Snow was a writer and a scientist, but between those two worlds, which he saw as ‘comparable in intelligence, identical in race, etc.,’ he noticed ‘an ocean.’¹ He feared that ‘intellectual life of the whole of western society [was] increasingly being split into two polar groups,’ and ‘[b]etween the two [he saw] a gulf of mutual incomprehension — sometimes (particularly among the young) hostility and dislike, but most of all [a] lack of understanding.’² ³ ‘The non-scientists have a rooted impression that the scientists are shallowly optimistic,’ Snow wrote, ‘unaware of man’s condition. On the other hand, the scientists believe that the literary intellectuals are totally lacking in foresight […]’ — and so Snow diagnosed culture.⁴
This is the 2022 C.P. Snow Symposium, for which this paper was written. This Symposium was hosted by Hal Conte in conjunction with the Other Life community.
‘A good many times,’ Snow encountered the ‘highly educated’ and found them incapable of ‘describ[ing] the Second Law of Thermodynamics,’ ‘the scientific equivalent’ of asking someone about the ‘work of Shakespeare.’⁵ F.R. Leavis disagreed with this parallelism, claiming, ‘There is no scientific equivalent [to Shakespeare],’ for even thermodynamics entails specialization, but even if that’s true, I do think we can say, to channel Thomas Sowell, that many people are considered educated who know nothing about combustible engines and the supply chain.⁶ We often hear warnings that “science isn’t everything,” but it sometimes feels that science doesn’t matter to anyone but scientists. This, Snow believed, would cause societal and practical suffering, but at the same time “scientism” has contributed to turning the world into what Heidegger called “standing reserve.” When “the two cultures” don’t relate, the worst of both dominate.
I
As I understand it, Snow originally titled his lecture “Rich and Poor,” which gives a whole new meaning to “The Two Cultures.” Deidre McCloskey argues that creativity generates wealth, and if art cultivates creative thinking, then the loss of art will be the loss of technological innovation. At the same time, the loss of science might contribute to a loss of “technological know-how,” which means we’d struggle to engineer ideas to market. Hard to say, but we can point to “The Meaning Crisis” John Vervaeke discusses as evidence of what can occur when “non-creative thinking” dominates, but the explosion of conspiracy theories and ideologies might be evidence of what occurs when “autonomously coherent thinking” is unleashed. To allude to Milton, “The Two Cultures” become “The Two Pandemoniums,” separate kingdoms in which nobody wants to dwell but lack any alternatives for escape.
Snow critiqued the idea ‘of producing a tiny elite’ and sought to reform education to avoid the pitfalls of this effort which could contribute to science and art only further failing to appreciate one another.⁷ Why was this a problem? Well, Snow argued that ‘[i]ntellectuals, in particular literary intellectuals, are natural Luddites’ (which I will later connect with them naturally being more “coherent thinkers”), and if artists and scientists didn’t interact, these “Luddite tendencies” would not be balanced.⁸ Snow was concerned about the humanities not appreciating the fruits of science, mainly the Industrial Revolution. Snow recounted his grandfather, whose life could seem to ‘his grandchildren laborious and unrewarding almost beyond belief,’ but actually his grandfather felt that ‘compared with his grandfather, he […] had done a lot’.⁹ Snow supposed that his grandfather’s grandfather was an agricultural worker, ‘completely lost in the great anonymous sludge of history,’ and all this in mind Snow notes that the Industrial Revolution ‘look[s] very different according to whether one [sees] it from above or below.’¹⁰ ¹¹ ‘To people like [Snow’s] grandfather, there was no question that the Industrial Revolution was less bad than what had gone before. The only question was, how to make it better.’¹²
For Snow, if the humanities were ignorant of science and the positive changes of the Industrial Revolution, they would oppose it and poverty worsen. As industry erupted, Snow claimed that the educated ‘didn’t comprehend what was happening’ due to scientific ignorance, and this contributed to them opposing the Industrial Revolution.¹³ Education could have curbed this opposition, making it less reactionary and more productive, but unfortunately there were “two cultures,” a division which contributed to extremity and less empathy. Snow noted that the Industrial Revolution made total war possible, but the technological progress was a great hope for the poor and ‘the base of our social hope.’¹⁴ The question simply was how could we “manage the negatives” of technology well, a balancing act we were unlikely to succeed at if pathologically split apart into “two cultures.”
Now, to be clear, Snow didn’t let scientists off the hook, for he noted that they too were often ‘devastatingly ignorant of productive industry,’ but scientists were at least less likely to practically moralize this ignorance, while some Intellectuals could view industry as “beneath them.”¹⁵ Snow noted that this “moralization of ignorance” was consequential, but it would be especially consequential if industry and scientific advancement accelerated, as Snow argued would occur. Already, ‘[t]he rate of change ha[d] increased so much that our imagination [couldn’t] keep up,’ and there was no reason to think that the change would decelerate anytime soon (especially not if Ray Kurzweil is right).¹⁶ We may soon feel forced to live with some alien “Singularity,” making “Luddite life” all the more tempting.
II
There have been countless responses to Snow over the decades, and, hoping not to sound repetitive, I will focus on an epistemological problem I think arises when science and art split apart, mainly the division of “coherence” and “correspondence.” I myself work in the arts, so, for my own sake, I will emphasize a defense of science
“Coherence” is the lack of contradiction between a network or system of ideas, while “correspondence” is the degree ideas apply to actuality (not that this is easy to determine, and ultimately “certainty” is not possible, only confidence). A system of ideas could be entirely “coherent,” say in a novel, and yet not “correspond” with anything actual, as it is possible that there are facts about reality we don’t know about yet which “correspond” with actuality but are yet to fit into any “coherent” worldviews and intellectual frameworks. A novel that is “coherent” but hard to relate to will likely fail, lacking “correspondence,” while facts which “correspond” with reality but lack a “coherent” narrative will likely be seen as meaningless. The humanities are generally in the business of “coherence” more than “correspondence,” and though arguably “correspondence” is ultimately indeterminable due to Gödel, “unbound coherence” leads us into conspiracy theories (and what I call “Pandora’s Rationality”). In the cultures of sciences and the humanities becoming “two,” this lead also to a split between “focuses on coherence” and “focuses on correspondence,” which lead to a loss of a needed dialectic which could help us gain both and escape our age of pandemonium and social neurosis between scientism and “magical thinking.”
Science isn’t everything, but Jonathan Rauch does a remarkable job in The Kindly Inquisitors of showing why it is special. I will not describe Rauch’s whole argument here, but the scientific method gives us a way to meaningful define “beliefs” from “knowledge” without claiming “only knowledge is true” (that would be scientism). Rauch argues that, without the scientific method, we are likely to end up in a world where “beliefs” and “knowledge” cannot be meaningfully defined apart. This is when “coherence” will be unbound, and epistemological fragmentation and tribalism likely unavoidable.
Science isn’t the only “mental model” we need, but it is unique in its ability to “give us reason to think” x could correspond with reality, not merely cohere with our ideology. Society cannot function where “nothing is in common,” and material reality itself is uniquely positioned to be a common basis according to which we can organize our values, but only if we have a unique method for determining what is likely to “correspond” with material reality. For me, this brings to mind David Hume, and the distinction I like to make between “such-ness” and “is-ness,” and I will note that if it is impossible for us to agree upon “such-ness,” and “correspondence” by extension, Hume sees totalitarianism as basically inevitable. But that’s another topic for another time.
“Coherence without correspondence” leads us to a world of multiplying “internally consistent systems” (like conspiracies) which we cannot dismiss simply by viewing the structures (see “Anxiety and Schrödinger’s Conceivability Structures” by O.G. Rose); at the same time, “correspondence without coherence” would be entirely meaningless (and perhaps unrecognizable as “correspondence” at all). Facts and information must be fit into a framework to be made sensible, which is to say “pure observation” is impossible, but a frame without a picture is empty. To think without facts is to consider only notions.
Isn’t the world today constantly talking about “facts” and “science?” Is not scientism everywhere? Fair, but I would argue first that even if scientists controlled “centers of power,” it wouldn’t follow that the general public was “scientifically minded,” a shortcoming that might notably make the powerful feel justified to impose their will, and that might make centers of authority difficult to understand by the public. This would create a tense relationship, and if people in power feel threatened by the society, they might be hesitant to entertain “humanities thinking,” and so fall into the very “scientism” the public worries about, making it seem as if the public was right all along to be so concerned. A self-feeding cycle might then be created, where the public becomes less scientific in reaction to the authorities becoming more scientific, and the authorities becomes less creative in reaction to the public becoming more creative—and so on.
III
F.R. Leavis famously criticized “The Two Cultures,” and perhaps Leavis went too far in attacking Snow as a novelist in order to deny Snow the authority to speak “for” the literary and scientific communities. Leavis did not like Snow positioning himself as omniscient and “discerning” the present state of culture, and indeed there is something to be said against the implications in Snow that economic prosperity is primary. A world with money but not creativity is hardly a world worth living in, but at the same time poverty is awful. I myself am always taken listening to Deidre McCloskey on the radical ways that technology has helped people economically advance (“The Great Enrichment”), but Leavis is also right to warn against making economics the meaning of life.
My sympathies for Leavis expressed, when I think about the epistemological dangers of “unbound coherence,” which we can be indirectly trained in without proper exposure to the value of “correspondence” through science, economics, and the like, then my final approvals must rest with Snow. However, the ultimate need for “balance” cannot be overstressed, for “art without science” can lead us into conspiracies and opposing the industry that helps alleviate poverty, while “science without art” can lead into “The Meaning Crisis” and Heidegger’s “technological thinking.”
What C.P. Snow foresaw was the emergence of our present world. The split between Reason and Spirit, to use language from Hegel, has indeed caused the “World Spirit” to become neurotic. Hegel was progressive, yes, but he also believed the more the world progressed, the more likely it was to fail. If we are indeed at the precipice of failure though, that would mean there is also the possibility of a new and great success, a “beatific vision.”
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Notes
¹Snow, C.P. The Two Cultures (14th Printing). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2012: 2.
²Snow, C.P. The Two Cultures (14th Printing). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2012: 3.
³Snow, C.P. The Two Cultures (14th Printing). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2012: 4.
⁴Snow, C.P. The Two Cultures (14th Printing). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2012: 5.
⁵Snow, C.P. The Two Cultures (14th Printing). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2012: 14.
⁶Allusion to “ ‘The Two Cultures’ Today” by Roger Kimball.
⁷Snow, C.P. The Two Cultures (14th Printing). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2012: 19.
⁸Snow, C.P. The Two Cultures (14th Printing). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2012: 22.
⁹Snow, C.P. The Two Cultures (10th Printing). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2007: 26.
¹⁰Snow, C.P. The Two Cultures (10th Printing). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2007: 26–27.
¹¹Snow, C.P. The Two Cultures (10th Printing). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2007: 27.
¹²Snow, C.P. The Two Cultures (10th Printing). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2007: 27.
¹³Snow, C.P. The Two Cultures (14th Printing). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2012: 24.
¹⁴Snow, C.P. The Two Cultures (14th Printing). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2012: 27.
¹⁵Snow, C.P. The Two Cultures (14th Printing). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2012: 31.
¹⁶Snow, C.P. The Two Cultures (14th Printing). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2012: 42.
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