Multi-Culturalism Redux: Science, Law, and Politics

A third of a century has now passed since the British writer C.P. Snow sounded an alarm about the "two cultures" problem. By "culture," he meant both a course of intellectual development and "a group of persons living in the same environment, linked by common habits, common assumptions, a common way of life" -definitions that will adequately serve my purposes here. Snow wrote of the "gulf of mutual incomprehension" yawning between the cultures of science and of literature, which he called "traditional" culture. Literary intellectuals' misunderstanding of science, he noted, often verged on "hostility and dislike.

"'