Culture Clash

In his 1959 Rede Lecture at Cambridge, C.P. Snow introduced the concept of "two cultures"—a distinction between science and humanities that became widely quoted but lost its original meaning over time. Cambridge scholar F.R. Leavis delivered a scathing response three years later, calling Snow's ideas a "preposterous and menacing absurdity," with their clash reflecting deeper philosophical tensions about how we understand the world.