Una versión similar del siguiente texto fue publicada en Infobae el 9 septiembre 2020: la encuentran acá.
Starting from a very young age, many of us have probably created a personal image as a "science-minded" or a "literarian." This image stems from an adult world, made up of parents, teachers and society itself, which imposes, from an early age, an active or passive choice between the two spheres of knowledge, the scientific and the humanistic. This choice is actively fomented through trivial questions like "Do you like math or language better?" or "Do you want to be a scientist or an artist?", as if the two things were mutually exclusive, and passively inculcated, transmitting to children the idea that there is a natural predisposition towards one discipline or another with phrases such as "I can't help you with your homework, I could never do math" or "You're like me, I've always hated English assignments" .
Generally speaking, people believe a person has an interest in science or the arts. People who express affinities with both spheres of knowledge are often driven by the educational system and social interactions to choose just one. Putting the individual before a choice between the two areas of knowledge means presenting as objectively real a separation, and in some cases, an antithesis between them, which instead is not intrinsic, but is socially constructed.
Each of us try to match him/herself and the others into stereotyped psychological profiles people in sciences or in the arts supposedly have. A very clear example is the image of the scientist as not outgoing and clumsy in human relationships, often insensitive or averse to art. Although few scientists may fit this stereotype, many non-scientists fit it too. To this stereotype we add another dichotomy made of clichés. On one hand, a person studying any major in natural sciences or mathematics is considered a particularly responsible person, and it is assumed they will undoubtedly receive a well-paid job after college. On the other hand, if one is dedicated to the humanistic disciplines, the most common prejudice is to consider them a hippie, a person who is certainly less focused on their activities and with fewer possibilities in the labor market.
Charles P. Snow, more than sixty years ago, in the REDE conference The two cultures given in 1959 in Cambridge, analyzes the differences and the relationship between the community of those who dedicate themselves to natural sciences, ‘the scientists’, and the community of those who work with humanistic disciplines, who self-identify as ‘the intellectuals’. He warns society about the division between the two. He calls these two communities ‘the two cultures’, using the term culture in an anthropological sense. Culture identifies a group of people who live according to the same customs and the same values, but heterogeneous in political affiliation, religious beliefs and social classes.
Perhaps we should ask ourselves what ‘culture’ means and surely the etymology of the word helps in this. The word comes from the Latin verb ‘colere’, meaning ‘to cultivate’, and, therefore, in the first place, it is related to a technical activity, that of agriculture, the work of the land. Snow, in the REDE conference of 1963, considers in his arguments the definition of culture given in On the constitution of Church and State by J.T. Coleridge: 'the harmonious development of the qualities and faculties that characterize our humanity'. Scientific knowledge satisfies humankind natural curiosity for the world around him and trains the capability of abstraction and symbolic analysis, while literary knowledge expands verbal capacities and the analysis of the inner world. Separating scientific knowledge from literary knowledge impoverishes culture because it prevents the 'harmonious development' of human capacities. A similar view is already found in Against Method of Paul Feyerabend (1975) where, in fact, a specialist is defined as 'a man or a woman who has decided to achieve prominence in a narrow field at the expense of a balanced development'.
Up to a certain point in Western history, knowledge was not a set of different items, it was not divisible into separated spheres. What we identify with the word ‘science’ was not semantically separated from ‘culture’. Philosophers and intellectuals were also scientists and engineers at the same time. Probably the most known example is the figure of Leonardo Da Vinci. Nowadays, although we know that, if we ask ourselves what culture is, or what something cultural is, many of us will answer: to read a book (and not a math’s book), to go to an art (not science) museum, or to go to a philosophy seminar (not a software coding workshop). The truth is that, even if the two spheres of human knowledge are perceived as intrinsically different, almost two separate worlds, they have always been both human productions, expressions of the same culture.
When, then, the concept of culture started to be associated more with the humanities than with the sciences?
Raymond Williams in his classic Marxism and Literature (1977) analyzes the evolution of the meaning of the word 'culture'. From its strictest and most original sense, that is agriculture and the care of animals, it becomes a synonym of civilization, understood as the development of an organized society in which the individual is inserted. This is possible when, in the eighteenth century, society is no longer seen as a set of relationships between individuals, and it is conceived as an organization of individuals in order to control economic activities. It is in the nineteenth century that the word civilization approaches the semantic sphere of development understood as something collective, social and artificial: the result of science and technology, while the word 'culture' approaches the most intimate sphere of life, of subjectivity, and of imagination and it overlaps with the individual themes that were clearly manifested in visual arts and in literature.
In the last decades, the education system and the job market have seemed to realize the cultural loss that this separation brings. Colleges declare to offer to their students that harmonious developments Coleridge was writing about, and companies announce vacancies for individuals with interdisciplinary profiles. As a matter of fact, the balanced development of our society is not really happening yet.
Although perspectives are changing within professors and scholars belonging to the two communities identified by Snow, it is still easy to find skeptical positions towards one another. Those dealing with the humanities often accuse scientists of being too rigid and overly specialized in a single aspect of a particular problem without being able to perceive the complex dynamics surrounding that specific problem. At the same time, they are forced, often by the funding system, to defend the authority of their studies by claiming the title of 'science' for their disciplines and by introducing numerical and quantitative methods in their analysis. Scientists doubt about the effectiveness or validity of sociological or philosophical theories, because they are not based on the scientific method. The two communities also focus on trying to show society that they are in control of a certain truth. Paradoxically, both agree on the fact that there is no absolute truth, although they justify their position with different languages and motivations. The opposition between the two, therefore, manifests itself, once more, as fictitious, and the antithesis between the world of letters and that of numbers is only apparent.
A more rigid system is still in place within the job market. Those who obtain an education and experiences that encompass more than one field of knowledge struggle to enter the labor market. Ultra-specialized training is still preferred. Very often human resources’ departments require in-depth knowledge of a subarea of one of the fields, they look for specialists even when they advertise the search of holistic interdisciplinary problem solvers.
Returning to the anthropological interpretation of the term ' culture ' as something that identifies a group of people with the same customs and the same values, it is understood that natural sciences and technology have a strong weight in the development of the culture and the values of a country. Therefore, only when scientific and technological controversies and problems are internalized by citizens as cultural problems that concern everyone, the debate can shift from a conflictive approach to a constructive one that provides truly long-lasting innovative approaches to solve many of the new millennium global challenges. We have known that since the sixties, but we have not believed in it enough to shape, in an effective way, our education system and labor market accordingly.