Education: Two Western Cultures

The vast gulf between scientists and nonscientists is often a subject of jokes. But English Novelist Charles Percy Snow is no longer amused. Sir Charles is qualified to protest: he worked as a physicist long before he became Britain’s most knowledgeable novelist of top-level science and politics (The Conscience of the Rich, Homecoming); he was knighted not for literature but for his work as chief organizer of scientists in the World War II Ministry of Labor; he is now a director of the English Electric Co. and scientific adviser to the British Civil Service Commission. “The degree of incomprehension on both sides,” he writes in Encounter, “is the kind of joke which has gone sour.”

No Trains for God? During and since the war, Snow and his colleagues have interviewed about 25% of Britain’s 125,000-odd scientific workers. “I confess that even I, who am fond of them and respect them, was a bit shaken. We hadn’t expected that the links with traditional culture should be so tenuous.” When asked what books they read, the scientists said: ” ‘Well, I’ve tried a bit of Dickens,’ rather as though Dickens were an extraordinarily esoteric, tangled and dubiously rewarding writer.”

But if scientists are startlingly “self-impoverished,” the narrowness of those who cling to the traditional culture is appalling. Snow finds the brainiest traditionalists unable to describe the second law of thermodynamics,* a question equivalent to asking: “Have you read Shakespeare?”

Of the two semieducated cliques, Snow concludes, perhaps the more dangerous are the nonscientific intellectuals. It is they who still manage the Western world, without any real understanding of the power at their command. Their ignorance began in the industrial revolution, and has graver consequences by the year. The English university “trained its young men for administration, for the Indian Empire, for the purpose of perpetuating the culture itself, but never in any circumstances to equip them to understand the revolution or take part in it … The academics had nothing to do with the industrial revolution; as Corrie, the old Master of Jesus College, said about trains running into Cambridge on Sunday, ‘It is equally displeasing to God and to myself.’ “

Yet the gains of industrialization—”the base of our social hope”—are still being scorned by Western intellectuals. And the West’s pure scientists have been just as “dimwitted” toward its productive engineers: “Their instinct . . . was to take it for granted that applied science was an occupation for second-rate minds.”

Wake Up. Snow suspects that the Russians have judged the situation more sensibly. “They have a deeper insight into the scientific revolution than we have, or than the Americans have; the gap between the cultures doesn’t seem to be anything like so wide as with us. One finds that their novelists can assume in their audience—as we cannot—at least a rudimentary acquaintance with what industry is all about . . . An engineer in a Soviet novel is as acceptable, so it seems, as a psychiatrist in an American one.”

The West has little time to wake up, says Snow. “Closing the gap between our cultures is a necessity in the most abstract intellectual sense as well as in the most practical. When those two senses have grown apart, then no society is going to be able to think with any wisdom. For the sake of the intellectual life … for the sake of the Western society living precariously rich among the poor, for the sake of the poor who needn’t be poor if there is intelligence in the world, it is obligatory for us and the Americans, for the whole West, to look with fresh eyes.”

* Heat always naturally flows from higher to lower temperatures, never the reverse.