The Two Cultures
Few literary phrases have had such an enduring afterlife as “the two cultures”, coined by C. P. Snow to describe what he saw as a dangerous schism between scientists and literary intellectuals, i.e. between the sciences and the humanities. Yet nowadays few people actually seem to have read Snow’s book bearing that title. Why bother when its main point seems so obvious?
It was in 1959 that Snow, an English physicist, delivered a lecture at Cambridge called “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” 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?”
Since then, “the two cultures” has almost become a bumper-sticker phrase. 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,” 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.
Snow’s essay provoked a roaring, ad hominem response from the Cambridge literary critic F. R. Lewis and a more measured one from Lionel Trilling. Snow’s cultural tribalism, Trilling argued, impaired the “possibility of rational discourse.” So why did Snow think the supposed gulf between the two cultures was such a problem? Because, in his view, 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 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.
Some of this sounds familiar; for decades we have regarded science as crucial to global competitiveness. But in other ways The Two Cultures remains irretrievably a cold war document. Yet Snow’s book actually embodies one of the deepest tensions in our ideas about progress. Snow wants to believe the sheer force of science cannot be restrained, that it will change the world – for the better – without a 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. So which is it? Is science an irrepressible agent of change, or does it need top-down direction?
This question is the aspect of Snow’s book that speaks most directly to us today. Your answer 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? Do we need broader public understanding of the issue to support governmental action? Or do we need something else? The separateness of Snow’s 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.
PETER DIZIKES, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW