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Few
literary phrases have had as enduring an after life 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?"... ...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." ...
2:34 AM
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