This Focus presents a bouquet of personal essays written in response to re-reading C.P. Snow’s historic formulation of ‘The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution’. Each of the authors, in person and in writing, stands in the vanguard of contemporary science and/or the liberal arts. Their essays, based on Snow’s description of a cultural gap between scientists and the ‘literary intellectuals’, will explore the state of the two cultures today and probe whether the digital age has put our humanist heritage at risk. Six decades after Snow’s presentation, we’ll ask if the cultural split he defined remains pertinent in the age of Twitter – and if our common culture faces greater threats today.

Big data and machine learning techniques are increasingly applied to creative tasks, often with strong reactions of both awe and concern. But we have to be careful about where to attribute the creative agency. Is it really the machine that paints like van Gogh, or is it a human that uses a high-level tool to impart one pattern upon another, based on her aesthetic preferences? In this paper, the author analyses the problem of machine creativity, focusing on four central themes: the inherent convergence of machine learning and big data techniques, their dependence on assumptions and incomplete data, the possibility of explorative search as a new creative paradigm, and the related problem of the opacity of results from such methods. The Google Deep Dream project is brought in as an example to illustrate the discussion. Information and complexity are brought into the discussion as central concepts for both creative processes and the resulting artefacts, concluding that the complexity of the interaction between the creative agent and the environment during the creative process is a crucial parameter for meaningful creative output. Based on the exposed limitations in current technologies, the author concludes that the principal creative agency still lies in the developers and users of the tools, not in the data processing itself. Human effort and input still matters. But we can take a constructive approach, regarding big data techniques as tools one order of magnitude more complex than what was available before, allowing artists to work with abstractions previously unfeasible for computational work.

The varieties of the national innovation systems among European countries are reflected in the large differences, discrepancies and sometimes unexpected results in the innovation processes and their influence on labor productivity growth. The goal of this paper is to find the differences between the drivers of the innovation systems and their influence on growth of productivity between two groups of countries with different institutional settings in the period of the financial and economic crisis in Europe. The first group consists of a selection of CEE (Central and East European) countries. The second group consists of Germany, Norway, Spain and Portugal. In order to measure the role of innovation on productivity growth we use the CDM (Crépon, Duguet and Mairesse) model of simultaneous equations. The model directly links R&D engagement and intensity to innovation outcomes measured either as process or product innovation, and then estimates the effectiveness of the innovative effort leading to productivity gains. The company-level dataset is drawn from the Community Innovation Survey (CIS10). There is one common result for the two groups, that in general the probability for a typical firm to engage in innovation increases with its size. The other factors influencing the decision process differ. A firm’s productivity increases significantly with innovation output, but only with firms operating in Western Europe. The results for firms in Central and Eastern Europe indicate that these countries’ national innovation systems are vulnerable, and in periods of crises higher level of innovation output leads to lower labor productivity. Therefore, systemic faults in the national innovation systems result in their unsustainability, especially visible in periods of crises, as was the case in 2008–2010. When it comes to Western European countries, the financial and economic crisis did not have negative effects on their innovation systems as innovation activity resulted in higher levels of labor productivity. Regarding the CEE group of countries, the crisis influenced both the innovation process and labor productivity as a whole negatively.

This study examines whether the financial market development and integration have affected the current account balances in the European Union (EU) countries in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) during 1996–2015. First, the results suggest that the higher bank credit flows have resulted in the current account deficits especially after EU accession. The larger pool of bank lending flows due to the foreign mergers and acquisitions has helped finance domestic investment. This has led to the larger current account deficits. Second, the results indicate that the larger stock market size due to EU accession has caused current account surpluses rather than deficits. This contradicts the findings of previous studies, which find that higher financial market development leads to current account deficit. Finally, the result confirms that financial integration has facilitated higher current account deficits. The European Monetary Union has eliminated the regulatory restrictions on cross-border capital flows. The increase in foreign capital inflows has helped finance the growing local consumption and investment needs, which has made the CEE countries run the larger current account deficits.

In recent years, the European Union (EU) has intensified efforts to open European research programmes to the world. This paper focuses on the opening of European research to the world by studying the case of the FP7 international cooperation programme. It is based on a mixed-methods approach including analyses of quantitative data, documents and interviews with programme participants, policymakers and other stakeholders involved in 131 EU projects worldwide. The paper identifies features specific to the European international research cooperation scheme and contributes to our understanding of the supranational intervention and its impact on European research integration. Policymakers can use this piece of evidence to formulate enhanced strategies and better design and target activities both within the EU and globally, to achieve stronger, long-lasting research outcomes and effects.

Public procurements have been high on the agenda of policy makers, decision makers, scholars, and other interested parties in Europe in the last few decades, as such procurements make up nearly one-fifth of Europe’s total gross domestic product. Nevertheless, not many attempts have been made to measure the efficiency of public procurement systems and accordingly rank European countries. The most important measurement that highlights this issue is the Single Market Scoreboard for Public Procurements. However, this scoreboard is subject to bias and numerous omissions, which significantly decreases its operational usage and deteriorates the real efficiency of public procurements. This article aims to rank European countries in an unambiguous, objective, and impartial manner by using the Composite I-distance Indicator (CIDI) methodology. Instead of using biased weights for individual indicators, assigned by experts, the CIDI method creates new weights in an objective manner. The study analysed 30 European countries. The results of the study are, to some extent, different from current practice for public procurement efficiency measurement. The novel approach to ranking provides an opportunity to interested parties to improve the performance of their public procurements by reviewing them on a multidimensional basis.

Charles Percy Snow was born in Leicester in 1905 and – like his fictional alter ago Lewis Eliot – determined from an early age to be remembered. The essays in this issue, some 60 years after he first wrote about ‘The Two Cultures’, give testimony that in this respect he has been successful. There is still merit in his essential contentions that there are graduates in the humanities who remain out of touch with scientific developments – and science graduates who don’t read novels. But the world has changed: the computer revolution and the World Wide Web have permitted far broader access to each of the two cultures. While the split between the humanities and the sciences may have grown less, another fissure has become prominent: the sharp divide between those I call the true children of the European enlightenment and those who reject these values, the ‘fideists’. This argument began at Christ’s College, Cambridge.

Data aggregations are an under-acknowledged site of social relations. The social and technical specifics of how data aggregate are arenas for rich debates about how knowledge ought to be produced, and who should produce it. Consumer goods such as fitness trackers create conditions where data scientists or professional researchers are no longer the only ones making decisions about how to aggregate data. Users of these products also rework their data to discover something medically significant to them. These practices call attention to a modality of ‘scaling up’ datasets about a single person that is different from, and until recently largely invisible to, clinical approaches to big data, which privilege the creation of a ‘bird’s eye’ view across as many people. Both technical questions how to build these aggregations, and social questions of who should be involved, betray broader epistemological issues about how new knowledge is created from electronic devices.

Due to attacks carried out by terrorist organisations, most European countries have placed this phenomenon at the forefront of their priorities in the field of security policy. The fight against terrorism has sparked a heated debate about the significance of security and civil liberties. The law on anti-terrorist operations of 2 July 2016 triggered the debate in Poland as well. This article attempts to answer the question of whether it is possible to maintain a balance between freedom and security. Therefore, the contemporary challenge that many governments face is not effective terrorist attack prevention, but rather an effective anti-terrorism policy whose provisions will not pose a greater threat to democracy than terrorists themselves.

I support a fundamental principle stressed by the Encyclopédie, that the Unity of Knowledge is the direct consequence of the unity of the human brain. All of us are animated by what Claude Bernard called a ‘kind of thirst for the unknown’ which ennobles and enlivens scientific inquiry. We must humbly confess for now our immense ignorance – ignoramus. But to satisfy Claude Bernard’s ‘ardent desire for knowledge’ we should never say, as some philosophers still do, ignorabimus about the human brain. Thanks to recent developments in neuroscience, we can now propose a common set of brain processes that account for the production of the diversity of knowledge. Thanks to these processes, we can work on a reunification of the true, the good and the beautiful, not as a uniform, monotonous culture, but as a network of cooperative diversity favouring intellectual and emotional exchanges among disciplines.

This article considers the modern-day relevance of C.P. Snow’s ‘The Two Cultures’ while the author, Walter Massey, reflects upon his own personal journey through these two worlds, from his early life as a student of physics, to his current role as Chancellor of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The divisions between the sciences and the arts have been improved over time, thanks to the evolution of both disciplines, the rise of interdisciplinary scholarship, and a more collaborative mindset among scholars of both worlds. Certain shared challenges remain, such as the decline in the perceived value of intellectualism and scholarship among certain segments of society. The keys to overcoming these new two cultures are open communication and transparency.

From a certain perspective, literature is always political. Literature in a broad sense has been a source of uprisings and protest at least since Martin Luther nailed his theses on the door of the church in Wittenberg in 1517 – and probably much further back in history than that. Narratives are the most potent way to articulate both political praise and criticism within a given society. In his political satires, British author George Orwell reviled all kinds of totalitarianism and the idea of a socialist utopia. Swedish writer and journalist Stieg Larsson wrote explicitly dystopian crime stories targeting the Swedish welfare state. German novelist Heinrich Böll turned a critical eye on the development of the tabloid press and the use of state monitoring in German society. In the same tradition, Michel Houellebecq has been seen as a very provocative writer in his tone and in his use of political tools. He has articulated a nearly individual anarchist perspective combined with authoritarian and paternalistic views. In Soumission, Houellebecq uses the European idea of multiculturalism to explode our political frames from within. This article explores the perception of religion in Soumission, assesses the critique Houellebecq directs towards French society and European developments, and examines Houellebecq’s perception of democracy and politics. The following questions are addressed: does Houellebecq’s critique come from a classical ideological perspective? Does he describe any elements of an ideal society – even if only as the reverse of a presented dystopia? What kind of democracy does the text of Soumission support or oppose?

This article contributes to the scholarly as well as societal decades-long debate on the state of democracy in the EU. The objective is to problematize, discuss, and come up with constructive ideas on the role of expert groups in the processes of legitimization of decision-making within the EU. The analysis is guided by a general research question: how could expert involvement compensate for an incomplete capability of legitimization through democratic representation? The empirical analysis of expert influence in decision-making is guided by a new modelling of the so-called Epistemic Community approach. The case chosen to illustrate the model is the authorization process of the emergency contraceptive ellaOne, within the institutional setting of the Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use (CHMP) at the European Medicines Agency. The empirical material consists of interviews with eight members of the CHMP. To guide the empirical analysis the paper introduces a two-dimensional model of the epistemic community approach, which distinguishes between the institutional preconditions and the ideational motivations of expert groups. The results indicate that the experts within the CHMP had an influence on the policy-making process thanks to favourable institutional preconditions as well as ideational motivations of the experts themselves. Our conclusion is that there is a need for ‘institutional engineering’ as regards the involvement of experts in decision-making, to sustain the legitimacy of expert involvement, and level out the institutional conditions for experts’ influence on policy-making within the EU.

Through a panel analysis conducted in Bavaria, which covers two adjacent elections – the federal elections and the European elections in 2013 and 2014 – we examine the attitudinal factors that drive citizens’ propensity to turn out. We find that abstainers have generally low levels of knowledge, interest and sense of civic duty. National-level voters have relatively high interest, knowledge and sense of duty in national politics, but not in European affairs. In contrast, European- and national-level voters have high interest, knowledge and a sense of duty for both national and European politics. This finding contextualizes the characterization of European elections as second-order national elections. While prior research has established that voters make their vote choice based on national-level politics, we demonstrate that European elections are not national elections when it comes to citizens’ decision to vote. Rather, knowledge, interest and a sense of duty about national politics are not sufficient conditions for somebody to vote in the European elections. The person needs to have the same positive attitudes about European affairs as they have about national politics to participate in European elections.

In this paper, the author critically analyses Michel Houellebecq’s novel Soumission (Flammarion, 2017). The analysis uses post-structural theories of discourse, gender, and post-colonialism. The author argues that the novel employs neo-orientalist modes of identification where abjection is a fundamental theme. A neo-orientalist mode of identification refers to how knowledge about Muslims as an abject other is produced through various discursive techniques of differentiation, and how this performative practice is articulated through contingent conceptions of race, religion, and gender. Abjection refers to a symbolic castration, namely the central theme of how Western masculinity and European civilization has been de-masculinized by social democracy, liberalism, globalization, and feminism. Finally, the analysis of the novel is contrasted and compared with Houellebecq’s earlier writings.

The distinctive human characteristic of curiosity, once liberated from belief in supernatural causes of natural phenomena, has led with increasing speed to the brink of a world in which humanity will increasingly direct its own genetic endowment, raising the question of what we most value in being human and how to keep faith with it.

In his reflections on the divide between science and the humanities, C.P. Snow made only passing reference to the Cold War context of his epoch. Yet great challenges to science and its impact on human society were being played out in political arenas far from the protected academic enclave in which Snow lived and wrote. This article explores the hostile uses to which advanced science of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were put in the name of national progress and security, and the contributions of philosophers and scientists influenced by humanism in attempting to undo the harmful consequences of such inventions, especially nuclear weapons.