This Focus presents a bouquet of personal essays written in response to re-reading C.P. Snow’s historic formulation of ‘The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution’. Each of the authors, in person and in writing, stands in the vanguard of contemporary science and/or the liberal arts. Their essays, based on Snow’s description of a cultural gap between scientists and the ‘literary intellectuals’, will explore the state of the two cultures today and probe whether the digital age has put our humanist heritage at risk. Six decades after Snow’s presentation, we’ll ask if the cultural split he defined remains pertinent in the age of Twitter – and if our common culture faces greater threats today.

Charles Percy Snow was born in Leicester in 1905 and – like his fictional alter ago Lewis Eliot – determined from an early age to be remembered. The essays in this issue, some 60 years after he first wrote about ‘The Two Cultures’, give testimony that in this respect he has been successful. There is still merit in his essential contentions that there are graduates in the humanities who remain out of touch with scientific developments – and science graduates who don’t read novels. But the world has changed: the computer revolution and the World Wide Web have permitted far broader access to each of the two cultures. While the split between the humanities and the sciences may have grown less, another fissure has become prominent: the sharp divide between those I call the true children of the European enlightenment and those who reject these values, the ‘fideists’. This argument began at Christ’s College, Cambridge.

I support a fundamental principle stressed by the Encyclopédie, that the Unity of Knowledge is the direct consequence of the unity of the human brain. All of us are animated by what Claude Bernard called a ‘kind of thirst for the unknown’ which ennobles and enlivens scientific inquiry. We must humbly confess for now our immense ignorance – ignoramus. But to satisfy Claude Bernard’s ‘ardent desire for knowledge’ we should never say, as some philosophers still do, ignorabimus about the human brain. Thanks to recent developments in neuroscience, we can now propose a common set of brain processes that account for the production of the diversity of knowledge. Thanks to these processes, we can work on a reunification of the true, the good and the beautiful, not as a uniform, monotonous culture, but as a network of cooperative diversity favouring intellectual and emotional exchanges among disciplines.

This article considers the modern-day relevance of C.P. Snow’s ‘The Two Cultures’ while the author, Walter Massey, reflects upon his own personal journey through these two worlds, from his early life as a student of physics, to his current role as Chancellor of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The divisions between the sciences and the arts have been improved over time, thanks to the evolution of both disciplines, the rise of interdisciplinary scholarship, and a more collaborative mindset among scholars of both worlds. Certain shared challenges remain, such as the decline in the perceived value of intellectualism and scholarship among certain segments of society. The keys to overcoming these new two cultures are open communication and transparency.

The distinctive human characteristic of curiosity, once liberated from belief in supernatural causes of natural phenomena, has led with increasing speed to the brink of a world in which humanity will increasingly direct its own genetic endowment, raising the question of what we most value in being human and how to keep faith with it.

In his reflections on the divide between science and the humanities, C.P. Snow made only passing reference to the Cold War context of his epoch. Yet great challenges to science and its impact on human society were being played out in political arenas far from the protected academic enclave in which Snow lived and wrote. This article explores the hostile uses to which advanced science of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were put in the name of national progress and security, and the contributions of philosophers and scientists influenced by humanism in attempting to undo the harmful consequences of such inventions, especially nuclear weapons.

On reading C.P. Snow’s ‘The Two Cultures and The Scientific Revolution’, I was struck by the deep split he describes between scientists and literary intellectuals. One cause he proposes is the age-old specialization of English education, where each of the two cultures has long been segmented into rigidly defined subcultures. I came to learn about UK specialization in the 1980s in Brazil when I mentored a student for his Masters degree based on a study of leishmaniasis and its insect vector, the sand fly. When the student later went to England for his PhD, he was not required to learn about any other parasites – or other any other vectors – to pass his examinations. A different story from what would have happened at the Harvard School of Public Health where, for his PhD, he would have taken a variety of courses and been examined on all the parasites infecting humans as well as all the other insect vectors, not just sand flies.

Reading C.P. Snow’s 1959 lecture, ‘Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution’ in 2017, I was struck by the ways in which the essay, written over half a century ago, addresses issues that I’ve been engaged with for most of my life. Snow defined a world of cultures split between: ‘Literary intellectuals at one pole, at the other scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension, sometimes hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding.’ I’ve encountered this lack of understanding in my own profession and in public life. But it was Snow’s closing argument that really grabbed my attention: he proposed to his Cambridge audience that they had ‘better look at education with a fresh eye’ and that there was a ‘good deal to learn from the Russians’. Not really. If, as Snow proposed, ‘Scientists have the future in their bones’, we’d all do better to respond to the cool reason of dissidents such as Andrei Sakharov and Anatol Sharansky and to recognize the ultimate power of free speech, which only exists in a free society.

The economic crisis in Greece, and the reaction to it by key European institutions, gives scholars a unique opportunity to test the instrumentalist model for explaining the dynamics of political identity. This study seeks to do that, marshalling both quantitative and qualitative indicators of European identity in Greece, and examining how this identity has changed over the past decade under conditions of crisis and external pressure. Do Greeks now self-identify less as European than they used to because the utility of such an identity has diminished? The evidence presented in this analysis suggests that that is the case.

The existing policy and academic debate on the social mobility of Roma have been focused almost entirely on entry barriers (the cost of entry into the mainstream society), whereas exit barriers (the cost of exit from the traditional Roma lifestyle) have been acknowledged and studied to a much lesser extent. In this study we advocate that from a policy perspective it is important to understand differences between the two types of social mobility barriers, as they have different causes and hence have to be addressed by different policy instruments. However, it is important that both types of social mobility barriers are addressed simultaneously, as they interact and reinforce each other mutually. Further, addressing social mobility barriers of Roma requires a change of both formal and informal institutions. Therefore, policy measures have to be implemented and sustained over a long period of time in order to have a sustainable impact on the social and economic integration of Roma.

This article seeks to answer the following research questions: (1) why have the Chechen leaders become extremely religious, whereas at the beginning of the Russo-Chechen conflict in the 1990s, they were predominantly secular; and (2) what led the Chechens to use terrorism to fulfil their aspirations for complete independence from Russia. The article shows that the flow of foreign religious terrorists into the republic, as well as financial assistance to the Chechen population and its fighting leaders, turned the Chechen leaders from predominantly secular ones into extremely religious ones. At the same time, the traumatization of the Chechens by Russia’s disproportionate use of force against civilians was the reason that Chechens use terrorism against the Russian forces.

Alexander Dugin (b. 1962) is one of the best-known philosophers and public intellectuals of post-Soviet Russia. While his geopolitical views are well-researched, his views on Russian history are less so. Still, they are important to understand his Weltanschauung and that of like-minded Russian intellectuals. For Dugin, the ‘Time of Troubles’ – the period of Russian history at the beginning of the seventeenth century marked by dynastic crisis and general chaos – constitutes an explanatory framework for the present. Dugin implicitly regarded the ‘Time of Troubles’ in broader philosophical terms. For him, the ‘Time of Troubles’ meant not purely political and social upheaval/dislocation, but a deep spiritual crisis that endangered the very existence of the Russian people. Russia, in his view, has undergone several crises during its long history. Each time, however, Russia has risen again and achieved even greater levels of spiritual wholeness. Dugin believed that Russia was going through a new ‘Time of Troubles’. In the early days of the post-Soviet era, he believed that it was the collapse of the USSR that had led to a new ‘Time of Troubles’. Later, he changed his mind and proclaimed that the Soviet regime was not legitimate at all and, consequently, that the ‘Time of Troubles’ started a century ago in 1917. Dugin holds a positive view of Putin in general. Still, his narrative implies that Putin has been unable to arrest the destructive process of a new Time of Trouble.