I used to pride myself on being “cultured”—knowing not only science but a decent amount about literature, art, the other humanities, and so on (about classical music, however, I’m an ignoramus). Now, however, I realize I’m a total ignoramus, at least according to the New York Times, which recently published an entire magazine on how to be cultured. Not only does it not include any science, but the “culture” it reveals, in its articles and then the 30-item quiz (which I failed miserably) seems to be largely—but not entirely) “popular culture”. Although I keep up as much as I can with what’s going on today, I don’t have much patience for modern popular music and am very selective in popular literature. To me the quiz was telling: it was the paper’s way of telling you what you need to know to be cultured. It’s part of the “what-you-need-to-know” slant of modern journalism, which strikes me as patronizing.
But let’s hear what an aggrieved article in Physics World has to say:
The New York Times recently published a 124-page special issue of its Style Magazine entitled “How to be cultured”. According to the cover of this glossy, ad-driven supplement, the contents were “idiosyncratic” but amounted to a “compendium of what you need to know right now”. The material had been “chosen by experts” for the purpose of “teaching readers how to be more cultured”.
Curious as to what would be included, my hopes were raised by the magazine’s lead editorial. It said that the issue “celebrates expertise, a quality ever less valued in our culture today, where learnedness and firsthand research can be overshadowed by slick presentation and dumb certainty”.
Now, I’m not naïve. I know that the New York Times Style Magazine caters to advertisers, who in turn cater to wealthy readers who feel the need to spend gobs of money to get culture. It didn’t therefore surprise me to have to leaf through 40 pages of adverts for jewellery [sic], champagne, watches and home furnishings before finally coming across the table of contents.
I saw headings for film, food, music, theatre, fashion and the visual arts. Shakespeare showed up several times: over half a dozen plays, sonnet #94 and one of his monologues. There were entries for 1930s movies, animated videos and films from Brazil. One page on food and drink covered porridge from Norway, meat from Mexico, lemonade from Vietnam and wine from Austria.
There was no mention of science in “How to be cultured”, nothing at all
Novels from the US, UK, France, Japan, India and Brazil made the list, as did selections of music from medieval times to opera and hip-hop. Samples of theatre, puppetry and architecture made it in too. But there was no mention of science, nothing at all. The closest I found were architectural materials such as plaster, glass, steel and textiles.
Shades of C. P. Snow’s lecture and book Two Cultures, famous for bemoaning the ignorance about science of otherwise educated people. A quote:
A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s? I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question – such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? – not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.
All of this is missing. Biology is, too. How can you leave out Darwin, gene-sequencing, dark matter, and so on?
You can see the table of contents by clicking the screenshot below, or find the site archived here, though you can’t get to the individual articles. They include:
Film
Literature
Art
Food
Music
Theater
Architecture and Design
Fashion
Each of these has sub-articles. But there is NO SCIENCE!
I won’t go through the selections except to say that while there are some classics (in books: War and Peace, though I would have preferred Anna Karenina; and the 11 unforgettable film performances are decent, with “All About Eve,” “The Wizard of Oz,” “Chinatown”, and “Sophie’s Choice,” though they’re short on foreign films).
As for food and fashion, fuhgeddaboudit it: the wine section, for example, is called “How to sound like a sommelier,” and rather than recommending wines to try, it tells you how to say “sophisticated stuff” about the wine. In other words, the whole section, while good in some places, tells you how to appear cultured without having done the work.
There is simply no way to become acquainted with art, literature, wine, fashion, and the like without having acquired a thirst for learning these areas and absorbing them. It’s in that sense that I object to an au courant list of what the NYT Millennials tell us we need to be cultured, as if you could watch the recommended movies, read the recommended books, and view the recommended paintings, and then be deemed respectable.
Perhaps I sound like a curmudgeon, but so be it. My objection to the whole enterprise is encapsulated in the 30-question “How Cultured You Are” quiz which you can see by clicking below (or find archived here, though the archived version it won’t tell you the answers). An example of the type of question they ask is also given below.
I took the quiz and my score is below: it’s PATHETIC. It even tells me what I need bone up on, including reading Kindred, Quicksand and Passing. And I simply must know these chocolate bars (figure from the article).
Well, that sucks. But my biggest beef is that made by Physics World: WHERE IS THE SCIENCE? How can you be “cultured” unless you know about at least the greatest scientific advances of our age, if not the Second Law of Thermodynamics. C. P. Snow was right, but the NYT (and the New Yorker) ignore his plaint. In the modern sophisticated world that New York supposedly exemplifies, science is not “culture.”
In retrospect, it’s not all that difficult to see where they might be going. Science is about timeless and universal truths,* whereas culture is about current lifestyle and fashion. By definition, apparently, science doesn’t rate.
*Yes, I know that I’m being slightly hyperbolic here.
The question that is squarely about culture is the difference between sour cream and creme fraiche.
No science–is physics, biology, etc. irrelevant?
For the record, the medieval (Western) quadrivium, taught to “educated people” consisted of math, arithmetic, astronomy and music. Seems three of the four are no longer relevant to culture.
Just as disturbing as the absence of science is the absence of history.
Good catch. Arguably at least as important as science, for people who live in a democracy whose fate (and the fate of the rest of the world) depends on our wisdom and knowledge of the past mistakes of our country and others.
“People are painfully aware of the last 24 hours, but completely ignorant of the last 2,400 years.”
Heard a long time ago, I don’t know where.
Yeah, i would have thought that they would list the 1619 Project given the opportunity.
Hear, hear.
All of you are correct. The absence of history (including war) is doleful.
Introducing sections on contemporary technology would have been a means of introducing science/ engineering into the NYT definition of culture. AI, internet, smart phones, and medical technology are some topics off the top of my head that impact culture. For most of us, the technology may as well be magic. Identifying the first movie filmed with an iPhone doesn’t cut it for including science as culture.
I don’t read the New Tork Times, but this all smacks of the old “how to pick up girls” guides that used to abound (and perhaps still do). To paraphrase Billy Crystal’s old Fernando character, according to the Paper of Broken Record, “it is better to LOOK cultured than to BE cultured.”
I have an NYT subscription but I don’t read this type of article. I ignore the style section for the most part.
And “Tork” was a typo, not a joke that doesn’t make sense, sorry!
To BE cultured one would have to be yogurt!
A major difficulty with including sciences (or any other reality-based topics) for the fashionable poseur readership is that it’s hard to fake knowing it. Just learning some trendy words seldom suffices (except maybe for “quantum” 🙂).
The Physics World writer was perhaps too hard on the “wealthy readers” of the New York Times. The comments there mention a number of shortcomings stated here by Jerry and others, including lack of science and the esoteric content. And perhaps the NYT writers have misjudged their readers?
The nyt has done this type of (insert your favorite barnyard epithet here) for a number of years – contributing to the list of reasons that I canceled my hard copy daily home delivery subscription about a decade ago. It was too bad because all my early years I dreamt of, upon retirement, retrieving the morning’s nyt from my driveway, and unhurriedly reading it with breakfast and several cups of coffee. (WEIT has become an excellent substitute)
However I do see some value in this latest farce: it provides an excellent example of a socially constructed entity when explaining the silliness of post modernism. With the exclusion of any science from the list, it seems that we might have hit the daily double of a social construct of only social constructs!
Cultured, educated, wise, and knowledgeable are different things, and I could add several other aspects, as well. This all comes across in the same way as an English instructor I used to teach with.
She was a `Poet’. She always said it with a capital. She was proud of knowing neither any math nor any science, as they were beneath her. SHE was educated. Cultured. Superior.
She regularly got at me, and some of my other engineering, math, and physics compatriots, that we were NOT.
When she came to me at the end of a term to help her figure out grades (think the 1980’s and 1990’s… these days the computer does it for you. Sometimes correctly, if you set things up properly), though, she always nodded curtly when I called her ignorant in Latin, though. Or French. I fear that she didn’t actually understand. `Que’st-ce qu’elle etait ignorant’
Extra points for those old enough to remember “the Bluffer’s Guide” series
“Cultured, educated, wise, and knowledgeable are different things…”
Indeed, and even what one might mean by “cultured” could go in many different directions. This quiz makes me think the editors are using “cultured” for what I would probably call hip, cool, trendy or stylish.
When it was hip to be hep, They were hep…..
No, you are not being a curmudgeon. The New York Times has long skated on its inflated reputation for journalistic excellence and integrity; I’m only 86 years old so I don’t know when the decline began but I am young enough to recognize its full bloom. It’s euphemistic and mythological motto, “all the news that’s fit to print” is a polite though deceptive way of saying, we choose only what we think is important and decent. (marketing and advertising) Editors only have so much space in a newspaper, so they decide what to print and what to leave out. I have noticed the Times profusely apologizing when they are caught in the act of misleading or fabricating but never explaining. Your points about the influence of advertisers and wealthy readers, their tastes and proclivities, are well worth scrutinizing to identify problems and protect fairness. Follow the money to reveal the motivation.
Oh dear. It is far more important to have the image of being cultured than to have knowledge of the universe around us.
Of course, it is only the image of being cultured: as Tom Robbins wrote: “today’s hip is tomorrow’s hype”. Today, it is brands of chocolate. Tomorrow, brands of some other consumer fad. This is what passes for culture in our times. CP Snow would have laughed.
But really, to ignore the glories of the world around us. To be ignorant of the importance of, say, quadratic equations, and how to solve them. And what theory mean for the real world, such as modeling the genetic makeup of a population. Marginally more important, and more beautiful, than knowing what brand of chocolate to buy.
And for the record, as a chocolate lover, I am familiar with different brands of chocolate. I just do not think that that familiarity defines me culturally, or at all.
C.P. Snow himself combined scientific and literary abilities, as a physical chemist AND as a noted novelist. In 1959, he placed the onus for the chasm between “the two cultures” on the traditions of British education. American (and Anglophone) education of the last 40 years may have done even more damage of the same kind. There were the poseurs of post-modernism moving on to explicit attacks on science via “post-colonialism”, the “gender theorists” teaching that biology is irrelevant, campaigns to valorize indigenous folklore stories, and so on. I suggest that this new “woke” culture reflects precisely the same psychology as the old, class-based snobbism toward grubby, difficult science. No wonder “Progressives” often sound in their way quite old-fashioned.
If you are looking to grow little colonies of identical culture clones, what better way than the NYT Style agar plate? Complete with premixed medium sold here!
To be cultured, one ought to be aware that the solutions to the Heaviside Step function have nothing to do with utilising Ozempic or other GLP-1s.
If Snow’s book were written now, it wouldn’t be publishable unless he slapped it on substack. And it may have been retitled ‘The Cultured/Nerd bifurcation’.
BTW NYC mayor’s mum ( we share the same surname ) does give a couple of good film recommendations in the Culture Issue.
Ramesh 49% Indian, 49% Chinese, 2% cultured Denisovan
Indeed – time for The Two Cultures – A Third Look.
I mean, how is it that we know Sam the Eagle* at the NYT does not mean “culture” is how to :
• tie a taut-line hitch
• patch a tire
• write a foreach loop
• skate crossovers
• extract DNA
• compute a standard deviation
*( from The Muppet Show – Sam would ask of a skit “Is this cultural?”)… I’ll try to find a clip … example with Rowlf : https://youtu.be/ueuA-9pqRok?is=gGLY2Yf_clwThrY4
You are probably understating your case. Most ‘educated folks’ (using the NYT definition) don’t know what a standard deviation is, much less a Gaussian distribution, or even less a Cohen’s d.
The problem of who is cultured will soon disappear, since the generations brought up on smartphones and social media are not only not cultured in any sense of the word but also largely illiterate in science and everything else that matters.
Not surprising. But still frustrating.
Forget it, Jake. It’s the New York Times.
That’s not cultured. That’s what I call “cool signaling”; every bit as loathsome as virtue signaling.
Popular culture? Blimey, when you have thousands of years of literature, why restrict yourself to the trite and dilute stuff that satisfies our under-educated masses? Immerse yourself in that which has stood the test of time, and enjoy the real thing.
The NYT will take something that 6 people on the Upper West Side are doing or thinking and call it a nationwide trend. Those same 6 people must be setting the standard for being cultured.
Imagine if a rigorous understanding of science was required to be considered cultured. The result would be that too many people would be found out, because science is often hard. Much of the things on this NYT list that label one as “cultured” are easy to understand or at least fake understanding of.
The explanation for the NYT article is simple: they’re pandering to the readership of Style Magazine. Their job is to make readers feel good about themselves, not to call them ignoramuses. I’d wager that most readers of that section either already know the answers to those questions or aspire to be part of the tribe that does, and can look down on those who don’t. “I can’t believe that the elephant dung Virgin Mary question is even included in this! There’s no one we know who didn’t attend that wine and Oflili exhibition night at the MOMA!”
A guy by the name of ‘Bill Bryson’ wrote about this. The book’s title was ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything’. In the book, he was flying over the Atlantic Ocean and didn’t know why the ocean was salty. This led him to study science and write the book. I read the book and found errors on most pages. He was still 99% correct.
When I saw this article in Physics World, immediately I thought of Carl Sagan’s wise words. (Paraphrasing) Our world depends entirely on science and technology, yet few people know anything about either.
When I was an undergrad, I was lectured (literally) that science majors like me MUST take humanities courses. FTR I did, and I enjoyed them. However, no one ever lectured humanities majors to take science courses, even ones for non-majors.
This is quite a double standard.
Science? It is patriarchic, racist, and colonial. We do not need it to be cultured. I would expect nothing less from our premier dog-raping outlet.