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Russian military leaders have expressed concern about US plans for a national missile defense system. Will defense technology be limited by possibilities for a strategic imbalance? Is this just SDI all over again?

rshowalter - 08:33am May 22, 2001 EST (#4143 of 4145)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

There are many striking quotes in C.P. Snow's The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959) and A Second Look. (1964).

Snow summarized The Two Cultures four years later, and stated his first core argument as follows:

" .... In our society (that is, advanced western society) we have lost even the pretence of a common culture. Persons educated with the greatest intensity we know can no longer communicate with each other on the plane of their major intellectual concern. This is serious for our creative, intellectual, and above all, our normal life. It is leading us to interpret the past wrongly, to misjudge the present, and to deny hopes for the future. It is making it difficult or impossible for us to take good action.

" I gave the most pointed example of this lack of communication in the shape of two groups of people, representing what I christened "the two cultures." One of these contained the scientists, whose weight, achievement and influence did not need stressing. The other contained the literary intellectuals. I did not mean that literary intellectuals acta as the main decision-makers of the western world. I meant that literary intellectuals represent, vocalise, and to some extent shape and predict the mood of the non-scientific culture: they do not make the decisions, but their words seep into the minds of those who do. Between these two groups - the scientists and the literary intellectuals -- there is little communication, and, instead of fellow feeling, something like hostility."

(I'd add that the single body of work where I've found the best and most influential work bridging this gap is the science and health reporting of The New York Times . )

The problem of failures of communication and sympathy- and not just between scientists and literary intellectuals, remain. And continue to be a source of sheer loss to us all.

rshowalter - 08:34am May 22, 2001 EST (#4144 of 4145)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

From A Second Look Chaper 4 : Here is the hope I spoke of in 4129 -rshowalter 5/21/01 9:40pm , that made sense to Snow, that fizzled then, that might make sense now, and might actually work.

" .. it is accepted that, in all non-industrialized countries, people are not eating better than at the subsistence level. And they are working as people have always had to work, from Neolithic times until our own. Life for the overwhelming majority of mankind has always been nasty, brutish, and short. It is so in the poor countries still.

" This disparity between the rich and the poor has been noticed. It has been noticed, most acutely and not unnaturally, by the poor. Just because they have noticed it, it won't last for long. Whatever else in the world we know survives to the year 2000, that won't. Once the trick of getting rich is known, as it now is, the world can't survive half rich and half poor. It's just not on. "

How much worse we've done than C.P. Snow expected.

The Cold War has been a big part of the reason. More generally, failures of human beings to cooperate - which may perhaps be mostly technical failures, have kept the world poorer than seems sane, given technical possibilties that have long been in place.

rshowalter - 09:29am May 22, 2001 EST (#4145 of 4145)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

Exploitation in the Marxist sense has been an issue - as it has been throughout history - but a secondary one. It isn't so much that wealth has been stolen. It is that wealth has not been created, because the cooperations wealth creation takes have not happened often and consistently enough.

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