The Two Cultures Dilemma

Though in his time he was both a valued scientist and a well-known novelist, C. P. Snow may be best remembered for the distinction that he drew, in a 1956 essay for the New Statesman The Two Cultures and in this 1959 Rede Lecture, between the culture of intellectuals and the culture of science, two cultures that he was one of the few to be part of. Snow outlined the divide to the belief of non-scientists that scientists were "shallowly optimistic" and of scientists that the intellects of the day were thought to be "totally lacking in foresight, peculiarly unconcerned with their brother men, in a deep sense anti-intellectual, anxious to restrict both art and thought to the existential moment."
This is a tough idea to grasp; after all, the intellectuals of the 20th Century were mainly Leftists, whether simply liberal, socialist, or actually Marxist. The major characteristic of the Left is optimism about Man's nature, the belief that Man is fundamentally good but has been corrupted by an overbearing and unfairly hierarchical economic system. Snow argues that the gulf that exists between science and his version of "intellectuals" is a result of scientists’ total disregard for traditional culture and the "intellectuals’" denial to look at what the natural world might teach us about possible problems with that culture. Snow notes, as late as say the 1850s, any sensibly well-educated, well-read, inquisitive man could speak intelligently about both science and the arts. Man knew little enough that it was still conceivable for one to know nearly everything that was known and to have been subjected to all religions, arts, history and culture in general. With the pure science revolution of which Snow spoke, chemistry, biology and most importantly physics, unexpectedly a great deal of particular training and education was a necessity before one could be experienced in each field. Scientists were separated out from the population, raised above them by their access to “secret” knowledge. They had moved beyond what the rest of man could promptly understand, they could for example, read Shakespeare and listen to Bach, and discuss it logically. The reaction of their colleagues in the arts, or those who had been their peers, was to make their own fields of expertise as ambiguous as possible. For the sake of argument, if Picasso could not comprehend particle physics, he sure was not going to paint anything intelligible; and so grew the two cultures, both with intricate and often counterintuitive theories, requiring years of study (Snow).
The point of The Two Cultures is not that we have two cultures. It is that science, above all, will keep us well-off and safe. Snow’s manifestation of this optimism is dated, yet his beliefs about progress are more significant today than his cultural categorizations. After all, Snow’s descriptions of the two cultures are not exactly understated. Scientists have “the future in their bones,” while “the traditional culture responds by wishing the future did not exist.” He adds, scientists are ethically “the soundest group of intellectuals we have,” while literary ethics are more questionable. Literary culture has “temporary periods” of moral disaster, he quotes a scientist friend who mentions the fascist inclinations of William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, and Wyndham Lewis, and asks “Didn’t the influence of all they represent bring Auschwitz that much nearer?” While Snow states those examples are “not to be taken as representative of all writers,” the suggestion of his partial defense is obvious (C. P. Snow).
Today, others believe science now refers to the human condition in ways Snow did not expect. For the past two decades, the editor and literary agent John Brockman has promoted the notion of a “third culture” to describe scientists, especially evolutionary biologists, psychologists and neuroscientists, who are “rendering visible the deeper meanings in our lives” and overruling literary artists in their capability to “shape the thoughts of their generation” (Brockman). Snow himself proposed in the 1960s that social scientists could form a “third culture.”
Yet The Two Cultures actually exemplifies one of the innermost tensions in our ideas about progress. As Snow also believed, the sheer force of science cannot be confined, that it will change the world, for the better, without a significant helping hand. The Industrial Revolution, Snow states, occurred “without anyone,” including intellectuals, “noticing what was happening.” He simultaneously argues that the 20th-century progress was being thwarted by the insignificance of novelists and poets. This is the reason behind his writing of The Two Cultures; so which is it? Is science an incontrollable cause of change, or does it need a more specific direction?

Bibliography

Brockman, J. (1996). Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution (1st ed.). Simon &
Schuster.
C. P. Snow The Two Cultures. (n.d.). Retrieved August 6, 2015, from http://www.age-of-the-sage.org/scientist/snow_two_cultures.html Snow, C. P. (1960). The two cultures and the scientific revolution. Cambridge [England:
University Press.
Brockman, J. (1996). Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution (1st ed.). Simon &
Schuster.