Two cultures - Snow

As a talk on Radio 3 reminded me recently, it is now just fifty years since C P Snow gave the Rede lecture, The Two Cultures, and a phrase entered the language; more than just a phrase, actually, it is still a powerful meme. I am reading Snow's major novel series at the moment, and it is fascinating to see the physicist and the writer in one image, in one incarnation. Snow's basic argument, which he admitted was not an original one, was that the arts and the sciences had drifted apart to the point where the adherents of the two muses could not communicate with each other, often saw no value in the other, and were unable to cooperate and reinforce each other.  I shall let him explain in his own words, starting with why the issue interested him:

It was a problem I could not avoid just because of the circumstances of my life. The only credentials I had to ruminate on the subject at all came through those circumstances, through nothing more than a set of chances. Anyone with similar experience would have seen much the same things and I think made very much the same comments about them. It just happened to be an unusual experience. By training I was a scientist: by vocation I was a writer. That was all. It was a piece of luck, if you like, that arose through coming from a poor home.

Then the standard demonstration of incomprehension:

A good many times 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 the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's? I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question — such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? — not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.

And a failure to understand, on the part of the arts men, that the first half of the twentieth century was a unique flowering of science and physics, unique in all recorded history:

Literary intellectuals at one pole - at the other scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension - sometimes (particularly among the young) hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding. ... Non-scientists tend to think of scientists as brash and boastful. They hear Mr T. S. Eliot … the tone, restricted and constrained, with which literary intellectuals are at home: it is the subdued voice of their culture. Then they hear a much louder voice, that of another archetypal figure, Rutherford, trumpeting: 'This is the heroic age of science! This is the Elizabethan age!' Many of us heard that … and we weren't left in any doubt whom Rutherford was casting for the role of Shakespeare. What is hard for the literary intellectuals to understand, imaginatively or intellectually, is that he was absolutely right.

And finally, a comment about the frequent (then, perhaps not now) accusation that scientists are ridiculously optimistic - they can solve the world's problems, they even sometimes think they will have a theory of everything, that there will be nothing more to be discovered.  Snow has a more measured approach, and the novelist in him reminds us of some deep truths:

This is an accusation which has been made so often that it has become a platitude. ... Most of the scientists I have known well have felt - just as deeply as the non-scientists I have known well - that the individual condition of each of us is tragic. Each of us is alone: sometimes we escape from solitariness, through love or affection or perhaps creative moments, but those triumphs of life are pools of light we make for ourselves while the edge of the road is black: each of us dies alone.

Of course, it is easy to forget that for many people, neither culture is of any significance at all.  But for those of us who care about either Austen or Galileo, either music or relativity, it is always worth trying to care about both.  In reading Snow's essay, I was reminded of Jacob Bronowski's writings.  Bronowski was one of the great bridges across this arts-science divide, and you can read him on computing and physics and painting and music.  In his Origins of Knowledge and Imagination and The Visionary Eye, he deals with some of the exciting similarities, the need for creativity and imagination in both.  I would speak of his ideas more, but space forbids - but I will return to this subject in another post.

Comments

[psikeyhackr]

It is not two cultures it is THREE. The Sci/tech people, the arts/humanities people and the MASSES or Great Unwashed or whatever you want to call them.

But there are lots of pseudo-intellectual phonies in both of the first two groups pretending what they know is more difficult than it really is. Just because someone has a science degree does not mean they can have an original thought. But they aren't about to admit they are second or third rate.

Now computers and the internet make it possible to short circuit the educational system. What are we going to do with that ability?

[Dark Puss]

Scientists can indeed be over optimistic (but clearly not half as much as economists and bankers). I have however never felt "that the individual condition of each of us is tragic". Science, Music, Art, Literature are all hallmarks of civilisation and no educated person should regard any one of them as dispensible. I have sadly met more "artists" who claim no interest in science than vice versa and I do keep wondering why this is. It cannot be more difficult for the average person to understand the basic arguments and well-explained principles of science than it is for me to read important works of literature or listen to great music (of whatever genres and culture). The arts person may not be able to follow the mathematics (I probably can't these days either) any more than I can review the poetry of Donne, but both of us can surely be fascinated and moved by the ideas behind them.