Christopher Giofreda
The New Yorker’s “The End of the English Major” went viral February 2023. Maybe you’ve seen it – and you’ve definitely seen others like it. Humanities scholars seldom encounter a new problem, only new age-old problems! Enter Charles Percy Snow (1905-80), a scientist, novelist, and actual baron whose “The Two Cultures,” strikes me as a capable statement of the humanities’ impending demise (or at least its chronic illness). Snow’s ideas of the useful life, and the humanities place in that, are trenchant yet helpful.
Given as a lecture in 1959, “The Two Cultures” is describe thus by Snow:
There have been plenty of days when I have spent the working hours with
scientists and then gone off at night with some literary colleagues. I mean that
literally. I have had, of course, intimate friends among both scientists and
writers. It was through living among these groups and much more, I think,
through moving regularly from one to the other and back again that I got
occupied with the problem of what, long before I put it on paper, I christened to
myself as the ‘two cultures’.
Snow, who is about to go hard in the paint on literary types, lets readers know that there is nothing that makes us less capable than scientists. Generous! He also says that they make about the same incomes. Quaint. Nevertheless, he notes the widening fissures. Snow writes, “I believe the intellectual life of the whole of western society is increasingly being split into two polar groups.” The sixty years since have proved him prophetic. A lack of cross-pollination is everywhere evident from the journals we select to the separate buildings we occupy. We reinforce the gap through architecture; we reinforce the gap through language. Saddest of all, Snow argues, the two cultures are divided on a moral axis.
Snow, who generalizes to make his point, sees scientific culture as willing to struggle against humanity’s biggest problems – especially gaps in food security and life expectancy. He condemns the literary culture for falling into a “moral trap”, where one is “tempt[ed] to sit back, complacent in one’s unique tragedy, and let the others go without a meal.” Where does the “English Major” stand on the matter of complacency vs. public service? On optimism vs. pessimism? Who has, as Snow asks, the future in their bones?
The New Yorker article shows that students, especially the children of immigrants, take an acquisitive tone. They tend to align themselves with professional motives. The humanities should send a powerful signal that we are not mere plaintiffs crying over the culture. We seek meaningful participation at a profit to ourselves and the community. Let us undo the parody of the optimistic scientist and the pessimistic humanities scholar. We have much trepidation and joy in common. Let us follow Snow’s injunction to communicate with the other culture in interesting ways. Scientific minds of high caliber require the humanities and vice versa. We need deliberative rhetoric with a humanistic rationale. Humanities scholars can learn a lot about our own excesses and defects from the criticism of our neighbors. The humanities need not have waited for the social corrective of decreasing enrollments to understand its diagnosis. Nevertheless, we have been dying for a long time and it isn’t ever terminal with us.