C. P. Snow’s The Two Cultures

by S. N. Arseculeratne

This topic has interested me for many years. In our junior school education, science was restricted to the bare substance of science but seldom its methodology or history. In senior school, it had greater depth and was eclectic and covered the various branches of science – biology, chemistry, physics, geology with a little astronomy. University education gave us the methods and attention to its branches but historical and detailed aspects of special areas which led to graduate degree were left for graduate years.. We resorted to our private reading for detailed coverage.

As for the general public without a science education, there was a large gap. In these times of Covid, immunization and diseases in general, there are hugely deficient areas. Further areas of insufficient knowledge are in nutrition, and disease. This lack gives us what is called scientific illiteracy, especially in the public which is not exposed to the depth of the sciences. It seems to me that our British-based education has much to blame for this lack, while I think the US has much less of scientific illiteracy in the general public.

Charles Percival Snow from England did much to close this gap between the Two Cultures. The book The Two Cultures by C. P. Snow 1928, Cambridge University Press, states “It was noticeable that nearly all his honours came from foreign universities.. … His Rede Lecture (1959) on The two Cultures was the first and by a long way, the most famous of his pronouncements…:. Snow said that intellectual life in Western society is polarized into literary intellectuals at one pole and scientists at the other, and that the world view of persons on one side is incomprehensible to persons o the other”. Snow’s thesis has three components . Firstly that there is a cultural dichotomy between the arts and the sciences; secondly that this is damaging and thirdly that something can be done about it.

This idea of a cultural dichotomy had occurred to previous writers. Thomas Huxley in 1880 wrote of it in “Science and Culture”, Mathew Arnold on “Literature and Sciences” in 1882, and later in essays by Lionel Trilling and by Jacob Brunowski. Peter Medawar in 1894, restated Snow’s view that …”educated and reflective people subsist on diets of very different kinds; one having to do with scientific theories and ideas, the other more literary and more overly imaginative in character”. Medawar considered this as “…being a straight forwardly objective observation” but he used the words ‘idiotic’ and ‘futile’ to describe this debate, though he did not explicitly say why he used those descriptions but what could be concluded is that he referred to the debate itself about this so-called divide but not the existence of it.

The Evidence Is there really a divide between the two cultures?

To lighten this discussion are the views of an editor, probably of a scientific journal, who, having read in Shakespeare’s submission Macbeth, “Thrice to thine and thrice to mine and thrice again to make up nine” replied that ” the fact that 3 + 3 + 3 make 9 has been well established by many authors and could be omitted entirely”. A reviewer of a performance of Schubert’s unfinished Symphony, probably a scientist, wrote that “All twelve violins were playing identical notes. This seems unnecessary duplication. If a large volume of sound in really required, this could be obtained through the use of an amplifier”.

Some serious statements that imply that a gulf exists between these two areas, can now be considered. Snow, (1965 ) thought poorly of a person who couldn’t recall the Second Law of Thermodynamics while he equated this ignorance with that of a person on the other side of this divide who has not read a work by Shakespeare.

R. W. Livingstone on the side of literature wrote in his book (1973) “Education and the spirit of the age” “What do we miss when we analyse perfectly a poem, a historical event, a human character, a flower, a piece of music, a work of art and stop there, resting content in our analysis.”. Livingstone argued from the literary viewpoint; “Natural science seems so all-embracing, that we do not notice the vast regions of life and these the most important, do not come within this view, and a mind dominated by it would be naturally inclined to ignore or under-estimate them . It has little to say about those creations of the human spirit which alone are immortal, great literature or great art. When we read Homer or Dante or Shakespeare, or listen to a symphony of Beethoven, gaze at the Parthenon, or the paintings in the Sistine Chapel, natural science has little light to throw on what we feel or why we feel it….It is dumb if we ask it to explain the greatest human works or emotions or experiences”.

Sir James Frazer, author of The Golden Bough named the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the British Ass. The most telling comment on this divide is by Arthur Koestler (1964): “In the Index to the six hundred odd pages of Arnold Toynbee’s A study of history, abridged version, the names of Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes and Newton do not occur”. It was Cardinal Newman’s view that ” … in mathematics indeed we should arrive at certitude by rigid demonstration but in religious enquiry we should arrive at certitude by accumulated probabilities”.

Louis Pasteur had relevant views; “There are two ends in each one of us, the scientists who start with a clear field and desire to rise to the knowledge of Nature through observation, experimentation, and reasoning and the man of sentiment, the man of belief , the man who mourns his dead children, and who cannot, alas, prove that he will see them again but who believes that he will and lives in that hope…..The two domains are distinct, and woe to him who tries to let them trespass on each other in the so imperfect state of human knowledge” (Vallery Radot, 1948)..

What are the stated views that deny a gulf between The Two Cultures? Mosey (1990) noted that literary people were as much concerned with the events of the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions which were good examples of materialistic science and technology of Revolutions of that time. Mosey added “By the post world war II period, it was becoming an accepted axiom among literary critics that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle applied, in all its implications , as well as to the world of poetry as it did to that of physics”. Both Einstein the epitome of a scientist , and T. S. Eliot the poet dealt with Time.

(The writer is emeritus Professor of Microbiology of the University of Peradeniya)