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CP Snow: Only Connect

                                                                                          3 May 2009
Among the enduring controversies about CP Snow’s 1959 ‘Rede’ Lecture (50 years old on 7th May) the one general point of agreement is that it was this lecture which put the phrase ‘The Two Cultures’ into the vernacular, and provoked the still unfinished debate about the science/humanities divide and its consequences.
Or did it? In fact, Snow had already launched the phrase more than two years earlier, as title for a short article in the New Statesman ( 6 October 1956). There are major differences (though much common phraseology) between this article and the subsequent Rede lecture; and yet he still felt the need to re-vamp and further amplify his argument a full four years after it (‘The Two Cultures: A Second Look‘ (1963).
So, as Snow readily conceded, his own ideas and attempts at expressing them were continually gestating over the six or seven years from the New Statesman trailer to the ’Second Look’ epilogue, with the formal ‘lecture’ sandwiched uneasily between. And , although most people agreed that he had homed in on one of the greatest of the post-Darwinian social fissures – the Science/Humanities divide - he had also, critics said , helped to create the red-herrings and ambiguities on which the phoney wars between the cultures have thrived ever since.
So does ‘The Two Cultures’ lecture have any significant locus within the mainstream of the post-Darwin ‘Scientific Revolution’ ? And what were Snow’s real intentions for it?
For the latter, the answer requires some understanding oft he conventions and limitations of the Oxbridge ceremonial lecture style; with its flavour of Senior Common Room and elite insider peer groups. Where else would expressions like ‘literary intellectual’ hold much meaning? And where, outside that environment, would such insider- archaisms possibly be understood ( as ‘scientist’ would)? Snow knew these limitations and, as a professional writer, rather than academic dialectician, felt constrained by them;; there were those in the ‘Rede’ lecture hall who would recognise, only too well, that it was they he had in mind.
Which is why the serious essence of his argument, and the extent of its development over the years to 1963, is better measured between his more direct ‘ conventional’ media statements – New Statesman 1956 and A Second Look 1963 –than by the ‘formal’ lecture alone.
In this context, the function of the short New Statesman preliminary becomes clear. It was an uninhibited but necessary exercise in ‘ground-clearing’ before the architecture of his desired new social order could begin to be approached. His long accumulation of frustration and anger with the ‘ establishment’ elites demanded some cathartic release before any more positive agenda could be engaged. So, uncomplicated by the educational, political and rich/poor themes of the subsequent lecture, his NS article is a single-minded, frontal assault on the ’traditional’ culture, mainly (but not exclusively?) literary. His hostility is focused, not so much on any innate inferiority of the ‘pen’ to the ‘pipette’, (Snow’s own forte was his writing); but rather on the long-standing, conventional elites, still dominating the Oxbridge( and Ivy League) Senates and Councils, and with privileged access to the ear of Government. Between the Senior Common Room at Christ’s and the comparative rough-and-tumble of his Civil Service Commission and ’real world’ scientist recruitment realities, he had had the quintessential ‘gamekeeper/poacher’ conversion experience.
Reminders of the traditionalists’ grindingly slow adjustment to the earlier Industrial Revolution had been all around him at Cambridge. One of their greatest turn-of-the-century, in-house, critics, FM Cornford, had only recently died (1943). His great satire on Cambridge governance (Microcosmographia Academica 1908), enunciating the universal Principle of Unripe Time, had exposed the labyrinthine processes- of ‘caucuses’ and ‘squaring’ – by which the traditionalists defeated or held back, change.
‘ There is only one argument for doing something’ Cornford wrote; ‘ the rest are arguments for doing nothing. The argument for doing something is that it is the right thing to do …but it is at this point that the many arguments for doing nothing are brought in… Together, these arguments suggest that any action which departs from our conventional wisdom must be either wrong; or, if it is right, is a Dangerous Precedent. It follows that NOTHING SHOULD EVER BE DONE FOR THE FIRST TIME.’ And so – devastatingly- on.
Cornford’s book was a dramatic reminder of other, within-memory, fights - for degrees for women, the ‘rationalist’ movement, abandonment of compulsory chapel, etc against the very traditionalists Snow was to target .

 By a nice, mainly forgotten irony, Cornford had married Frances Darwin, daughter of Charles Darwin’s son and biographer Sir Francis Darwin, himself a distinguished Cambridge botanist.
Frances, an award-winning poet and author- contemporary of Snow’s, made a physical and intellectual link back to the great scientist. Allied to the radical, and innovative Cambridge Classics don, this would have been the embodiment of Snow’s ideal – the ‘marriage’ of the best in both the humanities and science : and allied to the championship of social change and progress in education. In stark contrast to the Oxbridge elites of Snow’s perception.
So the New Statesman article goes for the guttural of this ‘traditional’ culture. Unlike the lecture, the attack here is a deeply moral one. This ‘culture’ is decadent, barren of its own ideas yet resistant to the fresh promise of the new; its members tainted by its flirtations with fascism, anti-Semitism, defence of slavery. Snow names names – Pound, Faulkner, Eliot …… Contrast this with the fresher, outward and forward-looking attitudes of the scientists, their confidence, social and humanitarian concerns …..It is their moral, not their mere intellectual, uplift that “ is the greatest enrichment the scientific culture could give us”. These sentiments, so directly expressed, would have risked uproar in the hallowed Rede lecture hall.
And, its psychological purpose served, Snow’s later treatment of the ‘two cultures’ theme becomes progressively less strident and more positive on the benefits of fusion to both.
The ‘Two Cultures’ element of the Rede Lecture itself is relatively even-handed in tone between the ‘cultures’, more befitting the discursive and anecdotal medium, even though the balance of sympathies remains clear.
”The non-scientists have a rooted impression that the scientists are shallowly optimistic, unaware of man’s condition. On the other hand, the scientists believe that the literary intellectuals are totally lacking in foresight, peculiarly unconcerned with their brother men, in a deep sense anti-intellectual, anxious to restrict art and thought to the existential moment ……. On each side there is some of it which is not entirely baseless. It is all destructive. Much depends on misinterpretations which are dangerous.’
It is only at this point of ‘equilibrium’ between the two that Snow can make his bigger point, lost in many commentaries.” The clashing point of two subjects, two disciplines, two cultures – of two galaxies as far as that goes –ought to produce creative chances. In the history of mental activity that has been where some of the break-throughs came.”
Like, for instance, Darwin’s own – since we now know, through the work of Ashton Nichols, Richard Holmes and others, the extent to which 18th and 19th century literature and science fed from each other. This – the ‘creative synergy’ which Koestler talked about and CVN pursues – is what Snow so much wanted, but feared for. “ The chances are there now …. But in a vacuum, as it were, because the ‘cultures’ can’t talk to each other”.
Nor is this just about more poets using the language of ‘refraction’ and ‘polarised light’! “Of course, that isn’t the way science could be any good to art. It has got to be assimilated along with, and as part and parcel of, the whole of our mental experience, and used as naturally as the rest….There is only one way out of this: that is, of course, by rethinking our education”. The evidence seems to suggest that this has not yet been done.
To look for equivalent clarification on the remainder of Snow’s intentions, it seems best to go beyond the rest of the formal Lecture to his own chosen emendations in ‘A Second Look’(1963). The most astonishing of these is the extent to which Snow pursues the moral, social and political reaches of his argument; while so many eyes have been on the more banal arithmetic of ‘How Many Cultures’ ? ( and he does concede he had overlooked at least one possible Third – the Social Sciences, no less!).
The key priority, however, is ‘ applied science’ which is making it possible to remove unnecessary suffering from a billion human lives…The Scientific Revolution is the only method by which most people can gain the primal things – years of life, freedom from hunger, survival for their children… there was no pre-industrial ‘Eden’….” Here, in fact, is what I intended to be the centre of the whole argument. Before I wrote the lecture, I thought of calling it ‘The Rich and the Poor’ and I rather wish I hadn’t changed my mind”.
Paradoxically, this wise and sensitive man was an offspring of both – science and literary- cultures; as, we now know, was Darwin. I think they would have got on well together.