I write this having just re-read C P Snow’s book The Two Cultures, which contains the
text of his original 1959 lecture and the 1963 essay which he called The Two Cultures: A Second Look.
I first read this book back in the 1980s, and decided to
read it one more time to locate a particular sentence that I want to use in a
work of fiction. Putting the words of real life people (scientists, engineers,
and technologists) into the mouths of fictional characters is one of the techniques
I use. I have found scientists, and their cousins in engineering and
technology, to be a rich source of dialogue which can be used to highlight
their rather peculiar beliefs and the nonsense that they often speak, which
reveals also their silent narratives. Anne Glover is a very good example of a
scientist speaking such nonsense, and her particular distorted views of the
world have been the subject of a number of my recent blogs, where I have
revealed her silent narratives. And using the words spoken by scientists,
either in fiction or non-fiction, to reveal their silent narratives and to
expose what lies behind the words – values, beliefs, delusions, denial,
self-constructed realities, biases, etc. – lies at the core of what I do. C P
Snow’s book is a gold mind of nonsense (as is Anne Glover).
His book is not all nonsense of course, but his silent
narrative can be seen as a manifestation of the question that I keep asking
about such people: why so smart yet so
dumb? This one can say is a disease afflicting the European mind, and it is
an illness particularly to be found among scientists, engineers, technologists,
economists, and people bound up in the industrial era techno-science,
capitalist paradigm, which keeps the European mind bound to the past. And it is
not just these groups that are locked into the past – social scientists, artists,
and others also share this view of the world, such is its contagious nature.
At the beginning of his lecture, Snow states that: “By
training I was a scientist: by vocation I was a writer.” Not so! Snow was a
scientist who wrote. There is a difference! Snow had his feet and mind firmly
planted in science. The quality of his thoughts and reflections are mundane,
and reflect the output of a mind trained and conditioned by science, which has
its place in the research laboratory, where it is effective, but this is where
it should be contained. Tigers are best kept in their natural habitat, where
they can do what they do, but that is where they belong. Put them into the human
world, and what follows is inevitable!
In comparison to his contemporaries – such as Rachel Carson
(Silent Spring), Arthur Koestler (The Sleepwalkers, The Act of Creation, and more), Thomas Kuhn (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions), and Michael Polanyi (Scientific Thought and Social Reality) –
Snow is merely expressing opinions of the kind one would expect to hear expressed
in a bar room. Educated opinions no doubt, but certainly not the work of a mind
with the mental skills needed for the critique and analysis that Snow
attempted. If indeed there are two cultures (or more), then they are most
likely to be found by considering the cognitive styles and skills that relate
to different types of human activities, as well as in values, beliefs, etc. This
is not something that Snow gives proper recognition to, but which can be found
when exploring the subject of disciplinary differences in a systematic way, and
some understanding of this can be found in the above mentioned work of his
contemporaries. As I often say – it’s all about behaviour! Snow’s book is
perhaps just one piece of evidence demonstrating that there are significant
differences in cognitive styles and skills – a case of horses for courses, which means that what is suitable for one
person or situation is unsuitable for another. Those who appoint people as
Chief Scientific Advisors should take note of this!
Before moving on, I would also mention here that this book
by Snow is not about Two Cultures,
but one that primarily addresses the divide between the rich and the poor. This
point he emphasises in Second Look. That
the book is often quoted, mentioned, referenced as being relevant to the disciplinary
divides in society, like for example between art and science, or art and
technology, is strange, for the book has very little to say about any
disciplinary divides, nor does it offer much in the way of insights. Are we
here dealing with a book like Adam Smith’s Wealth
of Nations, which, as Charles Handy once noted, must be one of the least
read but most often referenced books of all time?
What Snow’s book does however demonstrate, is the
construction of shared realities, silent narratives, and myths, by scientists.
This is evident in many places throughout the book, but becomes explicit in Second Look, when Snow starts to
criticise those with a romantic view of the past, and their myth that prior to
the industrial revolution, life was idyllic. He criticises such people and brands them as Luddites,
which is a common mistake made by scientific types. They mistakenly see Luddism
as a reactionary movement against progress (by which they mean new technology)
where in fact it was a movement brought about by the lack of progress of the
type that is far more important than new technology – the type of progress that
I will soon turn my attention to. For the moment, I will restrict my comments
to saying that Luddites made a statement that people are not machines, and
should not be treated as such, which is exactly how science and capitalism view
people.
Snow, after criticising the romantic myth, then demonstrates
the construction of another myth, the scientific one:
“Millions of individual lives, in some lucky countries like
our own, have, by one gigantic convulsion of applied science over the last
hundred and fifty years, been granted some share of the primal things. Billions
of individual lives, over the rest of the world, will be granted or will seize
the same. This is the indication of time’s arrow.”
Snow however conveniently disregards the fact that the
agricultural labourer of the 18th century, did not suddenly find
himself living in a paradise once industrialisation arrived, simply by offering
him the opportunity to work in a factory. Swapping the oppression of the land
owner for that of the factory owner was no progress, as the Luddites clearly
showed. Most ordinary people living in the mid-19th century lived in
the same squalor and poverty that existed 100 years earlier, only the
circumstances were different (perhaps worse).
History reveals a story of a continuous battle between the
vested interests of the few, and the rights and interests of the many. It is a
battle as old as civilisation, and what can be said of the role of applied
science in these battles? In the fight to abolish the slave trade and slavery,
what role did applied science have here? In establishing the rights of ordinary
people to organise themselves through trade unions, what did applied science
contribute? When laws were introduced to protect young children by making
unlawful their employment in factories, was it applied science that led to these
laws? Was free education for all the product applied science? In the fight to
achieve universal suffrage, what use was applied science? What leading role did
applied science play in the introduction of social security benefits? Our
National Health Service, providing free healthcare at point of need and use – was
this the product of applied science? And in recent times, what can be said of applied
science’s contribution to establishing our current legal basis for equality?
The above are the elements of which great leaps forward have
been made, the type of progress that Luddites yearned for, but which was not
forthcoming from industry nor applied science. This real and meaningful progress
did not in fact begin to appear in a significant manner until the 20th
century, which has been described as the
people’s century, and which clearly demonstrates both the negative aspects
of science and technology, and the importance of progress defined not by
science and technology, but by being human and treating humans as humans, and
not as faceless and nameless entities, whose only utility is an economic one.
It is a lesson that has not yet been learned.
It would of course be unfair to say that applied science has
not contributed to the improvement of human lives. That is not the point. What
I want to do is to place the benefits of science in proper prospective, but
Snow, like most scientists, looks at the human world and sees the benefits of
applied science, and ignores the fact that other forces and intentions were at
work, and what he sees is actually the result of a complex process, in which
applied science has played some part, but certainly not the most important,
except perhaps in the area of medical science and treatments, but that too was
dependent upon the notion of (free) healthcare for all, regardless of class and
financial standing. Without such a radical social reform, there would have been
no advances in medical science and treatments for the vast majority of people
(as is well demonstrated in the United
States ).
But the fragmented and reductionist mind does not see this,
because it has lost the ability to see the bigger picture. Snow was one these
fragmented thinkers. There are many more, and their number and influence grows.
And as Snow demonstrates (as do people like Richard Dawkins), education does
not offer a solution.
Snow (like Dawkins and Glover) can be seen as nature’s proof
that scientists should not be involved in policy making. They can provide
inputs yes, but that is not what they want. They believe that their world view
is more important than any other, that they are the sole bearers of the truth,
and they seek power by means most undemocratic to impose on others a
technocracy – the rule of science and reason. And when they are challenged
they become visceral as do all who live their lives in the self-imposed prison
that is called dogma. Moreover, because they are scientists, they do not see
this, and cannot foresee the consequences of their actions – for them there are
no consequences!
In my novel Moments in Time, the central character is one of these technocratic people with a fragmented
mind. But gradually he starts to understand as the consequences of his actions
begin to have a personal impact – sow the wind, reap the whirlwind. And understanding
the consequences of their actions is something that all those bound up in
dogma, be it scientific, religious, political or economic are capable of. In
the novel, there is a point where the central character states:
“Do you not know that we invent, that we are the creators of
the modern world? Intensive care technology, pharmaceuticals, mobile phones,
cars, domestic appliances, computers, trains, central heating, deodorants, fast
food, throwaway cups, tasteless vegetables, overcrowded roads, mountains of
discarded plastics, chemical weapons, unnecessary energy consumption, mindless
and repetitive manual work, dwindling oil reserves, environmental pollution,
global warming, loss of biodiversity, nuclear reactors that melt down … Yes,
indeed, we create the best of all possible worlds, …”
Prior to this moment in time however, he would not have said
this, or if he had, the sentence would not have included all the negative
things that are the product of a science and technology that is no longer fit
for purpose. The understanding that modern science, technology and engineering
are at the heart of our problems is something that the central character in the
story slowly comes to realise. But Snow does not recognise this, and indeed he
could easily be placed within the setting of Voltaire’s novel Candide, where, even after the
experiences faced by the characters, all the death, destruction, injustice,
etc., Snow would still be there at the end saying “All is for the best, in this
best of all possible worlds.”
But I conclude on a more positive note concerning Snow’s
book. At the very end of A Second Look,
he states: “Scientists can give bad advice and decision-makers can’t know
whether it is good or bad.” Did I not say that the book was not total nonsense?
And here we are back to the matter of Anne Glover, and how a President of the
European Commission will ever know that her advice, or more correctly her
version of the truth, the words that she whispers into his ear behind closed
doors, is good or bad? And such a statement points to the need for a different
and more sophisticated approach to policy-making than that which scientists
like Anne Glover are able to imagine. Suffering from the affliction why so smart yet so dumb, will in the
end lead to …
It takes a special set of circumstances of the kind that the
character in Moments in Time
experiences, for the unbreakable chains that bind Prometheus to the rock of the
past to be smashed and for people to be set free. Now is the time to create
these exceptional circumstances, and about this I will have more to say in due
course.
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