 |
Al-Ahram Weekly 25 - 31 March 1999 Issue No. 422 
|
||
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
 |
 |
|
|
Al-Ahram Weekly 25 - 31 March 1999 Issue No. 422
|
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
|
|
|
Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Focus Profile Features Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Plain talk
By Mursi Saad El-Din
Among the cultural debates that do not seem to die down is the "sectarian war of arts and science". Since C P Snow delivered the Reith lecture in 1959 with the title of "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution", this division seems to have set in. I still remember the furore which his lecture created. He was immediately supported by Bertrand Russel. A young American senator, John F Kennedy, described the lecture as "one of the most provocative discussions that I have ever read of ".
40 years later the debate was re-ignited by the BBC on 13 March, and immediately taken up by three papers: The Observer Review, The Sunday Times and The Independent Weekend Review.
Snow's topic was the division between the arts and the sciences, and he criticised both the smug literary intellectual with his shallow knowledge of science and the dull unimaginative scientist who was ignorant about literature. Snow went on to say that the hostility between the arts and the sciences was not only culturally damaging, but it was also politically ruinous. The intellectuals of the West were wasting their energies in petty cultural arguments while the third world countries are suffering from poverty, hunger and disease. Snow's solution was "reform of the educational system, ending premature specialisation, raising the school-leaving age and improving the social prestige of teachers".
Snow was in a position to judge: he was a successful novelist, a theoretical scientist at Christ's College, Cambridge and a government civil servant in charge of recruiting scientists. In many ways, reading the lecture, now published as a booklet, one feels that it is closely autobiographical. A physicist and a literary man, he writes: "I felt I was moving between two groups [that] had so little in common that, instead of going from South Kensington (where the Imperial college is situated) to Chelsea (the artists' district) one might have crossed the ocean."
Snow's argument has no doubt survived, though he was vehemently attacked by both scientists and literary men. One of his most vicious detractors was F R Leavis, the well known Cambridge literature professor and critic. In 1962 he delivered a lecture entitled "The Significance of C P Snow" in which he decribed Snow's argument as "a pompous combination of idiocy and ignorance".
According to Jonathan Rée in The Independent, the villain in the whole affair is probably the concept of culture itself. "Back in the sixties," writes Rée, "F R Leavis thought of culture as a single all-embracing tradition of discriminating criticism, while Snow had thought it had divided in two." Since the eighties, however, the idea of culture "has grown sullen and introverted... Every group is now supposed to be enclosed in the bubble of its own culture, internally unified and isolated from others."
In an article entitled "Whose side are you on?" Melvyn Bragg points out that the ascription of imagination to the arts only drives "a wedge between the two cultures". A serious development, Bragg points out, is the way the young shun science: whole departments of science have been closed down for lack of students, while engineering courses are severely undersubscribed." Snow's visionary gleam, nonetheless required a degree "of optimistic decency and enlightened self-interest which was beyond us then and seems beyond us now."
Rée ends by saying that Snow would have been appalled by the fate of his idea of science as a form of culture. "In fact he originally planned to call his lecture 'The Rich and the Poor' instead of 'The Two Cultures'. 'And I rather wish,' he once said, that I hadn't changed my mind.'"
