Fifty years ago last month, the prominent public figure C.P. Snow wrote an article in the New Statesman which was to spark off an intellectual controversy that still has resonance today. Snow was an unusual man: he was both a trained scientist and a novelist, a rare combination of talents that gave him the standing to pronounce on the subject of his article: The Two Cultures. It was Snow’s contention that the divide between the “literary intellectual” (as he put it) and the “natural scientist” in British life had become so wide, and so riven with mutual suspicion, that it needed widespread reform, starting with education and continuing into all areas of public life.
Snow’s thesis, on which he was to elaborate three years later when he gave his memorable Rede lecture at Cambridge, made no attempt to be even-handed. His view was that the literary intellectuals were inhabiting an amoral world, and fatally lacked the purposeful instincts of the scientists, whose sole ambition was to be concerned with the collective future and welfare of humanity.
Snow’s polemic was full of the casual prejudices of the time: scientific culture was “steadily heterosexual”, lacking the “feline and oblique” quality of literary discourse. His examples of the moral degeneracy of literary intellectuals were damning, albeit highly selective: Ezra Pound broadcasting for fascism, William Faulkner “giving sentimental reasons for treating Negroes as a different species”.
Writers, said Snow, let their concern with the tragic nature of individual life overshadow the needs of their fellow human beings. He saw a palpable connection “between some kinds of early 20th-century art and the most imbecile expressions of anti-social feeling”. Only scientists possessed the clarity of moral vision to lead us all out of these decadent ways.
There is not sufficient space here to report fully on the entirely predictable ferocity of reaction to Snow’s lecture. Suffice to quote his most notorious critic, F.R. Leavis, who scored something of an own goal by repeatedly patronising Snow’s literary abilities (”The nonentity is apparent on every page of his fictions”) but more interestingly denounced his antagonist as a prophet of the consumer society, in which the language of “prosperity” and “rising standards of living” was beginning to replace the values that could give life a real meaning.
That debate between Snow and Leavis is both of its time, and sharply relevant to our own age. The late 1950s and early 1960s were a time of unfettered faith in scientific advancement and technological know-how. But even while Harold Wilson famously talked of the “white heat” of the technological revolution, there were more burning issues at stake on the ground: profound changes in the country’s social structure and values that would prove irreversible. Where technological innovation and rock-and-roll attitude became complicit - as with the invention of the birth control pill - the effects were explosive.
Looking around today, it is hard to rebut the Leavisite accusation that science and technology have indeed become enslaved to making us all happier consumers. It seems that the flatter our television screen, the smaller our MP3 player, the greater the range of our mobile phone, the more gratified we are. Morals do not come into it. What we actually watch, listen to and say have taken second place to how all of our global chatter is transmitted: faster and sleeker than ever.
Geopolitics has also had a crucial effect on the way we see the two cultures divide. During the golden years of the 1990s - the cold war ended, totalitarian regimes collapsing, booming economies all over the world - it was possible to see how scientific knowledge, widely and freely disseminated, could finally be put to use in making the world a better place.
But since then we have had the gruesome return of nationalism, ethnic conflict and religious fundamentalism. Modernity and free-thinking scientific inquiry did not rid us of these odious movements after all. And what can science, pure science, do against these? As Stefan Collini writes in his introduction to the published version of Snow’s lecture, “it has not become more obvious since Snow wrote that... an education in physics or chemistry is a better preparation for handling the world’s problems than an education in history or philosophy.”
Yet the remarkable advances in communication and information technology have their utopian aspects too. Take the case of blogs, which have, in advanced western countries, become a symbol of the unfeasibly wide range of voices that we are expected to listen to. Do we need to engage with views that are frankly better left unexpressed? And who has the time to discern the articulate from the verbose?
Yet there are still many countries in the world in which to express an honest opinion is to take real risks. That hoary liberal belief, that free expression is the greatest enemy of oppression and dictatorship, finds its most resilient allies in the blogsphere, in young men and women who tell the rest of the world how their particular world is failing humanity. Could there be a more idealistic use of technology?
To harness the two cultures for the common goals of humankind remains, half a century after Snow brought up the issue, the greatest challenge we face. The imagination of the literary intellectual and the passion for objective truth of the scientist must be brought together, as mutually respectful equals, not polemicising opposites.
