\documentclass[12pt]{article} \usepackage{fullpage} \begin{document} \title{Cultural shifts: humanities to science to computation} \author{R.W. Oldford \\ University of Waterloo} \date{July 24, 1999} \maketitle \begin{abstract} It is argued here that the essential phenomenon of import which C.P. Snow described in 1959 as that of two distinct non-communicating cultures -- one of `literary intellectuals' one of `scientific intellectuals' -- is better described as a shift in emphasis within the university culture from a {\em humanities dominated} one to a {\em science dominated} one. Society in general and university students in particular actively participated in this shift. The natural reaction of the student body is to pursue perceived opportunity. The university culture reacted in a lurch from one dominating group to another. The consequent detrimental effect on the humanities at the universities has been regularly argued with passion in the forty years since Snow's lecture. There is now some evidence that another cultural shift is taking place or, in the language of Snow, that a third culture is growing to stand beside the other two. Unlike Snow's vision of a third culture, this one is technologically based and cares little about bridging any perceived gap between the other two. This new shift presents significant challenges to the natural sciences not unlike those presented to the humanities at the last significant shift. Ignore it and the cost to the natural sciences could be great; recognize it and it could be significantly accommodated. Either way, there should be a renewed urgency in the university culture to ask the perennial question of what constitutes a well-educated citzenry. \end{abstract} \section{Shift in culture} In 1959, Snow was writing at a time when the `scientific culture' was ascendant and enjoying great popularity. The twentieth century was a new age of enlightenment likened to that of the Elizabethan, with Rutherford as Shakespeare. Although the twentieth century, and particularly the times between and after the two world wars, had been very good to science, it was not so good to the letters. George Orwell wrote ``The literature of liberalism is coming to an end. As for the writer, he is \ldots merely an anachronism, a hangover from the Bourgeois age, \ldots from now onwards the all important fact for the creative writer is going to be that this is not a writer's world.''\footnote{Quoted from de la Mothe, p. 34.} Overstated perhaps, but it does convey the widely held sentiment that it was a better time to start a scientific career than a literary one.\footnote{This case is convincingly made by de la Mothe.} For the most part Snow's essay on the `Two Cultures' was directed at the `other culture' -- the older, established culture of the literary intellectual. Just look at the tests he applies. It is hard to imagine, even now, that any native English speaking scientist could have made it through secondary school without having read at least one play of Shakespeare (and Shaw, and Ibsen, and Chekhov, ...); but it is still debatable whether a non-scientist should know the second law of thermodynamics (at least as {\em The Second Law of Thermodynamics}). % How about the third law? Especially since soon after Snow's %lecture, knowledge of the first two laws has been put to song by that contemporary, comic, yet cultured %English singing duo Flanders and Swann -- the third law might have been more challenging. A somewhat comparable literary challenge might be having read and appreciated Horace or Cicero. Perhaps the most telling sign of this one-sidedness is that scientists, for the most part, seem to agree with Snow's assessment while humanists have been quite dismissive of Snow's `superficial' and even `silly' dichotomy.\footnote{E.g. Allan Bloom, Russell Kirk, F.R. Leavis, Northrop Frye.} Snow's `scientific culture', feeling its youthful strength and insecurity, wants recognition from the established `intellectuals'. To me, this seems to be more symptomatic of a shift than of a separation. In his rebuttal to critics, written four years after the Rede lecture, Snow struggles to defend his choice of the word culture and of the number two. Parenthetically he remarks that ``No one, I think, has yet complained about the definite article.'' The choice of `culture' is defended by appealing to a dictionary definition meaning ``intellectual development, development of the mind'' and also to the anthropological distinction made between living groups of people. Were he to adopt a definition from Coleridge of culture being those `qualities and faculties which characterise our humanity', Snow admits that neither the literary nor the scientific constitute cultures but rather sub-cultures. In this light, the cultural shift is one of emphasis. In Snow's view, too long has our culture nurtured the literary and starved the scientific. Snow is interested in having the balance redressed. Accepting Snow's choice of the word culture, it is easy to see that the number two could be many more. Every specialization could be called a culture. Indeed, in the forty years that has passed since the Rede lecture, sufficient has been written on Snow's `Two Cultures' that it might legitimately constitute a specialization of its own -- a humbling thought for those of us here who have been asked to address the matter for the first time. Snow defends the number `two' on grounds of simplicity -- it crystallizes the two extremes for contrast. It is interesting that Snow briefly considers three by the possible separation of technology from science. He dismisses it because he has observed that the technologist, when designing a new technology, goes through much the same experience as a scientist in designing an experiment. To this I feel compelled to add the words of the professional chemist, Primo Levi, whose fame is established as a writer. They should evoke kindred feelings from any theoretician: \begin{quote} \ldots I now felt in the writing a complex, intense, and new pleasure, similar to that I felt as a student when penetrating the solemn order of differential calculus. It was exalting to search and find, or create, the right word, that is, commensurate, concise, and strong; to dredge up events from my memory and describe them with the greatest rigour and the least clutter.'' {\footnotesize From {\em The Periodic Table}, 1975, p. 160.} \end{quote} \noindent A more understandable justification would be that technology has so long been tied up with science that its separation seems unnatural to Snow. One thing that the number two has resulted in is an entire cottage industry devoted to finding number three. Snow himself started this. Although `technology' was rejected, in his rebuttal to his critics he did introduce what he saw to be the beginnings of a third culture. This third culture was being formed by the social sciences, in Snow's words those \begin{quote} ``\ldots intellectual persons in a variety of fields -- social history, sociology, demography, political science, economics, government (in the American sense), psychology, medicine, and social arts such as architecture. \ldots All of them are concerned with how human beings are living or have lived -- and concerned, not in terms of legend, but of fact. % I am not %implying that they agree with each other, but in their approach to cardinal problems -- %such as the human effects of the scientific revolution, which is the fighting point of this whole affair %-- they display, at the least, a family resemblance.'' {\footnotesize page 70 of {\em The Two Cultures} second edition.} \end{quote} %\noindent %These are what we now call the social sciences. Allan Bloom, in his 1987 book {\em The Closing of the American Mind}, identifies the big three disciplines which ``rule the academic roost and determine what is knowledge'' (p. 356). These are the natural sciences, which are doing well, the social sciences which are more robust being more in harmony with the natural sciences although in Bloom's opinion they only succeed in ``aping \ldots the methods of natural science'' (p. 358), and the humanities which are languishing having decided ``to proudly set up shop next door'' rather than to ``humbly find a place at [the] court'' of natural science (p. 358). The shift from Snow's view of the cultural problems to Bloom's is staggering. Snow thought that when this third culture came into existence it would serve to ease communication between the two cultures. This was because this third culture would have to ``be on speaking terms with the scientific one \ldots just to do its job.'' Perhaps it has but, if Bloom is correct, the communication sadly ended there. More recently, John Brockman and others have seized on the communication between science and others as the hallmark of the third culture. His third culture consists of scientific thinkers who are able to communicate directly with the lay public. These include well known scientists like Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould, and Roger Penrose, and well known computer scientists like Daniel Hillis and Marvin Minsky. %, and the occasional philosopher and science writer. The primary medium for discourse seems to be the internet where articles and follow up commentary are posted to open discussion groups. (The principal web site is www.edge.org\//3rd\_culture.) Whereas early scientists, at least as early as Archimedes, exchanged their ideas in letters written to other scientists, challenging them to think on them, this third culture purports to replicate the exchange but with a much larger collection of thinkers (scientists and the lay alike). The writers and commentators are the third culture, a culture of individuals whose ideas are reviewed by the public rather than by more traditional (and likely more conservative) peer system. Brockman writes \begin{quote} ``Unlike previous intellectual pursuits, the achievements of the third culture are not the marginal disputes of a quarrelsome mandarin class: They will affect the lives of everybody on the planet.'' \end{quote} \noindent Heady stuff. Absent the internet, and so the immediacy of discussion, and this is just a bunch of scientists, albeit articulate ones, trying to communicate to the lay public. Nothing new to that. In fact Snow had been quick in his rebuttal to point out the existence of such writers as J. Bronowski, G.H. Hardy, and A.N. Whitehead who in ``some of the most beautiful prose of our time'' (p. 63) wrote directly for public consumption. But this is not a third culture in Snow's view, simply additional evidence that science is deserving of the word `culture'. Scientists, curiously, have often not been kind to other scientists writing for the lay public, particularly if it is found to be promoting a pet theory. An early example is Descartes's biting review of Galileo's famous book, the ``Two New Sciences'': \begin{quote} ``... his fashion of writing in dialogues, where he introduces three persons who do nothing but exalt each of his inventions in turn, greatly assists in [over]pricing his merchandise.'' {\footnotesize In a letter to the great experimental scientist Marin Mersenne (1588-1647), dated 11 October 1638 \ldots from Stillman Drake's translation, 1975, p. 388.} \end{quote} \noindent One is reminded of the current and much more public disagreement between Gould and Dawkins where one worries publicly that the other writes perhaps too well. A more interesting, and to me much more plausible, candidate for a third culture is the one rejected by Snow, namely, technology. Not technology as Snow understood it in 1963. Far too much has changed since. And not that of the specialized technology expressly designed to address scientific questions. The critical technology here is the general purpose computer which now appears in schools and homes throughout every industrial society. The ubiquity of this extremely malleable technology together with the instantaneous worldwide communication between its users has enabled the growth of what Kevin Kelly, the executive editor of {\em Wired} magazine, has called the `nerd culture'. Kelly coined the term last year in an essay in {\em Science}. There he described the nerd culture as an outgrowth of science but one which is quite separate from Snow's two cultures. \begin{itemize} \item The nerd culture pursues neither understanding of the natural world nor of the human condition; it pursues novelty. \item Questions are framed so that the answer is a new technology. \item It creates possibilities. \item Creation is preferred to creativity. \end{itemize} According to Kelly: \begin{quote} The culture of science, so long in the shadow of the culture of art, now has another orientation to contend with, one grown from its own rib. \end{quote} If Kelly is right, our culture is shifting in an important way again. This time in a direction which might affect science more than the humanities. \section{The student} Imagine a student now entering university. % in the midst of this new cultural shift. The `nerd culture' is part of his or her culture. It could not be otherwise. %He or she could not avoid exposure to the `nerd culture', it is pervasive %in books, movies, arcades, advertisement, school, and home -- it is part of today's student culture. What does this student expect of a university education? What do we expect of this student? It is a time honoured tradition in academe to lament that students are not what they once were. But this just isn't true in any important way. In terms of intelligence and motivation little has changed since ancient Greece. Students have always enjoyed, and will always enjoy, the contemplative and the puzzling. And, they have always been, and will always be, interested in personal gain -- whether financial, or affiliation with an elite, or fame, or power for its own sake. It is no accident, for example, that students appearing in the Platonic dialogues are intent on honing their rhetorical and dialectical skills so as to acquire and wield political power. Nor is it coincidence that the elite of Athenian society would charge Socrates not just with impiety but also with the corruption of their youth. One can imagine the appeal of a classical education to a youth in classical times. Our principal means to give meaningful power to students is through specialization. Acquiring some mastery of a subject requires spending considerable time immersed in it, exploring a terrain so well that it not only becomes familiar but that one can at least imagine how it might be extended into new territory. This is an intellectual power that every educated person should experience. Even so, a specialization which cannot assure the student a certain success in society after graduation will be avoided, if not shunned. Natural science might still provide that path to success but the nerd culture has already informed students that computer science delivers in spades! It is fresh, exciting, important, modern and has yet to experience its Chernobyl. Like earlier times in the natural sciences, the nerd culture presents an encouraging and friendly face. Internet newsgroups and the like provide a supportive and competitive forum for neophytes and experts alike. Recall nineteenth century science, when letters to Nature might recount the strange behaviour of a gentleman's dog, or describe flora and fauna observed on a trip abroad. Start up costs are minimal. One achieves 0 to 60\% effectiveness in real world application remarkably fast. Many budding computer science students make money with these skills before reaching university -- graduate specialization is unnecessary. Think of the feedback to the student: older generations are amazed and the skills transfer easily to almost any area of application! Intellectually, general purpose computers are machines which manipulate symbols -- some of these just happen to represent floating point numbers. The technology is extremely malleable and so provides a new medium for representing ideas, expressing relationships, and modelling just about anything. The only bounds are the imagination and the finite but very large number of states. This is power -- power with some immediacy. Joseph Weizenbaum expressed it first, and best, as follows: \begin{quote} The computer programmer, however, is a creator of universes for which he alone is the lawgiver. So, of course, is the designer of any game. But universes of virtually unlimited complexity can be created in the form of computer programs. Moreover, and this is a crucial point, systems so formulated and elaborated {\em act out} their programmed scripts. They compliantly obey their laws and vividly exhibit their obedient behaviour. No playwright, no stage director, no emperor, however powerful, has ever exercised such absolute authority to arrange a stage or a field of battle and to command such unswervingly dutiful actors or troops. {\footnotesize {\em Computer Power and Human Reason}, 1976, p.115.} \end{quote} Of course, Lord Acton's dictum applies. That this power corrupts was Weizenbaum's point, applied to the often over-reaching claims of Artificial Intelligence. \section{Challenges} The nerd culture is, I think, a genuine cultural shift. Perhaps not as large as that from a humanities dominated culture to a science dominated culture, but it does seem more a shift than a fashion. How we are to accommodate this shift is a significant challenge to the university and to the natural sciences. The last shift, that heralded by C.P. Snow's Rede lecture, was accommodated at a substantial cost to the humanities -- a cost from which we have yet to recover. Standing proudly aloof, as Bloom said of the humanities, seems a strategy intent on reducing one's influence. And aping the methods of the foreign culture is quickly seen for what it is. Fortunately, there is much in the sciences that is already heavily computational which could easily be, and should be, made more visible to the student. Gratuitous computational use, however, is not on -- aping is aping. In this it is important to remember that, while we may regard the computer as a powerful and even essential tool, in the `nerd culture' it is the {\em raison d'\^{e}tre}, a malleable medium for expression -- in, of, and for itself. The challenges to the natural sciences are: to ensure that science and scientific reasoning are an important part of everyone's education, to attract the good students to the sciences, and to apply scientific knowledge and reasoning to this new specialization. The broader challenge to the university culture is to incorporate important cultural shifts without sacrificing the best of what went before. We have a new shift that requires addressing and we have yet to deal justly with the last much larger shift. The same questions still need to be answered. Northrop Frye argued in 1963 that C.P. Snow's problem of two (or now more) cultures is not a major problem of society. %Northrop Frye wrote about C.P. Snow's problem of the two cultures: \begin{quote} ``It is not the humanist's ignorance of science or the scientist's ignorance of the humanities which is important, but their common ignorance of the society they are living in, and their responsibilities as citizens. It is not the humanist's inability to read a textbook in physics or the physicist's ability to read a textbook in literary criticism, but the inability of both of them to read the morning paper with a kind of insight demanded of educated citizens.''\\ {\footnotesize From {\em The Changing Pace in Canadian Education}, the Kenneth E. Norris Memorial Lectured delivered at Sir George Williams University, January 24, 1963 as reprinted in Frye, 1988, p. 69.} \end{quote} \noindent What should constitute an education? Must specializations be so specialized? And so soon? Allan Bloom suggests that posing some of these questions would be a threat to the peace, yet pose them we must. But where? This series of conferences is important in that they provide a rare forum where scholars from across the spectrum of intellectual inquiry can raise and discuss these and like questions. How to foster the same kind of discussion back at our home institutions is a challenge for all of us. \section* {References} \smallskip \noindent Bloom, A. (1987). {\em The Closing of the American Mind: How higher education has failed democracy and impocerished the souls of today's students}, Simon and Schuster, New York. \smallskip \noindent de la Mothe, J. (1992). {\em C.P. Snow and the Struggle of Modernity}, University of Texas Press, Austin. \smallskip \noindent Drake, S. (1978). {\em Galileo At Work: His Scientific Biography}, Dover Publications, Inc., New York. \smallskip \noindent Frye, N. (1988). {\em On Education}, Fitzhenry and Whiteside, Markham Ontario. \smallskip \noindent Kelly, K. (1998). ``The Third Culture'', {\em Science} Vol. 279, \# 5353, Issue of 13 Feb 1998, pp. 992 - 993. \smallskip \noindent Kirk, R. (1988). {\em The Intemperate Professor and other Cultural Splenetics}, 2nd Edition Sherwood Sugden \& Company, Peru Illinois. \smallskip \noindent Levi, P. (1975). {\em The Periodic Table}, (1984 translation by R. Rosenthal) Everyman's Library, Alfred A. Knopf, Toronto. \smallskip \noindent Snow, C.P. (1959, 1964). {\em The Two Cultures}, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. \smallskip \noindent Weizenbaum, J. (1976). {\em Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation} W.H. Freeman and Company, San Francisco. \end{document} AGNES: THE REST OF THIS IS UNUSED MATERIAL WHICH I HELD IN RESERVE. Fortunately there is much in the sciences that is already heavily computational and this could easily be made more visible to the student. Gratuitous computational use, however, is not on -- aping is aping. It is important to remember that, while we may regard the computer as a powerful and even essential tool, in the `nerd culture' it is a medium for expression. %Requiring computer science courses is only a partial solution and %one that needs to be adopted with care. The challenge remains as to how we are to incorporate important cultural shifts. We have a new shift that requires addressing and we have yet to deal justly with the last much larger shift. The same questions still need to be answered. What should constitute an education? Must specializations be so specialized? And so soon? Allan Bloom suggests that posing some of these questions would be a threat to the peace, yet pose them we must. But where? The enduring attraction of these conferences is that they provide a rare and natural forum for these and like questions. On that note, I thank you for your time and attention. When I look at my university, I see that in many ways the shift has already occurred and continues to occur. Waterloo has a reputation as the most innovative university in Canada. Following Allan Bloom's method, I find that the most powerful disciplines at Waterloo are the Faculty of Mathematics (where Computer Science resides) and the Faculty of Engineering (where computer engineering resides). The term `natural science' is a poor fit to either of these disciplines; even `applied science' does not fit as well as `technology'. The Faculty of Science is the third largest voice and the `social sciences' and the `humanities' are just heard. Born only two years before the Rede lecture, Waterloo has built a reputation by responding to the cultural shift in education from emphasis on the humanities to emphasis on science to emphasis on technology. Science grew substantially in importance in western culture in the twentieth century. The two world wars and the cold war contributed largely to that. The humanities lost ground. Now at the end of the century, western society has governments tumbling like puppy dogs over one another each devoting scarce and important resources to information technology so as not to be left behind. The average citizen is inundated by messages from every direction that the information age is upon us, that e-commerce is the future, that global competitiveness demands that the society be wired, that individual competitiveness demands that you be `wired'. Has our culture shifted? A better question perhaps is how far has it shifted? It is perhaps not so surprising that in this climate the basic research valued so highly by scientists sounds so much like the contemplative research valued by the humanists. So how does all this sit with us at the university? This third culture, if it has any staying power and I don't see why it would not, seems to threaten more the science Again as science was becoming an increasing important part of our popular culture It represents a shift in what is deemed important by our incoming classes, and by society A literary versus scientific dichotomy is not a serious concern right now. More serious is the emphasis on specialization -- within educated circles and within government circles. To me the point of Snow's two cultures is to ensure breadth over the exclusivity of specialization. what are the opportunities for the individual? what does the individual perceive them to be? What should we educators be trying to provide? \section{What is the attraction of science?} Primo Levi {\em The Periodic Table} pp. 45-46 \begin{quote} His father had died when he was a child; they were simple, poor people, and since the boy was bright, they had decided to make him study so that he would bring money home: he had accepted this with Piedmontese seriousness but without enthusiasm. He had travelled the route of high school -- {\em liceo} -- aiming at the highest marks with the least effort. He was not interested in Catullus and Descartes, he was interested in being promoted, and spending Sunday on his skis and climbing the rocks. He had chosen chemistry because he had thought it better than other studies; it was a trade that dealt with things one can see and touch, a way to earn one's bread less tiring than working as a carpenter or a peasant. We began studying physics together, and Sandro was surprised when I tried to explain to him some of the ideas that at the time I was confusedly cultivating. That the nobility of Man, acquired in a hundred centuries of trial and error, lay in making himself the conquerer of matter, and that I had enrolled in chemistry because I wanted to remain faithful to this nobility. That conquering matter is to understand it, and understanding matter is necessary to understanding the universe and ourselves: and that therefore Mendeleev's Periodic Table, which just during those weeks we were labouriously learning to unravel, was poetry, loftier and more solemn than all the poetry we had swallowed down in liceo; and come to think of it,, it even rhymed! That if one looked for the bridge, the missing link, between the world of words and the world of things, one did not have to look far: it was there, in our Autenrieth, in our smoke-filled labs, and in our future trade. And finally, and fundamentally, an honest and open boy, did he not smell the stench of Fascist truths which tainted the sky? Did he not perceive it as an ignominy that a thinking man should be asked to believe without thinking? Was he not filled with disgust at all the dogmas, all the unproved affirmations, all the imperatives? He did feel it; so then, how could he not feel a new dignity and majesty in our study, how could he ignore the fact that chemistry and physics on which we fed, besides being in themselves nourishments vital in themselves, were the antidote to Fascism which he and I were seeking, because they were clear and distinct and verifiable at every step, and not a tissue of lies and emptiness, like the radio and newspapers? \end{quote} \begin{quote} It isn't absurd, e.g., to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end of humanity; that the idea of great progress is a delusion, along with the idea that the truth will ultimately be known; that there is nothing good or desirable about scientific knowledge and that mankind, in seeking it, is falling into a trap. It is by no means obvious that this is not how things are. Wittgenstein. \end{quote} Following shows power associated with education of students of the elite. \begin{quote} The young man who has drunk for the first time from that spring is as happy as if he had found the treasure of wisdom; he is positively enraptured. He will pick up any discourse, draw all the ideas together to make them into one, then take them apart and pull them to pieces. He will puzzle first himself, then also others, badger whoever comes near him, young and old, sparing not even his parents, nor anyone who is willing to listen. He would not spare even the barbarians, if only he found an interpreter ... Plato .. \end{quote} \begin{quote} The following incident may be of interest to readers of Nature. We have a black retriever dog, very well trained. She is kept chained in a kennel in the yard, to which a number of fowls have access. During the last few days a black hen nearly every day lays an egg in the kennel, the dog meanwhile outside. UNless someone takes the egg out directly afterwards, the dog takes possession of it and eats it. This curious proceeding raises the question whether the hen lays the egg in the kennel for the dog's benefit, and whether the dog for her own advantage allows the hen to enter the kennel without molestation. Nature Vol. 89, 192 1912. \end{quote}