The third culture

between Science, i.e. physics, and the Traditional Culture, i.e. literature. Snow’s pamphlet opened a passionate debate about the existence and significance of this entrenched cultural separation. That debate has slowly receded into oblivion. Rereading these lectures today, while several dimensions of Snow’s description do sound dated, others seem extraordinarily apposite. ’ 1 The core of Snow’s argument is simply stated. Following the cue of the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, Snow observed that scientists have a culture not only in the intellectual but in the anthropological sense: ’without thinking about it, they respond alike. That is what a culture means.’2 An ethos informs that culture: pragmatic optimism. Scientists are ’impatient to see if something can be done: and inclined to think it can be done, unless it’s proved otherwise’. ’ Snow captures the physicists ’ stance toward themselves and the world with one of those aphorisms which draw immediate assent but whose ironies and ambiguities return later to haunt one. These men of science, he observed, ’Naturally had the future in their bones’.4 Confident to the point of arrogance, pragmatic, often on the left of the political spectrum, carriers of the future, if not in their genes at least in their labs, these men of science surprised Snow, however, by their lack of Traditional Culture, with capital T, capital C. ’The ear, to some extent, the eye. Of books, though, very little. They are self-impoverished.&dquo; Contemporary participant observation reveals that little has changed in this regard. Spokesmen for the Human Genome Initiative cite Woody Allen far more frequently than they do Thomas Bernhard or Claude Simon. Snow observed that the bearers of Traditional Literary Culture, the other culture, were equally, if inversely, impoverished by their lack of scientific education. While this state of affairs remains more or less the same today, one important thing has changed. Snow’s observation that ’It is the traditional culture, to an extent remarkably little diminished by the scientific one, whic