By Dr. Satish C. Aikant
In 1959 eminent physicist and novelist C.P. Snow delivered a lecture called ‘The Two Cultures,’ at the University of Cambridge in which he argued that science and humanities were becoming increasingly isolated from each other, leading to a lack of understanding and communication between the two significant fields of human endeavour. He believed that scientists and literary intellectuals represented two distinct cultures with different values, languages, and ways of thinking.
Snow’s contemporary the well-known literary British literary critic and scholar F.R. Leavis responded with a scathing critique of Snow’s lecture, accusing him of oversimplifying the relationship between science and humanities and neglecting the cultural and historical context of scientific achievements. Leavis argued that science was not a separate culture, but rather a mode of understanding the world, and that literary intellectuals had a critical role to play in evaluating the ethical and moral implications of scientific progress.
The questions raised by The Two Cultures and Leavis’s criticisms of Snow’s position demands attention. It is not simply that the gulf between scientists and literary intellectuals (and the general public, too) has grown wider as science has become ever more specialized and complex. Because of the extremely technical nature of contemporary scientific discourse and its reliance on abstract and often abstruse mathematical formulations – that gulf has become unbridgeable and will only widen as the fate of the world is increasingly determined by science and technology. One must, of course, acknowledge the importance of scientific progress and its impact on society, but it is also essential to recognize the crucial role of literary intellectuals in evaluating the ethical, moral, and cultural implications of scientific advancements.
In an ideal situation, we ought to encourage dialogue and collaboration between scientists and literary intellectuals to foster a more comprehensive understanding of the world and human experience. There is need to emphasize the need for a multidisciplinary approach to education, research, and problem-solving, and integrating scientific and humanistic perspectives to address complex challenges. We must celebrate the diversity of human knowledge and experience, recognizing that both scientific and literary intellectual cultures contribute to our understanding of the world and our place within it.
A humanistic approach can be both pragmatic and accessible for the general public, as it focuses on the human experience, values, and ethics, rather than on technical – scientific niceties. This approach can help make complex issues more relatable and understandable, without requiring a deep understanding of scientific intricacies, and can help bridge the gap between science and humanities, making scientific knowledge more accessible and relevant to a broader audience. In this age of specializations, it is liberal education which provides necessary equipment to a person to cope with the exigencies of modern life. It is also important to note that a humanistic approach should not replace scientific literacy, but rather complement it.
Snow’s argument operates by erasing or ignoring certain fundamental distinctions. In his view, intellectuals, in particular literary intellectuals, are natural Luddites. Mark what he says: ‘A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists.’ He goes to a literary party, discovers that no one (except himself) can explain the second law of thermodynamics, and then concludes triumphantly: ‘yet I was asking something which is about the equivalent of, have you read a work of Shakespeare?’ I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question – such as, what do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, can you read? – not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language.’
Leavis rebuts Snow’s argument and notes that Snow’s equivalences are anomalous and miss the point. The second law of thermodynamics is a piece of specialized knowledge, useful or irrelevant depending on a given situation, while the works of Shakespeare provide a window into the soul of humanity: to read them is tantamount to acquiring self-knowledge. If literary types tend to be quite appallingly ignorant of even rudimentary scientific concepts, then it turns out that many scientists are unacquainted with the novels of Charles Dickens. It would be nice though if literary intellectuals knew more science.
A person with liberal education should be intellectually at home in the world of physical nature. He should know something about the earth he inhabits and its place in the solar system, and its relation to the cosmos. He should know about the structure of his own body and mind, and the cycle of birth, growth and degeneration. And on a larger frame of reference, he should understand the growth and decline of civilizations, and the underlying historical and economic forces that shape social change. It is important because it helps make everyday experience more intelligible, because it furnishes continuous exemplification of scientific method in action which is seminal to our understanding of our world, and because our world is literally being made and remade by the consequences and applications of science.
For Snow, a society’s material standard of living provides the ultimate, really the only, criterion of ‘the good life,’ science being the means of raising the standard of living. Culture – literary or artistic culture addresses no questions of material consequence. Leavis on the other hand understood that the preservation of culture – not as entertainment or diversion but as a guide to conduct – was now more crucial than ever. The realm of culture had to be protected from the reductive forces of a crude scientific rationalism. We are everywhere encouraged to think of ourselves as bodies for consuming sensations – the more, and more exotic, the better. Culture is no longer an invitation to confront our humanity but a series of opportunities to impoverish it through diversion. We are, as Eliot put it in Four Quartets, ‘distracted from distraction by distraction.’
Many people objected to the virulence of Leavis’s attack on Snow. But Leavis essentially saw Snow’s views as a threat to the humanities and the traditional values of education.
‘Poetry makes nothing happen,’ wrote W. H. Auden in his elegy for Y. B. Yeats who died in 1939. The line is often taken out of context as a critique of literary culture in general though a subsequent line of the poem disavows this interpretation with the affirmation that the arts are crucial to the survival of human culture. To reduce literature to its usefulness, in a utilitarian sense, is to miss the sheer pleasure of the word and sound that make it literature in the first place. The life that literature really equips us to live is not the one Wordsworth derided as devoted to ‘getting and spending,’ but the other life of inwardness and imagination. Unlike the sciences humanities are not considered merely utilitarian or having practical applications. Yet there is a persistent tendency in our culture to offer such pragmatic excuses for devaluation of art, as if something that helped us gain an advantage in the struggle for life alone was worthy of respect. Obsessed with commercial gains and profit motive, nations, and their systems of education, are heedlessly discarding skills that are needed to keep democracies and communities vibrant. If this trend continues, we shall soon be producing generations of useful machines, rather than complete citizens who can think for themselves, take a broader humanistic worldview, and understand the significance of pluralistic traditions. India, otherwise proud of her multifarious knowledge traditions, is following the globally mandated path of singular pursuit of technology that undermines lateral thinking and cultural regeneration. We ignore the faculties of thought and imagination that make us human, and instead subject ourselves to manipulations by global agencies disregarding our cultural specificities. With the overriding concern for profitability in the global market, values precious for the future of democratic societies, are in danger of getting lost.
The world of physical nature may well be studied without reference to human values. But history, arts, literature and particularly the social studies involve problems of value at every turn. Literature in all its forms is the great humanising medium of life. A sufficient justification for some study of the arts and humanities required in modern education is that it provides an unfailing source to guide human conduct, delight in personal experience, and add a certain grace in living. It provides a variety of dimensions of meaning by which to interpret the world around us. This, in itself, is a sufficient justification. One can reasonably hope that a community whose citizens have developed taste for finer aspects of living would not tolerate the mendacity, violence and squalor that surround us in a grossly materialistic world.
(The writer is former Professor and Head of the Department of English, H.N.B.Garhwal University)
