Two Cultures? The Significance of C.P. Snow

Famous critic and man of letters F. R. Leavis eviscerates C. P. Snow's literary output by way of proving that a man who writes so badly, such a literary nullity, cannot possibly be taken seriously on any topic. That's an interesting idea, similar to the argument from aesthetics: an ugly theory cannot be right, or an ugly thing good. I'm not wholly hostile to it. Still, while Leavis is probably right about the quality of Snow's novels, he harps on them at such length that at the end the polemic has been bypassed and Snow's main argument (that to be complete an education must encompass natural sciences) has barely been addressed. Leavis, in fact, merely scoffs at it, at Snow's example of knowing the second law of thermodynamics as being show more as important or fundamental as knowing Shakespeare. Nothing of the kind, never on your life, not of the same order, thing, planet etc. sez Leavis. The invective is funny and colourful, for those who like such things, but disappointing in not fueling a real debate at all. Leavis wasn't necessarily anti-science (I don't think anyone was allowed to be, in those hectic tech-triumphant days), he just doesn't seem to understand what science IS, at all, nor does he seem to have stopped and thought about any of the amazing discoveries made in his lifetime. For him it's just a tool doing tooly things in the toolshed. He doesn't understand what the second law of thermodynamics means, how it describes the universe, how it relates to the way things are, to what we are, or life. So he throws it back at Snow as if he'd been asked to kowtow to a wrench, exemplifying exactly the misunderstanding and ignorance that sparked Snow's pamphlet in the first place.

Lively reading and a classic piece of cultural history, more interesting in the context of the fifty years that followed (especially now with the hind view of the Sokal hoax). show less

now was someone I admired, and read some of his work while at LSE. There didn't seem to be room in my friends' minds for the science and the arts - Sandra, the Swedish one, the Ukrainian Natalie, Jose the Belgian jesuit,. - the Oxford physicist Peter Krebs, even in me. dh

Two Cultures? The Significance of C. P. Snow / An Essay on Sir Charles Snow's Rede Lecture by F. R. Leavis / Michael Yudkin (1963)