Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Two Cultures are Better than One

I have been asked to read this document in preparation for a meeting of the School Research Committee. It would be cruel to ask you to do so as well, but if you want to, please go ahead. It is basically a proposal for muddling the 'Two Cultures' back together in a porridge by structuring humanities studies around 'evolutionary theory' and stressing that 'evolutionary theory' is a 'form of narrative that functions within its social and historical context'.

I assert that:

Inappropriately mixing poorly-thought-out ideas from biology with the humanities gave us the First World War, the Second World War, and the Holocaust.

Inappropriately mixing poorly-thought-out ideas from the humanities with biology gave us the only comparable man-made catastrophe of the second half of the 20th century, the famine associated with Mao's 'Great Leap Forward'.


Let's not go there.

1 comment:

Jenny said...

I read a bit of this...till the guilt of unmarked exams dragged me away. I had the impression of watching a rapidly moving train, while wondering if the bridge round the bend was out.