In his 1959 essay, the novelist C. P. Snow argued that science and the humanities were dangerously divided – but is it still true in 2009?
Stefan Collini
C. P. Snow intended to call his lecture “The Rich and the Poor” – and regretted not doing so. This title points to what remains valuable about the essay now. Helping the world’s impoverished majority meet their basic needs remains an obligation of richer societies, and applied science is a vital tool.
In other ways, though, Snow’s lecture is superficial and misleading. Despite its subsequent reputation, it does not make useful distinctions between types of enquiry or discipline, making a thin contrast between “physicists” and “literary intellectuals” (mostly modernist poets and novelists, not scholars in the humanities). It also identified a rather outdated element of English cultural attitudes and snobbery, rather than a true divide between disciplines. It makes better sense to talk of “two-hundred-and-two cultures” than of “two cultures”.
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One of the major issues Snow touches on, but does not illuminate, concerns specialisation. This is an essential part of the production of knowledge. We should not denounce it, but seek ways to ensure specialists remain “bilingual” – able to communicate with a wider society that does not share their idiom.
The more damaging influence of Snow’s lecture has been to encourage the prejudice that natural science is the only reliable source of “objective” knowledge, and to support the misguided belief that science and technology are undervalued in the UK and so should receive preferential treatment.
Stefan Collini is a professor of literature and intellectual history at the University of Cambridge. He edited The Two Cultures (1993, CUP)
Susan Haack
C. P. Snow acknowledges that “attempts to divide anything into two ought to be regarded with…suspicion”. But, he continues, “subtilising any more would bring more disadvantages than it’s worth”. And perhaps, in a way, he was right; perhaps it was just because of its reliance on a “dashing metaphor” that “The Two Cultures” was so celebrated, and so controversial. But the subtleties Snow casually dismisses are essential to an even half-way adequate understanding of our intellectual life.
For intellectual life is both more and less integrated than Snow acknowledges, and the concept of culture won’t bear the weight he puts on it. Failures of communication among practitioners of different scientific subspecialties, or of the natural and social sciences, or among political scientists and political theorists, literary and legal intellectuals, and so on, suggest a plurality of subcultures. But the “moral component” Snow sees “in the grain of science itself”, the respect for evidence demanded of everyone who investigates – articulated by physicist Percy Bridgman in his reflections on “the struggle for intellectual integrity”, by philosopher William James when he wrote of the “patience and postponement, the choking down of preference” built into “the magnificent edifice of science”, and by novelists like Sinclair Lewis, William Cooper and Snow himself – suggests, perhaps not one culture, but a vital shared aspiration.
Susan Haack is a professor of philosophy and a professor of law at the University of Miami, Florida
Harry Collins
There are two cultures. The key difference is what Rob Evans and I call the “locus of legitimate interpretation” in our book Rethinking Expertise. This refers to the people who society sees as entitled to make a legitimate comment on the meaning or value of some claim. In science, the LLI is close to the producer of a work, and the only people who can “legitimately” comment on, say, a research paper, are the authors and their peers. In the arts, the LLI is closer to the consumer. Worth is set by dealers and professional critics; even the “ordinary” person is entitled to say that they “know what they like”. The artist doesn’t get much of a look-in.
My field, sociology of science, involves shifting science’s LLI a bit away from the producer end and admitting a few outsiders. Postmodernists, however, try to shift the LLI all the way to the arts/consumer end, allowing people in the humanities to write on science in an easy-to-parody manner (recall the row over physicist Alan Sokal’s spoof paper).
The fashion for consumerism is essentially the same: ordinary people are said to be as capable of making choices about, say, medical treatments, as professionals. This is “artsism”, the counterpart of the old “scientism” that tried to value everything by scientific standards. If it goes too far we will be left with one culture, and the resulting arts without science will be as dreadful as science without arts.
“Arts without science would be as dreadful as science without the arts”
Harry Collins is professor of sociology at Cardiff University in the UK
Mary Midgley
I have always remembered a story that C. P. Snow once told. He described being at a gathering of distinguished University of Cambridge dons when one mentioned the second law of thermodynamics. The whole party fell about laughing, seeing this as an absurd, alien piece of technical terminology.
Snow’s topic was, of course, the tribal philistinism among the learned that made such crass ignorance possible. And the dominant tribe at this gathering was the one educated in classics and humanities. Snow rightly complained that scientists do it too, and protested strongly against the whole tribal approach on both sides. This kind of narrowness had surely only recently crept into the tradition. Things weren’t like that when Blake and Coleridge could discuss scientific problems with Faraday and Davy, nor in the time of Darwin, who could write about Kant very sensibly, or T. H. Huxley, who wrote a book on Hume. Nor are things like that in much of Europe today, where they know there is only one world, and scientists expect to study history and philosophy during their education, and vice versa. Snow’s protest reduced this tribalism, but not half enough. His message was blurred by the incursion of literary critic F. R. Leavis, who knew nothing about science but spotted a tribal feud. We should forget Leavis and continue Snow’s chasm-bridging.
Mary Midgley is a philosopher and writer
Sandra Harding
C. P. Snow’s powerful arguments excluded critical social science as an important “culture” to take into account when considering international economic, political and social policy. Unfortunately, this exclusion is still widely practised today – though fortunately it is less achievable – among natural scientists and those working in humanities.
To be sure, the social sciences arrived late in the lives of educated people: in the 1950s plenty of major universities in the US lacked a full sociology department. These days, at their best, the social sciences take a critical stance toward established opinions of how societies function – just as the natural sciences do for the natural world. However, in doing so, the social sciences are seen to “take the side” of the very groups who are disadvantaged by the way the dominant social institutions work.
C. P. Snow was writing when social sciences were poised to begin a half-century of startling research into the social institutions, culture and practices of the natural sciences community. Social science intellectuals from the developing world and from the nascent women’s movements would soon be voicing their views on how best to think about the effects of western science – directed only by elites – on the lives of disadvantaged groups.
One must conclude that the widespread prevalence of Snow’s assumption that the critical social sciences are irrelevant to understanding human interactions with the natural world has been a persistent obstacle in the development of global democracy that was Snow’s concern.
Sandra Harding is a philosopher and professor of education at the University of California, Los Angeles
A. C. Grayling
One of the major problems identified by C. P. Snow in lamenting the gulf between science and literary culture was that almost everyone in a position of power in society was a product of literary culture, with too little understanding of or sympathy for science. That remains a problem, one exacerbated, if anything, by the rapid progress of science in the past half-century. But the issue Snow raised is merely a special instance of a much wider problem: the lack of scientific literacy in society generally.
This matters because it is not only desirable but necessary that we should all be party to the conversation about the place of science in society. This does not require high levels of expertise, just enough to permit intelligent citizens to engage in the wider discussion and decision-making that determine which roads we take in research and in applications, and which ethical considerations should inform them. Despite efforts to address the issue – in the 1960s, some new universities made science compulsory for humanities majors, and vice versa – his point has only become more acute.
A. C. Grayling is a professor of philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London