The Real Story Behind C.P. Snow's 'Two Cultures' Clash
Culture Clash
C.P. Snow's 1959 Rede Lecture introduced the phrase 'two cultures' to describe the divide between science and the humanities, but the phrase has since been stripped of its original, more provocative meaning. Snow's actual argument was a partisan defense of science, attacking literary intellectuals as 'natural Luddites' who ignored the Industrial Revolution and the needs of the poor. This essay delves into the ensuing clash with F.R. Leavis, whose savage rebuttal revealed deeper temperamental conflicts about how to face life's tragedy.
The individual condition of each of us is tragic. Each of us is alone: sometimes we escape from solitariness, through love or affection or perhaps creative moments, but those triumphs of life are pools of light we make for ourselves while the edge of the road is black: each of us dies alone.
- owenversteeg
I enjoyed the piece but the conclusion is weak and so broad as to be meaningless.
>So, what of the two cultures today?
Well, Snow won of course. Removing Latin and Greek in favor of more science and engineering? Teenagers used to read Thucydides. What was that study recently, that fifty-eight percent of English majors at two universities couldn't read the opening paragraphs of Bleak House and that only five percent could read it acceptably? "Industrialisation is the only hope of the poor"? Science and engineering will bring us material comfort? We are living in Snow's world!
>Above all, this style of thought valued analysis and exactness, and it was just this drab preoccupation with exactness that bothered Leavis, for it neglected what he considered should be the true focus of serious thinking: ‘life’. The idea of life haunts Leavis’s thought. It is central to it and yet maddeningly opaque. He believed the mark of great literature – or rather, what it is that makes great literature great – is its ability to manifest life, to summon it and make it exist for the attentive and dedicated reader. Literature is the locus of life. If a piece of writing does not make the close reader somehow sense life, then it can fairly be denied the status of literature. The absence of life is the most common cause of Leavis’s derision, with which he was so generous (even extending once to a rant against Jimi Hendrix, of all people). So: what did he mean by it? What is life?
To me this comes to mi […]
- herodoturtle
> He sees these scientists as strong men, willing to wrestle with the tragedy of existence by increasing the amount of happiness in the world. That struggle makes them optimists.
Loved that.
- jareklupinski
> ... otherwise Britain will sunset before its time, like the decadent Doges of the long-lost Venetian Republic ...
i love it when history rhymes
- brandonb
Related and worth reading: The Third Culture by the former executive editor of Wired (when Wired was good): https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.279.5353.992
- b450
Lovely article. I sympathize with Leavis's anger. I recognize the image of the smug technocrat, someone whose confidence in his conceptual scheme is so great that its ontology, its quantifications and operationalizations, come to supplant experience itself. That's not to say I have a particularly positive feeling towards the humanities, as Leavis represents plenty of what is worst about them. He doesn't seem to actually represent wisdom or humility in the face of the open-endedness of life. He presents as a gatekeeper of an elite club privy to special truths, who lashes out nastily at a perceived threat to his clergy's social cachet.