lives of many people, as well as, of course, bettering those lives along many material dimensions. This was the progress which led to the Fritz-Haber process, which greatly increased crop yields and is now responsible for at least half the nitrogen in the bodies of all living humans; it was a similar kind of progress that led to unspeakable devastation in the World Wars, and to the “triumph of the technician over the warrior” once spoken of by Ernst Junger.

Though the characteristic form of technological change today may be in the world of bits, it’s possible to see the confusion we live with now as being prefigured 100 years ago. Yet today’s confusion is maybe even more intense, since it no longer strikes at our bodies in an unending stream of bullets, but instead inundates our minds with an unending stream of data. Today the confusion has been tracked inside the house, so to speak, inside the abode into which Art once burrowed to escape industrial change. And it’s increasingly my belief (as a Gen Z child-of-the-internet with archaic inclinations) that our very perceptions and imaginations—the sources of criticism and curiosity which form the bases of science and art (as Steinbeck put it)— threaten to change, even wither, if we can’t become aware of what’s happening to us.

Today much the same problem presents itself as the early 1900s— though perhaps more profoundly— of how to integrate scientific developments into the human world of meaning and motivation. And all these parallels between now and then encourage us to use work from the early 1900s, like those quoted above, as our reference points for questions on the two cultures, though we’ll certainly go further (much further) into the past in pursuit of answers.

Lastly, some pre-emptive caveats and promises. As a poetry-loving early-career neuroscientist, it may seem too early or naive for me to weigh in on such an expansive topic. I haven’t read enough, written enough, or done enough experiments, or something. But I simply felt it was too irresistible for me not to form my own opinions. Hopefully these opinions of mine stay moderate ones, well in line with what that ancient arch-moderate once wrote about the rich and poor of Athens:

I stood with a mighty shield in front of both classes,

And suffered neither of them to prevail unjustly.

So too, do I promise to handle the Two Cultures.

***

1. For yet another metaphor on the unity of the cognitive cultures in the Church, here’s the Apostle Paul.

2. See The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome, Book 3, chapter VII: “The Religion of the City”. Here is how the section starts:

The principal ceremony of the city worship was also a repast… it was partaken of in common by all the citizens, in honor of the protecting divinities. The celebrating of these public repasts was universal in Greece; and men believed that the safety of the city depended upon their accomplishment.

The Odyssey gives us a description of one of these sacred feasts: Nine long tables are spread for the people of Pylos; at each one of them five hundred citizens are seated, and each group has immolated nine bulls in honor of the gods. This repast, which was called the feast of the gods, begins and ends with libations and prayers. The ancient custom of repasts in common is also mentioned in the oldest Athenian traditions.

3. Sorry, biology joke

4. It just so happens that much material change today is driven by our own activities; Nature was the old innovator, after all, but her sense of novelty often proved a little… calamitous. While it’s good we upped our game, it remains to be seen whether our own sense of novelty is less hazardous!