David Naylor, the president of the University of Toronto, said this week that the international Holberg Memorial Prize of $785,000 to the Toronto social historian Natalie Zemon Davis was a “fantastic boost” to the university’s social science, arts and humanities faculties, which in recent years had suffered a decline in funding and support.
Such a decline has been dramatic in various degrees in all universities in the developed world. When leaders stress the need to be competitive, they mean competitive in math, science and engineering, not in history, the social sciences, literature and the fine arts.
David Naylor said: “How we understand each other on this troubled planet is way more important to our children’s future than the latest digital gadget.”
To many serious-minded scientists this must be self-evident because the development of “the latest digital gadget” does not represent the ultimate purpose of their existence. Still, it was clearly the purpose of David Naylor to plead for a correction in the balance between the two cultures, between the scientist and the traditional literary intellectual, of which C.P. Snow spoke in the middle of the last century. This concern followed the painful shock the West suffered when the Soviets developed the A-bomb and launched their Sputnik. These developments demonstrated that the West no longer had a monopoly in the training of the kind of experts who later made it possible to land on the moon. This was before Japan and China threw down the gauntlet.
In C.P. Snow’s days it was not unheard of for a Greek scholar in Oxford or Cambridge to look down on “philistines” like chemists and physicists with disdain. We now think of the two cultures as consisting of the pure and applied sciences, engineering, medicine and mathematics, on one side – they receive most of the funding – and religion, the humanities and the social sciences on the other.
In recent years the issue of climate change has clouded the picture. The whistle-blowers were the scientists, representing Culture Number One. Their warnings had a dramatic impact on the disciples of Culture Number Two, raising the question in their minds, consciously or unconsciously, whether the scientists were to be believed. One had to keep in mind that on fundamentals scientists all over the world were in agreement. (Let us put aside for a moment such nuisance-issues as misdemeanors at the university of East Anglia, which encouraged the skeptics.)
On what grounds, other than disbelief in science as such, were the scientists’ findings to be doubted? Surely not on the grounds that the matter was too big, too novel or too complicated for ordinary people to grasp. This should be approached, not in terms of politics and public opinion, but as an intellectual issue.
And that leads one inexorably to the conclusion that only on religious grounds can the scientists be disputed.
Should one, therefore, redefine the two cultures as science and the rest of the traditional disciplines – and religion?
