Cynthia Ozick in her essay "Crocodiled Moats in the Kingdom of Letters" argued that C.P. Snow and F. R. Leavis were in the long-run both wrong. Snow at the time was already wrong, and should have known(probably did know) better: "[W]e had already had well over a hundred years to get used to the idea of science as a multi-divergent venture--dozens and dozens of disciplines, each one nearly a separate nation with its own goverance, psychology, entelechy." Yet, Ozick, insisted that natural science nonetheless had a kind of polythiesm or animism that held its disparate parts together.
Leavis, on the other hand, at the time was right--there really was one culture of the humanities--the belles-lettres--that held it together. But this is now lost, she laments. Instead, "the culture of the humanities has split and split and split again, always for reasons of partisan ascendancy and scorn." Novelists, poets, journalists, and critics are divided from each other in their sour professionalism. Furthermore, there is no longer a unifying theory or philosophy that offers a center around which to gather even in good-hearted debate.
Is she right? Have we come to a vast broken mirror of a thousand cultures without a frame?
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