The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox

  The late-nineteenth-century formulation of the warfare model arose directly from surrounding contingencies of the time—including the deeper challenge of Darwinian theory to traditional views about the origins of our species, and the occupation of the papacy by the increasingly bitter and deeply conservative Pio Nono (Pope Pius IX, who wins no stars in my book of heroes, but whom I regard as one of the most fascinating figures of the nineteenth century)—and not from any greater validity gained by the dichotomous model in the light of Darwinian challenges. And so the debunking continues right to our present moment, when the most celebrated and supposed example of warfare between science and religion in our times—the attempt by biblical literalists to ban or dilute the teaching of evolution in America’s public schools—cannot be so characterized in any fair or accurate account. The majority of professional theologians, including numerous explicit statements throughout the past fifty years of papal pronouncement, from the conservative Pius XII to John Paul II, support the factuality of evolution, and recognize that no aspect of empirical nature can challenge the legitimate role of religion in ethical and spiritual domains outside the logic and authority of science. Rather, the public fight against evolution has been carried out by a small, if vocal and locally powerful, minority of fundamentalists who proclaim the literal truth of the Bible—not a popular idea, to say the least, among most religious people these days. The group that successfully joined as plaintiffs to challenge the Arkansas creationism law in the early 1980s (McLean v. Arkansas), thus beginning a series of legal moves that culminated in a Supreme Court victory in 1987, included more theologians than scientists.

  3. Two cultures in the Cold War years. In 1959, when I was an undergraduate at Antioch College and still wallowing in a naively youthful assumption that scholarly debates packed more excitement, and certainly more potential enlightenment, than any other form of struggle with the possible exception of the World Series (then a sore point, as two of New York’s three teams had just departed for greener prospects—and I don’t mean chlorophyll—in California), C. P. Snow initiated the mother of all academic shouting matches by presenting his utterly inoffensive and, in retrospect, rather dull Rede Lecture at Cambridge, titled “The Two Cultures.” The original version received its share of press, but I doubt that this episode in constructing dichotomy between science and the humanities would ever have become such a cause célèbre if Britain’s most famous and most acerbic literary critic, F. R. Leavis, had not launched, in 1962, the most intemperate counterattack in the history of modern squabbling. (Obviously, in some irreducibly visceral sense, no one can face such a barrage of name-calling and deprecation with equanimity, but a little cool reflection on the virtues of both attendant publicity and overwhelming sympathy should quickly dispel any gloom. How could C. P. not benefit, and with a chuckle, in remembering the famous words of Isaiah 1:18: “Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.”)

  Snow did not fare so well in the most effective critique published later in 1962 by the American literary scholar Lionel Trilling, who inflicted many of Leavis’s strong bites minus the ad hominem barks that had won so much sympathy for Snow. Remembering my own enthusiasm and close following of this debate during my undergraduate years (I left Antioch for further study at Columbia in 1963), my rereading of it, as I prepared to write this book, left me with a feeling of disappointment and much ado about nothing.

  In arguing that academic life had become riven by a split of scholars into camps of suspicion, disrespect, and mutual incomprehension, and in designating the sides of his putative dichotomy as “literary intellectuals” versus “scientists” (with physical scientists the “most representative”), I believe that Snow had identified a local English phenomenon—and largely a snooty Oxbridge parochialism at that—and elevated his observations into a fallacious general case. Snow had begun his career in science, and ended both in university administration and as a respected novelist for a series of books centered on the minidramas of academic life, and collectively titled Strangers and Brothers— so he had lived intensely and professionally in both worlds, and surely knew their inner workings. But I can’t help thinking that he falsely equated a particular brand of haughty, hidebound, largely upper-class, traditional British literary culture with the much larger and more variegated community of humanists, and that he failed to realize—even while stating the point—that the British system of disciplinary specialization at such an early age accentuated both the parochialism of allegiance and the ignorance of other fields to an extreme level among Western nations. But to grant Snow his own words in asserting his thesis at the outset of “The Two Cultures”:I believe the intellectual life of the whole western society is increasingly being split into two polar groups: . . . At one pole we have the literary intellectuals, who incidentally while no one was looking took to referring to themselves as “intellectuals” as though there were no others. I remember G. H. Hardy [the great mathematician] once remarking to me in mild puzzlement, some time in the 1930s: “Have you noticed how the word ‘intellectual’ is used nowadays? There seems to be a new definition which certainly doesn’t include Rutherford or Eddington or Dirac [the leading physicist of the day] . . . or me. It does seem rather odd, don’t y’know.” Literary intellectuals at one pole—at the other scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension—sometimes (particularly among the young) hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding. They have a curious distorted image of each other. Their attitudes are so different that, even on the level of emotion, they can’t find much common ground.

  In my view, Snow’s thesis suffers from two fatal flaws, despite its success in promulgating the most influential twentieth-century claim for dichotomous opposition between science and the humanities. First, as discussed above, I believe that Snow falsely extended a local British phenomenon into a claim for global pattern. Second, Snow, by his own later recognition, mixed two quite different and independent points in the central thrust of his argument, and their incoherence seriously compromises the logic of his entire case. With fully good heart and intentions, but with a bit of British paternalism, Snow added a political argument to his basic thesis about science and literature. He recognized the disparity between rich and poor nations as the most unjust and incendiary feature of modern life. His concern became so intensified in his mind that he made one of the worst predictions ever printed about our recent millennial transition:This disparity between the rich and the poor has been noticed. It has been noticed, most acutely and not unnaturally, by the poor. Just because they have noticed it, it won’t last for long. Whatever else in the world we know survives to the year 2000, that won’t. Once the trick of getting rich is known, as it now is, the world can’t survive half rich and half poor. It’s just not on.

  The debate on “the two cultures” stemmed largely from this forgotten second section of Snow’s thesis, rather than from the first part with its basic claim for dichotomy. In fact, by now in our times, both parts have been pretty much forgotten. Most of my scientific colleagues could identify Snow, and could probably even cite the title of his famous address. But, although the lecture remains in print, I hardly know anyone who has read this short document in recent years. In a sense, Snow’s catchy and dichotomous name became too successful, for everyone remembered the title, and the one-sentence caricature, while forgetting the argument and then ignoring the text itself.

  Intensity of debate on this second half arose from the legitimate feeling of humanists that Snow, despite his undeniably good intentions, had inexcusably simplified the problem of poverty in the developing world, and had added insult by touting his own scientific colleagues as quick and sole saviors. For Snow did argue that the end of poverty would be achieved by little more than adequate training of enough local scientists and engineers—a simple technological fix, easily achievable in a few years. He wrot
e of China with a healthy denial of racism, but with a simplistic disregard of cultural and political issues:For the task of totally industrializing a major country, as in China today, it only takes will to train enough scientists and engineers and technicians. Will, and quite a small number of years. There is no evidence that any country or race is better than any other in scientific teachability: there is a good deal of evidence that all are much alike. Tradition and technical background seem to count for surprisingly little.

  Snow acknowledges that this expertise must be imported from the West, and he does add a small warning about paternalism as his only slight caveat about social difficulties. But he then falls immediately back into naive optimism, accompanied by yet another zinger (as read by his humanistic colleagues) about the inherent ability of scientists, as opposed to other folks, to work in this cooperative and sensitive manner with others:Plenty of Europeans, from St. Francis Xavier to Schweitzer, have devoted their lives to Asians and Africans, nobly but paternally. These are not the Europeans whom Asians and Africans are going to welcome now. They want men who will muck in as colleagues, who will pass on what they know, do an honest technical job, and get out. Fortunately, this is an attitude which comes easily to scientists. They are freer than most people from racial feeling; their own culture is in its human relations a democratic one. In their own internal climate, the breeze of the equality of man hits you in the face. That is why scientists would do us good all over Asia and Africa.

  In 1963, largely in response to the firestorm initiated by Leavis and Trilling, Snow published a reassessment and update of his defining claim for dichotomy of science and the humanities in our times—The Two Cultures: A Second Look. His almost courtly, sometimes sardonic, always firm yet utterly unpetty commentary on the criticism surrounding his initial essay won nothing but plaudits for style and fairness. I particularly appreciated his wry summary: “From the beginning, the phrase ‘the two cultures’ evoked some protests. The word ‘culture’ or ‘cultures’ has been objected to; so, with much more substance, has the number two. (No one, I think, has yet complained about the definite article.)”

  But much of Snow’s rumination then moves from defense to acknowledgment and self-criticism. In particular—and providing my major reason for treating Snow’s work at length in this critique of dichotomy, and in brief for hybridizing the fox and hedgehog—Snow effectively surrenders, and reverses his position on what had been, after all, the motivating assumption of his original argument: the validity of a dichotomous parsing of intellectual life into contrarian literary and scientific camps (however much Snow deplored the opposition and hoped to facilitate its easing or disappearance). Even in the original essay, Snow had sensed, and acknowledged, the problems of our all-too-convenient divisions by two:The number 2 is a very dangerous number: that is why dialectic is a dangerous process. Attempts to divide anything into two ought to be regarded with much suspicion. I have thought a long time about going in for further refinements: but in the end I have decided against. I was searching for something a little more than a dashing metaphor, a good deal less than a cultural map: and for those purposes the two cultures is about right, and subtilising any more would bring more disadvantages than it’s worth.

  But, by 1963, Snow had reassessed this basic decision and its resulting model. He had apparently recognized just how severely he had caricatured his two sides by choosing extremes as their exemplars in each case—upper-class, literary Oxbridge dons to stand in for all the humanities, and devotees of the “hardest” quantitative and experimental methodologies in physical science to represent the full range of folks who study factual nature in all its ways and manifestations. In the intervening years, Snow had obviously explored the enormous middle ground between these artificial end points—not just a few oddballs in a small transitional zone, but a vast mass of scholars, probably constituting the great majority in a continuum that certainly cannot be depicted as a dichotomy defined by the rare extremes at each terminus.

  Moreover, I think Snow now realized that although the continuum of a single axis suggested a richer and truer model than a dichotomy, intellectual life spread out in too many directions to depict along a single axis in any case. I regard this admission as an honorable surrender, a throwing of the towel into this particular academic boxing ring. Snow’s expansion suggested that what we roughly characterize as the “social sciences” should probably be formulated as a third culture, thus implying a fourth, a fifth, and, by extension, the death of the dichotomous model that had sparked all the controversy in the first place! Thus, I view the history of discussion about Snow’s “Two Cultures” as a lesson in the fallacies and dangers of dichotomy (while I obviously do not deny the value of such simplification in provoking discussion and better resolution). Snow wrote:I have been increasingly impressed by a body of intellectual opinion, forming itself, without organisation, without any kind of lead or conscious direction, under the surface of this debate. This body of opinion seems to come from intellectual persons in a variety of fields—social history, sociology, demography, political science, economics, government (in the American academic sense), psychology, medicine, and social arts such as architecture. It seems a mixed bag: but there is an inner consistency. All of them are concerned with how human beings are living or have lived—and concerned, not in terms of legend, but of fact. I am not implying that they agree with each other, but in their approach to cardinal problems—such as human effects of the scientific revolution, which is the fighting point of this whole affair—they display, at the least a family resemblance.

  I ought, I see now, to have expected this. I haven’t much excuse for not doing so. I have been in close intellectual contact with social historians most of my life: they have influenced me a good deal: their recent researches were the basis for a good many of my statements. But nevertheless I was slow to observe the development of what, in the terms of our formulae, is becoming something like a third culture. I might have been quicker if I had not been the prisoner of my English upbringing, conditioned to be suspicious of any but the established intellectual disciplines, unreservedly at home only with the “hard” subjects. For this I am sorry.

  4. Postmodernism and the millennial “science wars.” As the debate over C. P. Snow’s version of the dichotomous opposition between science and humanities died down and passed into the academic limbo of lost fashion (that is, still available for historical chronicles but not for current passions), an even more general and, if anything, apparently more contentious episode emerged in what American vernacular calls the “same old same old.”

  As my own cynicism grew after my undergraduate fascination with the apparent depth of Snow’s “two cultures” debate (on more sanguine days, I would substitute “wisdom” for “cynicism” as the descriptor of my maturation), I came to realize that most of the starkness and uncompromising opposition in all these episodes of dueling dichotomy arises not from any position actually taken by either party in the debate, but rather from the strawmen of extremity invented by one side to discredit the other and win the argument by ridicule. As an old, and factual rather than cynical, principle of human affairs, the victors get to write history, and their willful mischaracterizations, invented in the heat of battle, tend to persist even when, in another (and far better) convention of human affairs, generosity should prevail as a correlate of victory.

  It took me many years, and many incidents of puzzlement, to recognize this particular trick and trope. I would imbibe the myth of victors about the position just vanquished. I would then search the documents of the vanquished for affirmation—and never find any claim even close to the exaggerated version that made the victory of my side so sweet and so necessary. Instead of suspecting the victors of caricature, I just looked harder for the position that my side had imputed to their enemies. Only much later did I grow the guts, and acquire the intellectual maturity, to suspect, and then virtually to prove by more assiduous study, that victors often distort their opponents’
views into absurd extremes.

  If I may enter the confession booth and admit an embarrassing example from my very first publication, I wrote an essay on uniformitarianism in geology, making some novel points that I continue to recall with pride. But I had learned from day one of my first course in geology that the “bad guys” of an early-nineteenth-century dichotomy, known (boo, hiss) as “catastrophists,” were antiscientific theological apologists who argued for paroxysmal geological change at global scale because they dogmatically accepted both the efficacy of miracles and the six-thousand-year literal chronology of Genesis. But I read and read, and never found a hint of affirmation for either claim. Rather, all leading catastrophists seemed to agree with the uniformitarians about an ancient earth. They also shunned miracles as outside the course of natural law, and therefore incapable of scientific explanation. In fact the catastrophists seemed to be making the theoretically honorable (if factually dubious) point that geological dynamics on our ancient earth had been primarily paroxysmal but entirely natural—rather than gradual and accumulative as the uniformitarians favored.