Few literary phrases have
had as enduring an afterlife as “the two cultures,”
coined by C. P. Snow to describe what he saw as a
dangerous schism between science and literary life. Yet
few people actually seem to read Snow’s book bearing
that title. Why bother when its main point appears so
evident?
It was 50 years ago this
May that Snow, an English physicist, civil servant and
novelist, delivered a lecture at Cambridge called “The
Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” which was
later published in book form. Snow’s famous lament was
that “the intellectual life of the whole of Western
society is increasingly being split into two polar
groups,” consisting of scientists on the one hand and
literary scholars on the other. Snow largely blamed
literary types for this “gulf of mutual
incomprehension.” These intellectuals, Snow asserted,
were shamefully unembarrassed about not grasping, say,
the second law of thermodynamics — even though asking if
someone knows it, he writes, “is about the scientific
equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?”
In the half-century since,
“the two cultures” has become a “bumper-sticker phrase,”
as NASA’s administrator, Michael Griffin, said in a 2007
speech. (Naturally, as a scientist, Griffin also
declared that Snow had hit on an “essential truth.”) And
Snow has certainly been enlisted in some unlikely
causes. Writing in Newsweek in 1998, Robert Samuelson
warned that our inability to take the Y2K computer bug
more seriously “may be the ultimate vindication” of
Snow’s thesis. (It wasn’t.) Some prominent voices in
academia have also refashioned his complaint. “We live
in a society, and dare I say a university, where few
would admit — and none would admit proudly — to not
having read any plays by Shakespeare,” Lawrence Summers
proclaimed in his 2001 inaugural address as president of
Harvard, adding that “it is all too common and all too
acceptable not to know a gene from a chromosome.” This
is Snow for the DNA age, complete with a frosty
reception from the faculty.
There is nothing wrong
with referring to Snow’s idea, of course. His view that
education should not be too specialized remains broadly
persuasive. But it is misleading to imagine Snow as the
eagle-eyed anthropologist of a fractured intelligentsia,
rather than an evangelist of our technological future.
The deeper point of “The Two Cultures” is not that we
have two cultures. It is that science, above all, will
keep us prosperous and secure. Snow’s expression of this
optimism is dated, yet his thoughts about progress are
more relevant today than his cultural typologies.
After all, Snow’s
descriptions of the two cultures are not exactly subtle.
Scientists, he asserts, have “the future in their
bones,” while “the traditional culture responds by
wishing the future did not exist.” Scientists, he adds,
are morally “the soundest group of intellectuals we
have,” while literary ethics are more suspect. Literary
culture has “temporary periods” of moral failure, he
argues, quoting a scientist friend who mentions the
fascist proclivities of Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats
and Wyndham Lewis, and asks, “Didn’t the influence of
all they represent bring Auschwitz that much nearer?”
While Snow says those examples are “not to be taken as
representative of all writers,” the implication of his
partial defense is clear.
Snow’s essay provoked a
roaring, ad hominem response from the Cambridge critic
F. R. Leavis — who called Snow “intellectually as
undistinguished as it is possible to be” — and a more
measured one from Lionel Trilling, who nonetheless
thought Snow had produced “a book which is mistaken in a
very large way indeed.” Snow’s cultural tribalism,
Trilling argued, impaired the “possibility of rational
discourse.”
Today, others believe
science now addresses the human condition in ways Snow
did not anticipate. For the past two decades, the editor
and agent John Brockman has promoted the notion of a
“third culture” to describe scientists — notably
evolutionary biologists, psychologists and
neuroscientists — who are “rendering visible the deeper
meanings in our lives” and superseding literary artists
in their ability to “shape the thoughts of their
generation.” Snow himself suggested in the 1960s that
social scientists could form a “third culture.”
So why did Snow think the
supposed gulf between the two cultures was such a
problem? Because, he argues in the latter half of his
essay, it leads many capable minds to ignore science as
a vocation, which prevents us from solving the world’s
“main issue,” the wealth gap caused by
industrialization, which threatens global stability.
“This disparity between the rich and the poor has been
noticed . . . most acutely and not unnaturally, by the
poor,” Snow explains, adding: “It won’t last for long.
Whatever else in the world we know survives to the year
2000, that won’t.” (For some reason, Y2K predictions and
Snow did not mix well.) Thus Snow, whose service in
World War II involved giving scientists overseas
assignments, recommends dispatching a corps of
technologists to industrialize the third world.
This brings “The Two Cultures”
to its ultimate concern, which has less to do with
intellectual life than with geopolitics. If the democracies
don’t modernize undeveloped countries, Snow argues, “the
Communist countries will,” leaving the West “an enclave in a
different world.” Only by erasing the gap between the two
cultures can we ensure wealth and self-government, he
writes, adding, “We have very little time.”
Some of this sounds familiar;
for decades we have regarded science as crucial to global
competitiveness, an idea invoked as recently as in Barack
Obama’s campaign. But in other ways “The Two Cultures”
remains irretrievably a cold war document. The path to
industrialization that Snow envisions follows W. W. Rostow’s
“take-off into sustained growth,” part of 1950s
modernization theory holding that all countries could follow
the same trajectory of development. The invocation of
popular revolution is similarly date-stamped in the era of
decolonization, as is the untroubled embrace of
government-dictated growth. “The scale of the operation is
such that it would have to be a national one,” Snow writes.
“Private industry, even the biggest private industry, can’t
touch it, and in no sense is it a fair business risk.”
This is, I think, why Snow’s
diagnosis remains popular while his remedy is ignored. We
have spent recent decades convincing ourselves that
technological progress occurs in unpredictable
entrepreneurial floods, allowing us to surf the waves of
creative destruction. In this light, a fussy British
technocrat touting a massive government aid project appears
distinctly uncool.
Yet “The Two Cultures”
actually embodies one of the deepest tensions in our ideas
about progress. Snow, too, wants to believe the sheer force
of science cannot be restrained, that it will change the
world — for the better — without a heavy guiding hand. The
Industrial Revolution, he writes, occurred “without anyone,”
including intellectuals, “noticing what was happening.” But
at the same time, he argues that 20th-century progress was
being stymied by the indifference of poets and novelists.
That’s why he wrote “The Two Cultures.” So which is it? Is
science an irrepressible agent of change, or does it need
top-down direction?
This question is the aspect of
“The Two Cultures” that speaks most directly to us today.
Your answer — and many different ones are possible —
probably determines how widely and deeply you think we need
to spread scientific knowledge. Do we need to produce more
scientists and engineers to fight climate change? How should
they be deployed? Do we need broader public understanding of
the issue to support governmental action? Or do we need
something else?
Snow’s own version of this
call for action, I believe, finally undercuts his claims.
“The Two Cultures” initially asserts the moral
distinctiveness of scientists, but ends with a plea for
enlisting science to halt the spread of Communism — a
concern that was hardly limited to those with a scientific
habit of mind. The separateness of his two cultures is a
very slippery thing. For all the book’s continuing interest,
we should spend less time merely citing “The Two Cultures,”
and more time genuinely reconsidering it.