David P. Barash: Remembering the Anniversary of CP Snow
The year 2005 is the centenary of the birth — and the 25th anniversary of the death — of C.P. Snow, British physicist, novelist, and longtime denizen of the "corridors of power" (a phrase he coined). It is also 45 years since the U.S. publication of his best-known work, a highly influential polemic that generated another phrase with a life of its own, and that warrants revisiting today: The Two Cultures.
Actually, the full title was The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, presented by Snow as the prestigious Rede Lecture at the University of Cambridge in 1959 before being published as a brief book shortly thereafter. Since then his basic point has seeped into public consciousness as metaphor for a kind of dialogue of the deaf. Snow's was perhaps the first — and almost certainly the most influential — public lamentation over the extent to which the sciences and the humanities have drifted apart.
Snow concerned himself with "literary intellectuals" on the one hand and physicists on the other, although each can be seen as representing their "cultures" more generally: "Between the two," he wrote, there is "a gulf ... of hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding. They have a curious distorted image of each other. Their attitudes are so different that, even on the level of emotion, they can't find much common ground."
"A good many times," Snow pointed out, in an oft-cited passage, "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 about the scientific equivalent of: 'Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?'"
F.R. Leavis — reigning don of British literary humanists at the time — reacted with particular anger and (according to many) unseemly venom, denouncing Snow as a "public relations man" for science. Leavis mocked "the preposterous and menacing absurdity of C.P. Snow's consecrated public standing," scorned his "embarrassing vulgarity of style," his "panoptic pseudo-cogencies," his "complete ignorance" of literature, history, or civilization generally, and of the dehumanizing side of "progress" as science offers it. "It is ridiculous," thundered Leavis, "to credit him with any capacity for serious thinking about the problems on which he offers to advise the world. ... Not only is he not a genius, he is intellectually as undistinguished as it is possible to be."
In fact, Charles Percy Snow is not widely (or even narrowly) read as a novelist these days, despite — or, as critics like Leavis might suggest, because of — his 11-volume opus, collectively titled Strangers and Brothers, a roman-fleuve written over a period of three decades, depicting the public life of Britain refracted especially through the sensibilities of Snow's semiautobiographic academic/politician, Lewis Eliot. If Waiting for Godot is a two-act play in which nothing happens, twice, in Strangers and Brothers nothing happens, 11 times. The Two Cultures, however, is a different creature altogether: brief, lively, controversial, insightful, albeit perhaps a tad misbegotten.
Thus, today's readers will be surprised by Snow's conflation of "literary intellectuals" with backward-looking conservatives, notably right-wing Fascist sympathizers such as Yeats, Wyndham Lewis, and Ezra Pound, and his cheerful, optimistic portrayal of scientists as synonymous with progress and social responsibility. After all, for every D.H. Lawrence and T.S. Eliot there were a dozen luminaries of the literary left, just as for every Leo Szilard, an Edward Teller. Snow himself was an establishment liberal, suitably worried about nuclear war, overpopulation, and the economic disparities between rich and poor countries. He lamented the influence of those who, he feared, were likely to turn their backs on human progress; in turn, Snow may have been naïvely optimistic and even downright simplistic about the potential of science to solve the world's problems....
Read entire article at Chronicle of Higher Education
Actually, the full title was The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, presented by Snow as the prestigious Rede Lecture at the University of Cambridge in 1959 before being published as a brief book shortly thereafter. Since then his basic point has seeped into public consciousness as metaphor for a kind of dialogue of the deaf. Snow's was perhaps the first — and almost certainly the most influential — public lamentation over the extent to which the sciences and the humanities have drifted apart.
Snow concerned himself with "literary intellectuals" on the one hand and physicists on the other, although each can be seen as representing their "cultures" more generally: "Between the two," he wrote, there is "a gulf ... of hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding. They have a curious distorted image of each other. Their attitudes are so different that, even on the level of emotion, they can't find much common ground."
"A good many times," Snow pointed out, in an oft-cited passage, "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 about the scientific equivalent of: 'Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?'"
F.R. Leavis — reigning don of British literary humanists at the time — reacted with particular anger and (according to many) unseemly venom, denouncing Snow as a "public relations man" for science. Leavis mocked "the preposterous and menacing absurdity of C.P. Snow's consecrated public standing," scorned his "embarrassing vulgarity of style," his "panoptic pseudo-cogencies," his "complete ignorance" of literature, history, or civilization generally, and of the dehumanizing side of "progress" as science offers it. "It is ridiculous," thundered Leavis, "to credit him with any capacity for serious thinking about the problems on which he offers to advise the world. ... Not only is he not a genius, he is intellectually as undistinguished as it is possible to be."
In fact, Charles Percy Snow is not widely (or even narrowly) read as a novelist these days, despite — or, as critics like Leavis might suggest, because of — his 11-volume opus, collectively titled Strangers and Brothers, a roman-fleuve written over a period of three decades, depicting the public life of Britain refracted especially through the sensibilities of Snow's semiautobiographic academic/politician, Lewis Eliot. If Waiting for Godot is a two-act play in which nothing happens, twice, in Strangers and Brothers nothing happens, 11 times. The Two Cultures, however, is a different creature altogether: brief, lively, controversial, insightful, albeit perhaps a tad misbegotten.
Thus, today's readers will be surprised by Snow's conflation of "literary intellectuals" with backward-looking conservatives, notably right-wing Fascist sympathizers such as Yeats, Wyndham Lewis, and Ezra Pound, and his cheerful, optimistic portrayal of scientists as synonymous with progress and social responsibility. After all, for every D.H. Lawrence and T.S. Eliot there were a dozen luminaries of the literary left, just as for every Leo Szilard, an Edward Teller. Snow himself was an establishment liberal, suitably worried about nuclear war, overpopulation, and the economic disparities between rich and poor countries. He lamented the influence of those who, he feared, were likely to turn their backs on human progress; in turn, Snow may have been naïvely optimistic and even downright simplistic about the potential of science to solve the world's problems....