Snow's Two Cultures was something I loudly cheered
when I first read about its points and for years
afterward.

But now the book and the OP strike me as not well
considered.

Net, the 'humanities' have a role much more
important than is commonly or easily described. It
took me a while to understand this point.

Sure, as an insecure a young nerd facing the world,
both nature and society, I wanted 'control' of my
life, in particular, 'security', and for those
wanted the power of 'truth' and didn't want to
settle for anything less solid than, say, plane
geometry or, in a pinch, mathematical physics. Of
course then only some of this could I articulate.

So, something like 'The Song of Hiawatha' with "By
the shores of Gitche Gumee, By the shining
Big-Sea-Water ..." seemed to me as mostly nonsense
and gibberish and at best maybe something lightly
entertaining but nothing like the 'truth' for the
power I was seeking. And maybe I was correct, but
I'm reluctant to return to that poem to be more
sure!

Eventually I concluded that (1) there is a lot about
the world, where I was trying to get control and
security, that was too complicated and subtle for
mathematics and/or mathematical physics to do me any
good and (2) that part of the world was so important
to my life that, even though I didn't have solid
tools to address it, I still had to handle it in
some sense.

Maybe 'The Song of Hiawatha' wouldn't help me
handle those complexities, but eventually I
discovered that some parts of the humanities could
to at least a useful extent.

Generally my central criticism of the humanities was
that, in strong contrast with mathematics and
mathematical physics, and, really, most of
engineering, technology, medical science, medicine,
and even law, the humanities (1) did not make clear
just what they were claiming was true and (2) for
any claims nearly never provided convincing
evidence. While these remain valid criticisms,
amazingly in places the humanities can be important
nevertheless.

Still, I was often torqued at the humanities: E.g.,
in, say, the English departments, a common claim was
that English literature had a lot of good knowledge
of people and would help readers understand people.
I concluded, and still do, that maybe a little.

Once I discovered the E. Fromm, The Art of Loving,
awash in real practical expertise, well considered
and formulated, about people, I concluded that Fromm
was a good example of progress on information for
understanding people. For more on love
specifically, actually some of the relevant articles
on Wikipedia seem quite good -- at least in places
they have explained some of what I figured out more
or less independently, at enormous cost, and added a
lot more.

So, it is possible to get some understanding of
people, but for this purpose I would mostly set
aside English literature as too thin and/or even
misleading.

For understanding people, I'd say that the most
important contribution of English literature to
understanding people is that some people like English
literature.

The crack in my scorn that got me started with the
humanities classical music. A brilliant person once
said, "Music doesn't mean anything.". Well, maybe,
maybe not, but it still can be useful for someone
wanting to understand people or even themselves,
amazingly.

Classical music was able to 'reach' me in part
because there were usually few or no words to take
literally and, thus, argue with.

Well, it turns out that classical music has
something of a language, especially about human
emotions. If want to understand people, the biggest
chapter is human emotions.

Classical music is an example of a common definition
of art as in the communications, interpretation
of human experience, emotion. Well, it can be easy
enough to find parts of classical music that are
quite effective meeting this definition of art. So,
here there is some progress in understanding humans.

One description of much of the media is vicarious,
escapist, fantasy, emotional experience
entertainment which sounds next to worthless for
the audience and, maybe, is, but we can reduce this
description to vicarious emotional experience and,
then, learn about people by feeling their emotions
-- and art has a lot of this and, thus, can help a
person understand people.

For some value for the audience, good art is
supposed to be universal and, then, often a person
in the audience can see where the art is describing
things much as in their life from which that person
can conclude, "I'm not the only one who has
encountered such a thing. That thing is not unique
to me. Whatever I did to make that thing happen,
others did the same, and maybe some of the main
causes are not really from me.".

E.g., a few weeks ago I did a search for a girl I
knew and fell in love with in high school. Yup, the
Internet showed me a scan of a high school annual
with her picture as a Homecoming Queen candidate.
To me she was always the prettiest human female I
ever saw in person or otherwise. Then many of those
days with her, decades ago, came back to me as if
they were last week. She was my first love and,
apparently, burned into my brain -- I can no more
forget her than I can forget my own name.

Well, we were young: We saw each other for 18
months and started when she was just 12 and in the
seventh grade and I was 14 and in the ninth grade.

I was a nerd, socially awkward, and not good at
understanding the emotions of a young woman, and we
were both afraid of rejection. So we were to afraid
to communicate clearly and accumulated quite a list
of false beliefs about each other that had us making
mistakes in our relationship. At one point, some of
her mistakes got me to draw some seriously wrong
conclusions, and I walked away from her. I don't
think that there was anything seriously wrong, and
everything wrong was based just on
mis-communications, My heart was broken, and I later
discovered that so was hers.

Then there's Wagner's opera Lohengrin, first
performed in 1850, about a knight, Lohengrin, of the
Holy Grail who marries sweet Elsa. Yes, the Wagner
"Bridal Chorus" or "Wedding March" music is from
their marriage in that opera. Elsa is misled by an
evil witch, makes a mistake, and Lohengrin is forced
to walk away from his new bride.

So, Lohengrin told me that I was not the first guy
to walk away from the young woman he loved and that
such things go back to at least 1850.

Also, Lohengrin and I made similar mistakes: We
asked too much of the understanding of our women and
should have had arranged a less 'brittle' situation.

Nerd guys: Listen up here and learn.

As good art communicates emotions about the human
experience, members of the audience can begin to
learn more about other people.

The best art, in the humanities, can be astoundingly
effective in communicating about humans; we don't
want to be without the results; and technical fields
are so far no substitutes.

Took me a while to see these points.