The Guardian view on the humanities: science doesn’t have all the answers | Editorial
In Denis Villeneuve's lyrical sci-fi movie Arrival, a dozen mysterious vessels from an unknown planet appear on Earth. The military sends in the experts: a professor of physics and a professor of linguistics. Their task is to procure the answers to two questions: what do the aliens want? Where are they from? The physicist asserts that "the cornerstone of civilisation isn't language, it's science". But the linguist is not so sure. She suggests that they might try talking to them. The film gently asserts the possibility that the humanities hold the key to understanding an alien culture - that speaking someone else's language, literally and metaphorically, might be what's required to avert violent disaster.
Sixty years ago last month, CP Snow's influential, much-debated essay The Two Cultures was published in the New Statesman. He wrote of a "traditional culture" that was "mainly literary", behaving "like a state whose power is rapidly declining - standing on its precarious dignity ... too much on the defensive to show any generous imagination to the forces which must inevitably reshape it". He characterised scientific culture, on the other hand, as "expansive, not restrictive, confident at the roots, the more confident after its bout of Oppenheimerian self-criticism, certain that history is on its side..."
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