The "Two Cultures" debate ceased to mean anything the minute Quillette used C. P. Snow in order to attack humanities and social sciences and defend scientific racism and eugenics.
It's just culture-war shorthand for "worldviews" that answer neither to Snow's actual descriptions nor to the current realities of research in any of the fields concerned.
Notably, Snow's targets were not social scientists, nor "humanists" in any general sense; notably, too, he distinguished between the situation in the UK and that in the US. Finally, he wrote before most people working today -- and many research fields -- were born.
As with commentators whose only point of reference for political danger is "1984", it might be time for writers whose only way of thinking about different kinds of research is "The Two Cultures" to take the plunge and read a second book.

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More from @mccormick_ted

24 Feb
Introductions and summaries have their place but "don't try to read the primary texts, you won't understand them and it will frustrate you," besides being patronizing, is bad advice.

Reading widely and talking with other people, formally or informally, is often a good idea.
Part of the value of primary texts is that they have been and still are open to different readings. Substituting a summary -- as opposed to using one as a help -- closes off that engagement. If you are curious about the ideas in the first place, why would you want to do that?
I also find that moving from incomprehension to (greater) understanding by working through texts or other primary material -- with helps, by all means! -- is a good part of the value of reading and indeed of education in general. Why would I want to short-circuit that?
Read 4 tweets
24 Feb
These days you get arrested and thrown in jail if you say you're a historian of science or medicine
This is the real reason I haven't been back to the UK in a few years. Outstanding warrant for a tweet about air pumps
Read 4 tweets
24 Feb
So, in sum, a school district made material available and Counterweight helped get it removed and replaced. "Extreme" is vague rhetorical garnish.

I don't see how this is more than an ideological pressure group -- which is fine, but has nothing to do with protecting free speech. ImageImage
I mean, the whole point is explicitly to make things they don't agree with harder for people to access. The comments congratulate them on rolling back CRT "implementation", but that's a red herring -- by their own account, the only "implementation" was making material available.
Again -- if you want to be an ideological pressure group that agitates for school boards to replace things you don't like for ideological reasons with things you do, OK. That's your right. But to pretend this is about promoting free speech or debate is silly. It's clearly not.
Read 8 tweets
24 Feb
TIL that some colleagues think we should start “experimenting” with face-to-face teaching ASAP... to find out whether it’s safe.

I guess this is what happens when the deceased can keep lecturing
Sure, my 70+ mom is still not *old* enough to qualify for the vaccine in Quebec, but some of my colleagues are SUPER TIRED of Zoom, so
I’m really running out of f*cks to give, as they say
Read 5 tweets
22 Feb
Thread on the history of self-interest, drawing on my chapter for a volume on the subject coming out shortly
routledge.com/Historicizing-…
One of the most influential arguments about the history of self-interest as an idea is in Albert Hirschman's book, The Passions and the Interests (1977), helpfully subtitled "Political Arguments for Capitalism before its Triumph".
press.princeton.edu/books/paperbac…
Simply put, Hirschman located the weakness of contemporary economic analysis in a failure to recognize the ideological roots of economic thought. Rather than timeless fact of human nature, however, economic self-interest had been theorized in particular historical circumstances.
Read 20 tweets
17 Feb
This is a great example of invoking "evolution" to obscure historical specificity for right-wing political purposes.

Slavery has taken various forms over time. Slavery in the Atlantic world -- the legacies of which surround us -- was utterly bound up with empire and capitalism.
It is not at all "ahistorical" to connect them.

It is, in fact, ahistorical to ignore the historical contexts in which slavery has emerged and to pretend instead that every instance of slavery over time was same, and had the same, non-historical, "evolutionary" causes.
When evopsych fans call an explanation of a historical phenomenon "ahistorical", there's a better than even chance that what they're offering instead is an outright dismissal of historical contexts and processes in favor of some handwaving bullshit about natural behaviour.
Read 10 tweets

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