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How Many Cultures? CP Snow and the Darwin Legacy

2009 – The Year of Magical Anniversaries

In this heady year of Darwinian anniversaries – bicentenary of his birth, 150th birthday of The Origin of Species – we may need a quiet reminder that soon, on Thursday 7th May , we also mark the 50th anniversary of CP Snow’s 1959 Rede Lecture in Cambridge.


If nothing else, this was the occasion which put the phrase ‘The Two Cultures’ firmly on the agenda and provoked an –unfinished and unresolved – debate about the ‘Arts/Science’ divide and its consequences.

 

 
There is no suggestion that this event ranks with the momentous significance of Darwin’s life and achievement. It was simply Snow’s ( for the time) unusual career mix of ex -research scientist, successful novelist and high-ranking Civil Servant which gave him the prestigious Rede Lecture platform for his ideas; but even these credentials were questioned as ‘bogus’ by his severest critics (like his famous literary- critic adversary, FR Leavis)  in the controversy which followed.
So what was the ‘Two Cultures’ connection with the mainstream of Darwin’s legacy? And why, given the nature of CVN’s own inter-disciplinary mission, do we propose to raise a glass in Snow’s honour on May 7th?

 

 
Snow himself had felt obliged to re-visit some key points of his lecture four years later (‘The Two Cultures: a Second Look’ 1963). Since his ‘update’ includes the shattering possibility that the ‘Two’ cultures might well have been ‘Three’ or more, we can perhaps best capture some firm ground for his views by a brief synopsis of his own 1963 retrospective ‘critique’ of what he had said in 1959:

Oddly, in spite of the universality of the ‘Two Cultures’ phrase, it remains better not to assume that everyone entering this debate has read what Snow actually said; this seems to be particularly true of many of the post-modern tweedle-dums and tweedle-dees who, according to Eliane Glaser (New Humanist, March/April 2009), were still fighting the ‘Science/Humanities Wars ‘ in the 1990s;  and, for all I know  ’fought till six and then had dinner’. Snow said that:-

1    In advanced Western society ( including the USA) we have lost even the          pretence of a ‘common culture’. The people we educate ‘with the greatest intensity’ can no longer communicate with each other ‘ on the plain of their major intellectual concern’.

2    This is serious for our ‘creative’,’intellectual’ and, above all, our ‘normal’ lives.

3    I gave my most pointed example in the shape of the two groups representing what I have christened ‘ The Two Cultures’

     One of these ‘contained the Scientists, whose weight, achievement and influence did not need stressing’. The other contained the Literary Intellectuals: ‘they do not take decisions… but they represent ,vocalise, and to some extent shape and predict the mood of the non-scientific culture’.

4    The chief means (of change) open to us is education – mainly in primary and secondary schools, but also in colleges and universities.

5    There were questions about my word ‘Culture’; ‘ I want to repeat what was intended to be my main message – that neither the ’scientific’ system of mental development, nor the ‘traditional’, is alone adequate for our potentialities … or for the world we ought to begin to live in …’.

6    There were questions about the number ‘two’. Suggestions ranged from three to infinity, and there are certainly many ‘sub-cultures’. But ‘two’ brought out the key dichotomies.
     However …’ I had been slow to observe what, according to our formulae, is becoming something like a Third Culture- Intellectual persons from a variety of fields – social history, sociology, demography, political science, economics and psychology etc – all concerned with how human beings are living or have lived. Such an emerging ‘culture’, in order to do its job, has to be on speaking terms with the Scientific one…. and some social historians already face towards the Literary Intellectual one. This may help towards solving the problem, but we’re not there yet …..

7    But it is at this point in his ‘Second Look’ that Snow gets to the heart of the matter of his intentions and his wider social motives. It puts all the pedantic arithmetic of ‘How Many Cultures’ in its proper perspective. He argues:-
        It is applied science which is making it possible to remove unnecessary suffering from a billion human lives.
       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.
     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’ ….

     Escaping the first dangers of applied science (eg nuclear war) is one thing. Doing the simple and manifest good which applied science has put in our power is another, more difficult, more demanding of human qualities, and in the doing , more enriching to us all -from whatever ‘culture’.

    That is why we must learn to understand and communicate with each other across these cultures; and affect the way men think of themselves more profoundly ‘than any scientific advance since Darwin’s…’
    The need runs both ways between and within the ‘cultures’. In the face of the industrial revolution not all ‘literary intellectuals’ were Luddites; and ‘pure scientists and engineers also often totally misunderstand each other’ ……..and so on.


This is why, a hundred years after ‘The Origin of Species’  CP Snow  -like Darwin a child of both cultures -(read Ashton Nichols ‘Romantic Natural Histories’ again),  chose to wrestle with the real Luddites – of whatever culture- still obstructing the educational and social paths to fulfilment of Darwin’s ‘All Cultures’ legacy.  And key to that was, in Snow’s time, to open up the predominantly OxBridge and Ivy-League traditional elites, still with great influence on Government and any futures of educational policy.


    At which point, let me reveal yet another of this year’s Magical Anniversaries, less-known but of happy consequence for all we are discussing.
It falls mid-way (1909) between ‘The Origin of Species and ‘The Two Cultures’ .


It is the happy occasion of the marriage of a young (classics) lecturer at Cambridge, to an aspiring poetess.( more ‘literary intellectuals’, do I hear? )….Except that the young don became a fearless fighter for educational change, campaigned vigorously for degrees for women, co-founded the rationalist ‘Heretics’; and wrote a devastating satire on the way innovation is quietly subverted in organisations; so apposite, that I once transcribed it for the young corporate executive. Snow undoubtedly knew it, and appreciated first hand what the Establishment difficulties might be for an eventual ‘Two Cultures’ cure.
    The young don was Francis Cornford.  His book ‘Microcosmographia Academica’ ( or, less formidably,’ The Principle of Unripe Time ’(CUP 2009). And his bride?  None other than Frances Crofts Darwin , daughter of Darwin’s son and biographer, Sir Francis Darwin, himself a considerable botanist.

What would I not give to have overheard their family chats on the ‘two cultures phenomenon!
 Frances became a very successful poet, and won the Queen’s Medal for Poetry in 1959. We have already commented on Ruth Padel, our contemporary poet and writer, who is a great, great grand-daughter of Darwin and author of the brilliantly moving ‘Darwin: a Life In Poems’.


     I have no doubts about where Charles Darwin’s sympathies would have been in this debate. He would have been with Snow all the way on the obvious need to maintain healthy and open dialogue between scientists and all in the so-called ‘humanities’. He would have barely understood what idiocy could separate them and require him to classify himself as the one or the other.

 

And both, Snow and Darwin, would have applauded the invigorating ‘Encounters’ between the two currently taking place at Sheffield University.
 Which is why I hope to be in Sheffield, on May 5th, to hear Ruth Padel read from her work; and the historian, Mark Greengrass talk about pre-modern attitudes to the arts and sciences before the fences were built.
 And I’ll raise a grateful glass to Darwin, Snow and the Cornfords to mark this special Year of Magical Anniversaries!
Ralph Windle