C.P. Snow's Two Cultures

Next month it will be 50 years since Snow published his gave the lectures that were published as Two Cultures and started a debate about a mostly obsolete topic. The cynic in me suggests that his title (and thesis) presupposes there were two intellectual cultures before 1940-1945, the years in which his job of finding ways to facilitate cooperation between the various experts involved in the "War Effort." As both a highly regarded physicist and a novelist he probably was the right man. His experiences are the reason for his 1959 reflections. These were still receiving attention in Academia as late as the 1970s when, in an interdisciplinary program for a Master's in General Education, I taught the book several years running. It caused me to look up the 2nd law of thermodynamics, the ignorance of which Snow used as evidence of the gulf between the literary culture and the scientific as one should be as familiar with that law as with a play of Shakespeare. And a thoughtful article in the "NYT Book Review" of 3/22/09 makes it clear that Snow was not as much concerned with enabling the literary dons to understand their scientific brethren, as with argueing that science rather than "great books" would save us. This essay also, if incidentally, touches on another inspiration for Snow's train of thought. The "Great Books" or "History" readers of Cambridge and Oxford were overwhelmingly children of the upper classes who were groomed not to be university Professors but to be the next generation of the elite to run the British Empire the bureaucrats with whom he had to deal in his government jobs. Not a few might become teachers at the likes of Eton or Winchester where they would begin that grooming for a still younger generation. Snow did not belong to that class and even in his civil service job during WWII he was not among the top tier, though they were the ones whose education had not prepared them for leadership in a scientific world where the decisive weapon as the A-bomb rather than the polo stick. There is a telling incident in Snow's first novel, Death under Sail (1932), a detective story. The scene is set on a sailboat and when it comes to bathing the upper class character, who had gone to a private boarding school, undresses in front of the other without second thoughts while his companion, who had not, was concerned how he could undress without showing his nakedness. I have retained this image as a give-away for Snow's portrayal of outsiders in the series of 11 novels Strangers and Brothers about the shenanigans of academic administrators at a Cambridge college, of which The Masters and The New Men are the best known. It was science that allowed Snow to achieve his political status, but he was always better known to the general public for his novels.

Snow (1905-1980) was born and educated in Leicester and graduated from Leicester University, one of the "red brick" universities. In 1930 he became a Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge where he obtained his Ph.D. in molecular physics. But he apparently always remained one of the "New Men" and when he was given a peerage in 1964, having finished his government career as Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Technology (not a glamorous ministry), he took the title Baron Snow of the City of Leicester rather than the more common practice of adding to his proper something rural that might vaguely refer to an estate. The choice of that title reminds me of the English expresssion "that's one in the eye" (of the "Master class.") There's also something of the outsider in his remark that history shows that more unspeakable crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than in the name of rebellion. And for a high civil servant he could be surprisingly sharp, e.g. when he wrote that while "the great edifice of modern science goes up [ . . .] the majority of the cleverest people [. . .] have about as much insight into it than their Neolitic ancestors."

It has occurred to me that understanding the 2nd law of thermodynamics, or the science behind the double helix is not a requirement for guiding the modern, i.e. a science-based, world. Snow's somewhat older contemporaries, Julian and Aldous Huxley (who through their parents combined the blood of an earlier defender of science with that of Matthew Arnold, the defender of "literary culture") both discussed selective breeding long before DNA. Actually, in that interdisciplinary program and in similar courses since, I often met with scientists who themselves would not want to be involved in making decisions on how to apply scientific knowledge to economic or social problems. That's up to the politicians they repeated, they themselves maintained that science is neutral. But, as the Apostle Paul reminded his readers: the love of money is the root of all evil and while science may be neutral, scientist rarely are. They begin to surrender their independence with the application for grants to support research, the wording of which is aimed in part to fit with the agenda of the granting Foundation. And in the "climate debate" scientists clearly take sides and you can find them on Fox News as well as on MSNBC and even Jon Stewart.

Thomas Huxley ("Darwin's bulldog"), had to crib together his scientific education as an apprentice in several London Hospitals before he specialized as a marine biologist. It was he who promoted the science education in Britain that made it possible for Snow to receive his in Leicester. Though Thomas Huxley was mostly an autodidact, his grandsons went to Eton and Bailliol. Julian too became a marine biologist and was a pioneer in the field of ethology. His career bridged the gap between the two cultures. He was, among other things, the founding director of Unesco. Yet his eminence in the bothe Science and the Humanities did not prevent him from favoring what we now call eugenics. Unfortunately some of his writings remind me of Ernst Haeckel, also a marine biologist (with the outstanding scientific schooling that was only available in the Universities of late 19th century Germany and the Netherlands for example). An admirer of Darwin, he is best known today for having coined the term "ecology." A recipient of the Nobel Prize he nevertheless, towards the end of his life provided a "scientific" basis for Nazi racist policies.

What rekindled my interest in Snow's Two Cultures was a book notice in the science section of the NYT last fall. The description made the book, Darryl Wheye & Donald Kennedy. Humans, Nature and Birds, (2008), seem like a good birthday present for a friend with a gentleman's interest in birds and a scholar's appreciation for bird art. It turned out deserving of the reviewer's recommendation, for its design, layout and reproductions are a pleasure to the eye, a throwback to the time (not too long ago) that books were cherished for their appearance as well as instruction.

Wheye, the artist, has made a very imaginative contribution to the book by occasionally enhancing an aspect of an object reproduced as it would appear as an accurate portrayal of a present day equivalent or as it might have appeared in the perfect state of the original as in the case of some millenia old wall painting. The book is arranged by way of a modern art museum and the reader is invited to follow the editors as they present the works more or less topically. The accompanying texts are divided into two categories: art and science. The "gallery" arrangement is obviously arbitrary and it reminded me, unfairly no doubt, of the rooms at the Barnes Foundation, probably because I wonder about how some of the art from different eras and cultures fit a particular interpretation. They made in fact a rather ecclectic choice based less on artistic criteria than, it seems to me, on (very imaginative) associations an artwork evoked. The example that started this train of thought was the ivory from an early medieval book cover representing Gregory the Great writing in his study, a dove perching on his shoulder. The editorial choice is to present this as similar to the depiction of an Egyptian pharaoh portrayed with the head of a falcon. This to me seems a bit of a stretch, for if the pharaoh is thought to be the god symbolized by the bird, or is thought to derive power from his assimilation with the god, the dove on Gregory's shoulder symbolized the Holy Spirit that gives credence to the words Gregory is writing down, but otherwise does not alter Gregory's humanity. The ivory is nothing more than a representation of an anecdote allegedly recounted by Gregory's secretary. But, this instance aside, the editors deserve great credit for having made available a series of art works that are not easily accessible and now furnish great pleasure to the modern viewer.

In the introduction C.P. Snow's essay is used as the justification for the book's arrangements and this is where I have the greater difficulty in following the editors. The "science" of Snow is "exact science" and thus I expected discussions of anatomy or whatever biology (Kennedy was trained as neuro-biologist and eventually became Professor of Environmental Science at Stanford, before becoming its President. In 2008 he gave a -more positive - Snow-like lecture called "Where [good] Science and Policy Converge"), ethology, physiology or aerodynamics would have been appropriate to a particular work of art. Not much of that appears in the texts that in several cases continue under both headings of "Art" and "Science" with the same narrative merely switching from iconography (the pictorial techniques etc.) to iconology (the ideas represented). Thomas Huxley once said that "science is organized common sense" and my own teachers used to say "science is an organized body of knowledge." History of Art may be arranged in organized bodies of knowledge, but it hardly qualifies as an exact science; too often we lack exact data about artists, contexts etc. For example, the most eminent scholars disagree about the importance of Michelangelo's early Neo-Patonism and later intense Christian beliefs in his works or the extent the views of a patron (Julius II, Paul III) may have had on the execution as opposed to works undertaken by the artist on his own initiative.