65 Years “Two Cultures” – Time for a Celebration?
The feminization of academia, empathy run wild, the human systemizing trait as a pre-condition for science and the collapse of the knowledge project
“I believe the intellectual life of the whole of western society is increasingly being split into two polar groups: at one pole we have the literary intellectuals, who, incidentally while no one was looking, took to referring to themselves as ‘intellectuals’ as though there were no others. (…) Literary intellectuals at one pole – at the other scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists.”
C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution
In 1959, Charles Percy Snow, known as C. P. Snow, held a public lecture as part of the University of Cambridge’s Rede Lectures1. Snow, physical chemist by profession but writer of novels by vocation, described a social phenomenon that he, of the rare type of a human that was standing with one foot in science and the other one in literature, had probably more chances to recognize than others. Working his days in a lab but spending many evenings invited to literary circles he was astounded by the alienation between the two groups of humans, the ones from science and the ones from literature, and by the disregard they showed for each other’s field. He broadened this image to the whole Western world and went so far as to call the two groups two different cultures. He painted a dark image of potential bad outcomes of such a crack through the human knowledge project and he considered the Western civilizational project at high risk if it would not insist on broad education of its inhabitants. Snow’s “Two Cultures” had all the qualities of a serious warning.
We are now in the year 2024, 65 years after Snow‘s “Two Cultures” lecture. So, did we listen to his warning, did we improve things, did we unite knowledge, is it time for celebration? I don’t think so. We are in the midst of what many have called a culture war. Looking at it through the simplifying lens of an advocate of the human knowledge project, one could describe it in the following very simple way: We see a massive intrusion of non-knowledgeable behaviours into the human knowledge systems. Lower level functions like group think, a cult of feelings, victimhood competitions and the silent replacement of ethics with a basic mammalian tail-wagging function called empathy have captured what had once been built to search for truth. One could really wonder about that development, because at the same time the information age and its technical advancements have actually built the grounds for high-level knowledge that is finally accessible to all: people have many opportunities to educate themselves via the use of the internet. Unfortunately it does not at all seem as that this access has changed the scientific educational level at the knowledge field of non-math (or anti-math?), that begins somewhere in the social sciences and if conceptualized a bit sharper can be simplified to everything that clusters around the opposite pole of STEM, which we, for our purposes here, will call “the Humanities”. They have become some sort of “measles party” of the non-knowledgeable behaviours, and these behaviours spread and keep on spreading, distorting the human knowledge project, its processes, its knowledge hierarchies and its credibility.
But who is responsible for the misery? Acting, the field I work in, has its little wisdoms to offer. One of them is that the king is always played by the others. Neither those in the Humanities who might not even be able to understand the problem, nor the few activists that push things forward for their indecent purposes are the main culprits of what is going on. The main culprits are those who, despite better knowledge, let it happen. It is those who have both the intellectual capacity and the education to see how wrong these things are. These people have at no time in the history of humankind been many and they have never been everybody’s darlings, so it can neither count as an excuse that they are too few nor that the crowds won’t take delight in flocking around them today. We have allowed the intrusion of anti-knowledge behaviour under the roof of the human knowledge project and a narrative of social peace and empathy conceals the fact that the intruders deny their submission to the procedural rules that are what truly constitutes the human knowledge project. It cannot be declared, it can not be labeled, a stamp on a certificate can not create it, it is solely defined by its processes. Distort them and there will be nothing left.“Letting five be even” is a German idiom that we use to describe the social ability to step away from one’s own rigidities if the upkeep of social peace requires it. But five is not an even number.
It has never been smart to agree to a fight in which the opponent determines the weapons. The human knowledge project has unwisely done that, when it agreed to the fight of knowledge versus non-knowledge by the means of felt opinions. It might be time for the human knowledge project to remember its own weapons. The human knowledge project must fight the opponents of the human knowledge project with the means of the human knowledge project: knowledge. The human knowledge project must find out what is actually going on and then find out how to do it better. It is clear that this work has to be done by those who are able to do it, because the others can’t. The human knowledge project must quit the narrative of social peace and empathy. It must return to its original story. It is the story of light versus dark.
Two Clinics, Applied Unity of Knowledge and a Neurosociological Hypothesis
“Why the resistance? Because the social sciences have been in a grip of an orthodoxy that is scared stiff of biology.”
— Charles Murray, Human Diversity
We are in a moment of history when machines, which had already taken from us the major amount of work dependent on hands, start to overtake work that was till now dependent on brains, and will, similar to how it happened with the hands, do this work in many cases better. So I think it is a good moment to acknowledge that the struggle the human knowledge project once took up with nature includes the struggle with the human structure itself. We have reached a time when a theoretical explanation of a phenomenon on a societal level should include a description on the level of the human nervous systems that interact with it and the genetic structures that built them. In that sense I am convinced that we neither know what a “group” actually is, nor what terms like “sociality”, “ideology” or “functionality of the scientific community” actually mean. We humans tend to walk despite red traffic lights if others walk. That is the first primitive emergence of the phenomenon of “a group”. It might be worth asking if our so-highly-praised sociality might not also be settled on a primitive, subpersonal, neurological level as that of fish swarms and bird flocks2. We could then start to ask questions as if there could be different patterns for what I would like to provisionally label as a “protoscientific neurological predisposition” and alternatively for a “group behaviour neurological predisposition”. And what meta-processes would emerge on the group level if those more similar in these basic structures would group, and be left without external control, only exposed to the processes of within-group-regulation? And what would happen if whatever they did would be enforced by some sort of ongoing incentive? How would that look? Has it ever happened?
When the Viennese physician Ignaz Semmelweis made the unexpected discovery that gynaecologists could save mothers from dying from childbed fever if they washed their hands before helping them to give birth, he started his investigations in a very simple way. He was at a clinic where the death rate for childbed fever was particularly high. He chose another clinic, where things were significantly better, compared them, and found out, that at the other clinic, where it was midwifes that would help give birth, these midwifes did not, like the physicians in his clinic, spend their time in the corpse cellar dissecting corpses, and did not walk upstairs and enter the labour room with corpse slime on their hands3. Investigating our two cultures problem we could do the same. Because we actually have two clinics, the one where it has become very bad and the other where it is (still) better. These are the Humanities and STEM.
So, let’s keep it short: Do we know of any differences between STEM and the humanities? I know of three.
1. Evaluations based on “systemizing-empathizing” theory show a higher density of so-called systemizers in STEM.4
2. There are a higher density of females in the Humanities.5
3. That which shall not be named (the dread I-word: I*gence) is higher in STEM.6
One can consider it as a pure coincidence that each of these three points touches on either a holy cow of our times (empathy! females! ) or at its negative equivalent, a taboo (sex differences! That which shall not be named!). But one can also not exclude that once again in the history of human problems it could turn out that the problem is exactly where we want to question the least. The systemizing side of the human population has been considerably questioned in terms of their special needs concerning human sociality. Maybe it is time to start asking questions about the empathizing side of the human population in terms of their special needs concerning the human knowledge project.7 It should also keep us awake that another theory behind Systemizing-Empathizing theory, the theory of autism, a behavioural image that has its historical origin in children who wouldn’t integrate socially in Nazi Austria8 and Stalinist Soviet Union,9 claims individual differences on the neurological level that resonate quite well with the ideas outlined above.
Who knows what it might lead to if we managed to know a bit more? It could lead to an image of the human that shows an all-humans-encompassing spectrum of diversity of the neurological apparatus. A whole range of adaptational variants for what we all have to cope with: The minimization of confusion in a confused world by a halfways non-confused apparatus, for whom uncertainty reduction might be of higher value than truth, where the ability of a brain to let five be an even number in order to be able to do what the others do might have been a survival condition, and where the neurological less-ability of a minority to do so might turn out as a significant contributing factor for what made the human knowledge project work. And it can, at the present moment, also not be excluded that it might turn out that the uncontrolled clustering of those more similar to each other might lead to such different group behaviours that somebody of the rare type of knowing both groups from inside could rightaway describe them as “Two Cultures”. And academia may have functioned better in the past because it was dominated by highly intelligent, highly systematizing humans, who happen to be mainly males not compatible with the social rulesets of empathy and who would be driven out of the knowledge systems as soon as empathy would start to invade.
Anne Fruetel is an acting teacher and start-up owner. This article is a summary of a longer article that was originally published under the title “A Second Third Culture” on the blog of her company Human Acting.
Snow, C.P. and Collini, S. (2012). The two cultures. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Schirmer A, Fairhurst M, Hoehl S. Being 'in sync'-is interactional synchrony the key to understanding the social brain? Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2021 Jan 18;16(1-2):1-4.
Kadar, N., Romero, R. and Papp, Z. (2018). Ignaz Semmelweis: the ‘Savior of Mothers’. American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, [online] 219(6), pp.519–522.
Focquaert, F., Steven, M.S., Wolford, G.L., Colden, A. and Gazzaniga, M.S. (2007). Empathizing and systemizing cognitive traits in the sciences and humanities. Personality and Individual Differences, 43(3), pp.619–625.
Groen, Y., Fuermaier, A.B.M., Tucha, L.I., Koerts, J. and Tucha, O. (2017). How predictive are sex and empathizing–systemizing cognitive style for entry into the academic areas of social or physical sciences? Cognitive Processing, 19(1), pp.95–106. doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-017-0848-z.
Olson, Dr Randal S. “Dr. Randal S. Olson | Average IQ of Students by College Major and Gender Ratio.” Dr. Randal S. Olson | Average IQ of Students by College Major and Gender Ratio, randalolson.com/2014/06/25/average-iq-of-students-by-college-major-and-gender-ratio/.
Rosenkranz, P. and Charlton, B.G. (2013). Individual Differences in Existential Orientation: Empathizing and Systemizing Explain the Sex Difference in Religious Orientation and Science Acceptance. Archive for the Psychology of Religion, 35(1), pp.119–146.
Asperger, Hans. "Die „Autistischen Psychopathen” im Kindesalter." Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten 117.1 (1944): 76-136.
Sher DA, Gibson JL. Pioneering, prodigious and perspicacious: Grunya Efimovna Sukhareva's life and contribution to conceptualising autism and schizophrenia. Eur Child Adolesc Psychiatry. 2023 Mar;32(3):475-490.
Silberman, S. (2015). NeuroTribes : the Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity. New York: Avery, An Imprint Of Penguin Random House.
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I participate in the conversation about so-called trans "women". Is it empathy to celebrate men as the most feminine of women from the BBC to Time? Is it empathy to put old men into competition with young girls 12 years old and tell them to accept boys and old men in their locker rooms? Is it empathy to tell women that "female" includes men in dresses, some who take estrogen to grow breasts, men who want to badger and force lesbians into sex? Is it empathy to embrace a "transhuman" ideology that categorizes all humans as skin suits? Is it empathy to erase women by forcing the fetishists on society as if this tiny minority is the norm?
What my investigation and experience says from years in San Francisco's bonkersville stew is that these "thought leaders" are simply drug addled. It is driven by men (and a few women) using MDMA, mushrooms (a little) and LSD.
This allows similarly disturbed individuals to find each other online and create an echo chamber in which they take flight into imprinted word salad hallucination-land.
Imprinting on psychedelics is combined with porn addiction in an online relationship between porn servers and the mostly male 😳 progressively degenerating men who seek ever more and more. And pay.
This may be enabled by empathizing women, but only on the back end, I don't see it in the formation very much. Yes, there are women who raise empathy to the point of suicidal idiocy. We see this in the phenomenon of serial killers being befriended by mostly young women who write them. I don't see it as the core though. The core is the psychedelics phenomenon of exaggeration of personality traits, men with fetishes, and the absolute certainty of imprinted ideas that are nearly impossible to shake. This creates a leadership who then lead like pied pipers.
To give a sense for it, in the class I gave, I used the example of John Lilly, MD. John wrote "Center of the Cyclone" and invented the isolation floatation tank. When he was a professor in LA, he came down from an LSD and ketamine trip series knowing the reason for the cold war. This was the 1960's when it was at its height. So, he called the president. It was a simpler time, and he got through to the White House Chief of Staff, who told him that no, he couldn't put him through, he had to tell him what it was about so he could brief the president. So, John cut loose. The Cold War was due to aliens fighting over the earth. There were the good, friendly aliens and the bad ones. To my knowledge, this never affected US Cold War policy, but it was the Strangelovian period when the CIA had to circulate a memo to staff telling them not to put LSD in the Christmas Party punch, because civilians would be there, and were off limits. This was also the time when the CIA was trying to make Bourne-identity assassins using LSD to imprint ideas, and found that the moral compass could not be changed even if the ideology was.
John never shook his idea of the invisible aliens. It is quite reminiscent of angels and demons that are Jungian archetypes and religious symbols. It was there on John Lilly's posthumous web site last I checked, as ECCO, the "Earth Coincidence Control Office". This shows the power of imprinted ideas. They become ground truth, like knowing who your mother is. It isn't just that the person can't fight them, they have zero willingness ever to do so.
Silly men like Michael Pollan "How to change your mind" (on Netflix) think everyone who takes psychedelics will have their experience and outcome. It's perennial in the psychedelics field. It's helped by the self-authenticating chemistry of psychedelics. And it's utter codswallop.
The Baader-Meinhof gang bonded and extremified themselves with LSD. So did the Manson "family". Not everyone is on the same page as kindly STEM academics. John Lilly was STEM. Michael Pollan is not. Both made similar mistakes that cannot be undone very easily. I worry about another Dr. Strangelove era burning through the country, this time exacerbated by the dingbat-matching that the internet provides.
Snow said something else in that lecture, a quote that is very famous:
"A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's? I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question – such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? – not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had."
I think that's even more true today, although the humanities, broadly defined, have become less and less interesting as they've become less and less anchored in the real world, so perhaps scientists aren't following the latest developments. Still, how do we even out knowledge among the "educated class"? Of course, it is easier for scientists to "dabble" in the humanities (playing music and chess, engaging in creative writing or even acting) than it is for those in the humanities to "dabble" in theoretical physics, but there is plenty of popular literature, even about complex topics such as quantum mechanics, that is apparently ignored.
And yet....we need the humanities. We scientists can provide the sense of place that humans occupy, but cannot explain humans, or even very well explain how humans fit into that place. Perhaps the humanities need to take these wild deadend roads of exploration in order to come back around to a fuller understanding of humans, as indeed it seems Anne Frütel is encouraging.