Week 1: Two Cultures

Division of UCLA campus 
As a third-year political science major, I am very familiar with the concept of two cultures that Dr. Charles Snow introduces in Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. It is indeed true, just as Snow argues, that people perceive literary intellectuals as a complete distinction from natural science despite their correlation and interdependence (Snow,1959). I have had friends from the South Campus who said that Political Science is not a real science — a fact that I secretly agreed until now. The north-south division on UCLA campus only strengthens such notion. 

Political Science is both humanities and science 
However, after learning that the separation between art and science is a relatively new phenomenon, it finally occurs to me that there may be no such thing as less scientific or less literary, that everything is interrelated (Green, 2014). It makes me more appreciative of my degree and, more importantly, comfortable with my career’s choices. 

 In fact, I can see Political Science possibly being the third culture that would bring science and humanities closer (Vesna, 2001). It is an interdisciplinary field that studies sociology, economics, anthropology, history, and classical theories, etc. At the same time, it also forms hypotheses about the causal effects of certain events and performs experiments that would falsify said assumptions. It is a perfect balance between literary intellectuals and science (McNamee, 2014). 

Art and Science by Kailash Nair
Nevertheless, anyone, who insists on believing that the two cultures are completely different, is only missing out on a particular knowledge. As Snow argues, the separation is contributing to the decline in quality of education and thereby only exacerbates the issues around the world. It deprives students’ rights to study the subjects they like and their chances to find their passions. More importantly, the research found that children tend to have less creativity (Andreasen, 2012). If each culture is so great individually, just imagine what they would bring together. 



Work Cited

Andreasen, Nancy C. “Creativity in Art and Science: Are There Two Cultures?” Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience 14.1 (2012): 49–54. Print.

 Green, Hannah. "Art and Science: Seen as Dichotomous Practiced as Dependent" (2014). Undergraduate Honors  eses. 107. https://scholar.colorado.edu/honr_theses/107

McNamee, Gregory. “Erasing the gap between art and science.” Science Magazine. 2011. Retrieved from http://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2001/05/erasing-gap-between-art-and-science

 Nair, Kailash. "Art and Science."Organizational Development 'Art or Science?'. Linkedin. 2017. Retrieved from https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/organisational-development-art-science-kailash-nair

Snow, Charles. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. New York: Cambridge UP, 1959. Print.

Vesna, Victoria. "Toward a Third Culture: Being In Between." Leonardo. 34 (2001): 121-125. Print.


Comments

  1. UnknownApril 11, 2018 at 8:10 AM

    I totally agree with you about seeing Political Science as being the third culture that bring science and art together. Your correlation on Political Science major, that viewed as a combination of both, has widen my perspective towards our majors on campus, as well as connecting to the topic of "Two Culture" we learned this week in DESMA9.
    Although, the majorities considered them as two separate things, but surely, your blog has changed my vision towards them. You discussed the method that applied in both field and recognizing them as emerging, and at UCLA there are a lot of humanity classes that collides with science.

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