The Two Cultures

                                                                   The Two Cultures

We are living in alarming times with the fawning courtiers of Prime Minister Modi  raising a toast to him on daily basis , raising a halo round him as the savior of the country and turning him to be , the  new messiah, made in God’s image. The latest paean from an acolyte of Modi in a Sunday article in a leading newspaper is about the PM’s insightful effort to shape the nation’s future with a blend of technology and cultural rootedness. For him and for many hundreds of the aficionados of Modi, the solution on offer from the PM is a simple arithmetic equation: science + tradition. They view tradition and scientific culture as two sides of the same coin- being austere, strict and related to a perceptible world, truer to fact and far removed from the world of the “loose and bohemian”( terms used by the above mentioned writer)  humanistic culture that rests on libertarianism, belief in free will, in freedom of thought and expression and creative imagination. I only hope that PM does not have the time for these flatterers and perceive the inherent flaw cloaked in such flattery.

 The term “Two Cultures” was first coined by C.P. Snow who had the distinct advantage of being both a scientist and a novelist. Snow did not pit one against the other as both the cultures make distinctive contribution to the progress and development of the society.  The humanistic culture originated from a world of words seeking to express reality through language. Till the 17^th century, it dominated all discourses that encompassed the whole of human experience. For example, painting before the advent of modern art was “an illustration of verbal concepts- a picture in the book of language.”(George Steiner). All those pre- Modern paintings could be titled and could be seen as rendering a verbal account through colours and lines.  Similarly music was always set to a text or programmed to articulate a formal occasion or situation. For example the Bhakti movement in India was known for its music in praise of God. Music was the text rendered into soulful ragas. The word dominated all discourses in philosophy, ethics, economics, sociology and literature. All these changed after the 17^th C with the slow and steady advancement in science and technology, though it did not result in the banishment of humanistic culture. Today economics, sociology and social sciences are becoming more statistics and mathematics oriented and unlike the classic works of economists like Adam Smith, Ricardo, Marshal and  Malthus,  a number of modern economists have made economics approximate to mathematics replacing words by equations. (Keynes was an exception as he straddled between the humane and mathematical branches of economics). Sociologists have replaced words by graphs and statistical tables and even when they use word, their writings use the vocabulary of sciences. In a brilliant essay The Retreat from the Word, Steiner writes: “… sociology borrows what it can from the vocabulary of the exact sciences. One could make a fascinating list of these borrowings… norms, group, scatter, integration, function, co-ordinates”. Even Philosophy that had from the time of Plato and Aristotle relied upon words to apprehend the truth beyond the pale of facts, has come closer to mathematics with Descartes’s efforts to link eternal truth with mathematical proof. Spinoza recognized  precision, certitude and logic in mathematics that he turned philosophy into verbal mathematics, organizing ethics into” axioms, definitions, demonstrations and corollaries”. Modern art with its slogan “to make everything new’” changed realistic art from being “an illustration of verbal concepts”. The Impressionists and the post-Impressionists that include Cubists, Fauvists, Expressionists, Surrealists etc painted not what they saw but what they felt. This is the new art that transcended words and tried to capture feelings beyond reality. Musical notations approximate to mathematics that one notices in the works of Mozart, Hayden and Beethoven.  Much of music and art produced in modern times are notable for their technical virtuosity rather than relate to any exterior intelligibility.  In all these we notice  that words are being supplemented by non verbal language that belongs to the domain of science and mathematics. The two cultures are not opposed to each other. But a new literacy has come into existence where words have shrunk in potency but strengthened by the language of science and culture. Mathematical formulae and equations, graphic and statistical displays, electronic and chemical equations that are precise and exact complement words bringing about a fusion of the two cultures. There is no need to mark one as superior to the other. In Snow’s words: “a man who has  read no Shakespeare is uncultured, but not more so than one who is ignorant of the Second Law of thermodynamics. Each is blind to a comparable world.”

Unfortunately with partial knowledge of the concept of two cultures, our present day intellectuals speak of them as antipathetic to each other and deride those who favour freedom of thought and speech as “loose” and “bohemian” and applaud those who misunderstand the rigidity of tradition to be the same as the rigour and precision of science. We have to liberate our minds from pseudo- intellectualism that refuses to see anything except in black and white. It is in the shades of grey that one notices the commingling of the two cultures. Disproportionate praise of the PM by his ardent admirers founded on partial understanding of the two cultures is harmful and has the danger of  evolution of  a new world of cultural illiteracy that has a blinkered view  about the two cultures so essential for the regeneration and progress of humankind.