Cp Snow's Two Cultures Quotes

Technology is a queer thing. It brings you gifts with one hand, and stabs you in the back with the other.

There is no getting away from it. It is technically possible to carry out the scientific revolution in India, Africa, South-east Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, within fifty years. There is no excuse for western man not to know this. And not to know that this is the one way out through the three menaces which stand in our way — H-bomb war, over-population, the gap between the rich and the poor. This is one of the situations where the worst crime is innocence.

But what about the other side? They are impoverished too—perhaps more seriously, because they are vainer about it. They still like to pretend that the traditional culture is the whole of ‘culture’, as though the natural order didn’t exist. As though the exploration of the natural order was of no interest either in its own value or its consequences. As though the scientific edifice of the physical world was not, in its intellectual depth, complexity and articulation, the most beautiful and wonderful collective work of the mind of man. Yet most non-scientists have no conception of that edifice at all. Even if they want to have it, they can’t. It is rather as though, over an immense range of intellectual experience, a whole group was tone deaf. Except that this tone-deafness doesn’t come by nature, but by training, or rather the absence of training.

Of books, though, very little. And of the books which to most literary persons are bread and butter, novels, history, poetry, plays, almost nothing at all. It isn’t that they’re not interested in the psychological or moral or social life. In the social life, they certainly are, more than most of us. In the moral, they are by and large the soundest group of intellectuals we have; there is a moral component right in the grain of science itself, and almost all scientists form their own judgments of the moral life. In the psychological they have as much interest as most of us, though occasionally I fancy they come to it rather late. It isn’t that they lack the interests. It is much more that the whole literature of the traditional culture doesn’t seem to them relevant to those interests. They are, of course, dead wrong. As a result, their imaginative understanding is less than it could be. They are self-impoverished.

Loth as one is to agree with CP Snow about almost anything, there are two cultures; and this is rather a problem. (Looking at who pass for public men in these days, one suspects there are now three cultures, in fact, as the professional politician appears to possess neither humane learning nor scientific training. They couldn’t possibly commit the manifold and manifest sins against logic that are their stock in trade, were they possessed of either quality.) … Bereft of a liberal education – ‘liberal’ in the true sense: befitting free men and training men to freedom – our Ever So Eminent Scientists nowadays are most of ’em simply technicians. Very skilled ones, commonly, yet technicians nonetheless. And technicians do get things wrong sometimes: a point that need hardly be laboured in the centenary year of the loss of RMS Titanic. Worse far is what the century of totalitarianism just past makes evident: technicians are fatefully and fatally easily led to totalitarian mindsets and totalitarian collaboration. … Aristotle was only the first of many to observe that men do not become dictators to keep warm: that there is a level at which power, influence, is interchangeable with money. Have enough of the one and you don’t want the other; indeed, you will find that you have the other. And of course, in a world of Eminent Scientists who are mere Technicians at heart, pig-ignorant of liberal (in the Classical sense) ideas, ideals, and even instincts, there is exerted upon them a forceful temptation towards totalitarianism – for the good of the rest of us, poor benighted, unwashed laymen as we are. The fact is that, just as original sin, as GKC noted, is the one Christian doctrine that can be confirmed as true by looking at any newspaper, the shading of one’s conclusions to fit one’s pay-packet, grants, politics, and peer pressure is precisely what anyone familiar with public choice economics should expect. And, as [James] Delingpole exhaustively demonstrates, is precisely what has occurred in the ‘Green’ movement and its scientific – or scientistic – auxiliary. They are watermelons: Green without and Red within. (A similar point was made of the SA by Willi Münzenberg, who referred to that shower as beefsteaks, Red within and Brown without.)

For, of course, one truth is straightforward. Industrialisation is the only hope of the poor. I use the word 'hope' in a crude and prosaic sense. I have not much use for the moral sensibility of anyone who is too refined to use it so. It is all very well for us, sitting pretty, to think that material standards of living don't matter all that much. It is all very well for one, as a personal choice, to reject industrialisation—do a modern Walden, if you like, and if you go without much food, see most of your children die in infancy, despise the comforts of literacy, accept twenty years off your own life, then I respect you for the strength of your aesthetic revulsion. But I don't respect you in the slightest if, even passively, you try to impose the same choice on others who are not free to choose. In fact, we know what their choice would be. For, with singular unanimity, in any country where they have had the chance, the poor have walked off the land into the factories as fast as the factories could take them.

Since the gap between the rich countries and the poor can be removed, it will be. If we are shortsighted, inept, incapable either of good-will or enlightened self-interest, then it may be removed to the accompaniment of war and starvation: but removed it will be. The questions are, how, and by whom.

The number 2 is a very dangerous number: that is why the dialectic is a dangerous process