{"id":2941,"date":"2009-05-08T18:26:43","date_gmt":"2009-05-08T18:26:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/etherwave.wordpress.com\/?p=2941"},"modified":"2009-05-08T18:26:43","modified_gmt":"2009-05-08T18:26:43","slug":"the-two-cultures-at-fifty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/2009\/05\/08\/the-two-cultures-at-fifty\/","title":{"rendered":"The Two Cultures at Fifty"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>On May 7, 1959, C. P. Snow gave his famous lecture on “the two cultures”.\u00a0 The event took on such resonance that there are now 50th-anniversary events taking place in some major institutions of science to acknowledge its significance.\u00a0 See the New York Academy of Sciences<\/a>, the Royal Society<\/a>, the latest Nature<\/a>, and the folks from my old neighborhood<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The event is taken as an opportunity to reflect on and question the relevance of Snow’s message.\u00a0 But for me Snow has taken on the sort of red-flag qualities that other people in the history of science see in intelligent design or bad pop science.\u00a0 Why am I so exercised by Snow, of all people, and not these other things? Aside from his direct (albeit marginal) place in my research, I think it’s because Snow exists in a somewhat uncomfortable space between the uncontrollable bazaar of public ideas and the coherence of useful conversation.\u00a0 The bazaar will always be with us.\u00a0 But Snow helps experts who should know better think they’re having a good conversation, when it’s not the case at all.<\/p>\n

The way Snow did this was through a shrewd combination of good-but-obvious advice, bad history, and issue advocacy.\u00a0 As UVa<\/span> New York University prof Guy Ortolano details in his new (and lamentably expensive) book, The Two Cultures Controversy <\/em>(2009), when Snow made his argument, he had specific concerns for British university culture and civil service policy in mind.\u00a0 However, Snow ensconced his mundane advocacy within an epochal and obviously desirable project—overcoming cultural dissonance and barriers of communication.\u00a0 It was the historical failure or inadequacy <\/em>of this project that made his (or others’!) specific prescriptions seem obviously desirable.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>As David Edgerton has pointed out in Warfare State <\/em>and elsewhere (yes, I’m on about Edgerton again<\/em>, but it’s important<\/em> dammit), Snow was what he calls an “anti-historian” of British science and technology.\u00a0 For the “two cultures” to have any bite, Snow’s program had to have its historically dominant opponents.\u00a0 I used to take Edgerton to mean simply that Snow and others omitted or played down certain aspects of history, i.e. they weren’t very good or thorough historians.\u00a0 Ortolano, however, took the point better than I did in his article “The literature and the science of ‘two cultures’ historiography,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science <\/em>39 (2008): 143-150, where he notes that anti-history is necessarily self-negating<\/em>.\u00a0 It is not simply a question of neglect.\u00a0 Rather, it is a history where its own cogency and raison d’\u00eatre<\/em> actually hinge on a history of absence and failure of the subject it is narrating.<\/p>\n

Edgerton has used the term “inverted Whiggism” to describe the historiography of failure.\u00a0 You can always find failure, and if you tell enough histories about it, it begins to define the narratives we feel defined history.\u00a0 I like the concept a lot (though it doesn’t play as big a role as “anti-history” in Edgerton’s writing).\u00a0 Just as Whig history justifies the present, so inverted Whig history justifies a program of reform.<\/p>\n

For Snow, the general cultural failures of Britain justified reforms to education and the civil service.\u00a0 If by chance we aren’t so impressed by these issues, look to Nature<\/em>‘s articles on Snow to find others.\u00a0 The editors write that we need to further address Snow’s often overlooked points about applying ourselves to global poverty.\u00a0 Oxford art historian Martin Kemp observes that Snow and his arch-critic F. R. Leavis were off-track in their wranglings with each other; he concludes instead that disciplinary specialization is the real problem.\u00a0 Science writer Georgina Ferry writes that the real divide to be overcome is between optimists and pessimists.<\/p>\n

These are all fine sentiments, but don’t really tell us much about our past and present condition or what we should aim for in the future.\u00a0 After all, just as Britain was a highly scientific nation in Snow’s day by any reasonable measure, so we pay lots of attention to global poverty.\u00a0 We have long fought against the more evil tendencies of specialization.\u00a0 The fight between optimists and pessimists has raged for centuries without preventing the opposing sensibilities from resulting in good policy.\u00a0 None of this means we shouldn’t “do more”, but it doesn’t tell us what, exactly, needs doing.<\/p>\n

By supposing the path to reform to be obvious, and by supposing the main obstacles to be cultural blindness, we render our conversations essentially useless.\u00a0 In Nature <\/em>Joanne Baker excerpts another classic from the Snow oeuvre, his 1960 lectures, Science and Government<\/em>, detailing the pre-World War II conflict<\/a> between Henry Tizard and Churchill’s friend and science adviser Frederick Lindemann.\u00a0 In the lectures, Snow famously lionized Tizard as a sympathetic listener and deft bureaucratic organizer, and demonized Lindemann as an arrogant authoritarian.<\/p>\n

It’s well-known Snow was unfair in his characterizations.\u00a0 But the point was to make instrumental use of the tale.\u00a0 Baker shows us the incident to remind us of what science advice can look like behind closed doors, and for Snow, the incident was mostly valuable for its moral: be like Tizard!\u00a0 Well, yes.\u00a0 As Nature<\/em>‘s editors helpfully inform us, “Narrow-mindedness and any intellectual arrogance that lies behind it remain as unforgivable now as they were a half a century ago.”\u00a0 Who’s going to argue with that?<\/p>\n

Here are the perils of obvious-but-good advice.\u00a0 It’s like complaining about “the bureaucracy”.\u00a0 Everyone knows that bureaucracies are a nightmare, and everyone would love to explode the bureaucratic paradigm, but, really, no one in their right mind wants to get rid of bureaucracies.\u00a0 Nevertheless, by complaining about them, it makes you sound like you’re saying something novel and interesting.\u00a0 So then you set out to reform them, and that’s when the squabbling begins.<\/p>\n

When our conversations deteriorate into unhelpful truisms, we only hurt ourselves.\u00a0 The tough and intricate decisions that could benefit from better articulation, wider discussion, and nuanced history will still be made, but we won’t know what they are, let alone participate in the conversations that produce them.<\/p>\n

Snow hasn’t prevented good conversations from happening, and we haven’t needed him to have bad ones, but he’s been helping us have bad ones for fifty years.\u00a0 This is a sobering irony, though: by advocating for “science” in national culture, bad conversation was precisely what Snow thought he was fighting against.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On May 7, 1959, C. P. Snow gave his famous lecture on “the two cultures”.\u00a0 The event took on such resonance that there are now 50th-anniversary events taking place in some major institutions of science to acknowledge its significance.\u00a0 See the New York Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society, the latest Nature, and the folks<\/p>\n

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