The 'Two Cultures' debate revisited


Once or twice in a generation, an idea takes on a life of its own. It does so because it captures - encapsulates, pins down - a concern which had hitherto been widespread but inchoate. By giving a name to the concern, the idea converts it into conversational currency which can then be used for intellectual trading. Because we have a handle for it, we can suddenly discuss it openly.

The notion that we live in a world riven by 'two cultures' is such an idea. For a century and a half this society - or at any rate some of its more thoughtful members - has fretted about the intellectual chasm which yawns between the scientific worldview and that of the humanities. Every so often, the gulf between the two cultures has produced spectacular eruptions, much as the San Andreas Fault produces earthquakes. The nineteenth century saw incessant skirmishing between Romantics and Utilitarians and celebrated rows (Matthew Arnold versus TH Huxley, Coleridge versus Bentham). In the twentieth, we have so far only had F.R. Leavis versus C.P. Snow.

It started innocently enough. In 1959 the University of Cambridge asked Sir Charles Percy Snow to give the annual Rede Lecture. This is traditionally an opportunity for some establishment figure to pontificate on a grand theme theme. Snow was by this stage a corpulent member of the Great and the Good, as well as being something of a pundit on science and society, so he fitted the Rede bill admirably.

Unlike most establishment boobies, however, Snow had been a research chemist and a Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge during the 1930s. Indeed at one time it looked as thought he had himself made a great scientific breakthrough by discovering how to produce Vitamin A artificially. The discovery was reported in 'Nature' and hailed as a great advance, but turned out to be mistaken. The resulting recantation and humiliation had, understandably, taken the shine off his scientific research, and he turned to administration (as a Civil Service Commissioner) and writing instead, becoming famous for 'Strangers and Brothers', an eleven-volume sequence of linked novels about British academia and the corridors of power.

Choosing as his title 'The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution', Snow opened his Rede lecture with the observation that he was, by British standards at least, an unusual animal. 'By training I was a scientist: by vocation I was a writer. That was all.' In moving between the scientific and literary worlds, however, he felt that he was a lone traveller. 'Constantly I felt I was moving among two groups - comparable in intelligence, identical in race, not grossly

dissimilar in social origin, earning about the same incomes, who had almost ceased to communicate at all, who in intellectual, moral and psychological climate had so little in common that instead of going from Burlington House or South Kensington to Chelsea, one might have crossed an ocean.'

Snow painted a picture of a bipolar culture with, at one pole, scientists (and I suppose engineers, though he did not mention them explicitly) and, at the other, what he called 'literary intellectuals'. There was, he maintained, almost no intellectual traffic between these two subcultures. Scientists read 'very little. And of the books which to most literary pertsons are bread and butter, novels, history, poetry, plays, almost nothing at all'.

Literary intellectuals, for their part, were no better, being largely ignorant of science. In a famous passage, Snow described how he had asked a group of them 'how many could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which was about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's ?'

In fact, he argued, the situation was worse than that, for most literary people could not define the concepts of 'mass' or 'acceleration' with any precision, which is the scientific equivalent of being unable to read. 'It is ... as though, over an immense range of human experience, a whole group was tone-deaf. Except that this tone-deafness doesn't come by nature, but by training, or rather the absence of training'.

In describing this state of affairs, Snow adopted an Olympian, even-handed tone. The mutual incomprehension of the scientific and literary cultures was deeply regrettable; there were faults on both sides; the intense early specialisation enforced by the British A-level system of secondary education had a great deal to answer for; etc., etc.

But in fact, Snow's impartiality was only skin deep. The unmistakeable subtext of the lecture was that the literary culture was the truly degenerate, anti-social one. 'Intellectuals', he asserted, 'in particular literary intellectuals, are natural Luddites'. They fail to understand that 'industrialisation is the only hope of the poor'. And if scientists 'have the future in their bones, then the traditional culture responds by wishing the future did not exist. But it is the traditional culture, ... , which manages the western world'.

Snow's lecture had an astonishing impact. The idea of 'the two cultures' was evidently one whose time had come. It became part of the vocabulary of the chattering classes, alongside Thomas Kuhn's notion of a scientific 'paradigm'. In part, this rapid assimilation was due to the fact that - as with the Kuhnian paradigm - the initial formulation of the concepts was so vague that people could project their own interpretations onto it. (In a wonderful article, Margaret Masterman once showed that Kuhn had used the term 'paradigm' in 36 distinct senses in the 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions', the book which launched the idea.)

In a similar way, a close reading of Snow's lecture revealed the extent to which his thinking was riddled by ambiguity and evasiveness. It was never clear, for example, whether in talking about the scientific culture he was referring to scientists and their political views, or merely to people who vaguely approve of science and a 'scientific approach' to human affairs. There is an air of assertive windbaggery about much of the lecture which is pure Snow. 'The manner', observes Stefan Collini an an excellent introduction to Cambridge University Press's recent reprint, 'is that of one who has weighed unmentioned evidence, who knows the grave consequences of getting it wrong, but who is better placed than anyone else to get it right'.

Unfortunately for Snow, there also existed in Cambridge someone perfectly qualified to penetrate his authoritative-sounding smokescreen. He was F.R. Leavis, who at that time was coming to the end of an extraordinary career as the most controversial - if not the dominant - literary critic of the age. He was born 100 years ago this week.

Snow and Leavis had clashed indirectly once before - in 1934 - when they had both reviewed H.G. Wells's 'Experiment in Autobiography'. Leavis had dismissed it, whereas Snow had praised it in a review which contained a pointed sneer at the way 'undergraduates can be led to say that Gerald Manley Hopkins was the only justification for the nineteenth century', which was clearly a reference to Leavis's well-known enthusiasm for Hopkins.

If God had wanted to construct a bete noir for Leavis, then He could not have done much better than the 1959 Rede lecturer. For one thing, Snow was a prominent technocrat, an enthusiast for what was later characterised as 'the white heat of technological revolution' - and thus an advocate for the utilitarian reduction of human experience into what could be measured and calculated. For another, he moved easily in the clubbable, back-scratching circles of literary London and was thus an embodiement of the 'coterie culture' which Leavis detested.

Leavis got his chance when the students of his college - Downing - invited him to give the 1962 Richmond lecture. Like a hawk pouncing on an overweight mouse, Leavis went straight to the heart of the matter - the air of authority assumed by Snow because of his claim that he moved easily between the two cultures and (by implication) that he was taken seriously in both.

Leavis would have none of this. Whatever Snow's status as a scientist (and Leavis hinted that it wasn't very high, which was true), his claims to be taken seriously as a man of letters were utterly fatuous. 'Snow is, of course a - no, I can't say that; he isn't; Snow thinks of himself as a novelist'. Drawing on his own authority as a literary critic, Leavis ridiculed his enemy's pretensions as a writer of fiction, deriding his characterless, unspeakable dialogue, his constant resort to telling rather than showing and his limited imaginative range.

The savagery and ad hominem nature of Leavis's attack appalled many people at the time - and indeed almost dissuaded the Spectator from publishing the lecture for fear of legal action. In its ferocity, the Richmond lecture reminds one of Dr Johnson's diatribe against Chesterfield. But given the way Snow had set himself up as an authoritative man of affairs, it is difficult to see how any robust attack on his position could avoid being personal to some extent.

The object of Leavis's demolition job, of course, was to undermine Snow's attack on the literary culture which he valued so highly, and of which he was such a conspicuous ornament. What incensed him was partly Snow's (ludicrous) claim that the major imaginative writers of the nineteenth century had ignored - or mindlessly opposed - the industrial revolution. But the main driving force for his rage was the assertion that it was the scientists who had 'the future in their bones'.

This Leavis would not, could not stand. And he was right, for the things that really matter to us - the secrets of the heart, of what it means to be an individual, the depths and heights of human experience - all are accessible, if at all, only through literature and the creative arts. Science has no purchase on them, and precious little to say about them beyond the posturings of reductionists. A knowledge of the biochemistry of the brain tells us nothing about the mind of its owner. And even when the whole of the human genome has been mapped, we will still not know what makes us tick.
The Observer 9 July 1995

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