C. P. Snow and Three Cultures
Several weeks ago, I sent questions to a few friends.
Why do we know so
much about African American writers and so little about African American
scientists? Who talks about Neil
deGrasse Tyson, Ruth Ella Moore, Mae Jemison, Euphemia Lofton Haynes, and
Sylvester James Gates, Jr.?
Some of the responses were illuminating. One friend who is a librarian knew Tyson,
Moore, and Jemison. Another, who is a
medical doctor, proposed that people fear mathematics and think science is too
hard. A rather surprising answer came from a poet who holds that scientists
don’t know as much about literature as writers know about science. The most intriguing response came from a
highly acclaimed literary scholar and cultural theorist. He said that I was playing a Sunday morning
game as if I were moderating an Oxford Union debate and that Tyson’s
popularizing of scientific ideas compromised his trustworthiness as a
scientist. Damn. If asking a question is now the equivalent of being on a television
show, so be it.
These responses
inspired me to revisit C. P. Snow’s The
Two Cultures and the Scientific
Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1959). Less than a day after rereading Snow, Lee
McIntyre’s article “The Attack on Truth” appeared in the online Chronicle Review, June 8, 2015.
(http://chronicle.com/article/The-Attack-on-Truth/230631) Two friends with whom I shared the article
slammed McIntyre for publishing bullshit, for being ignorant about the history
of literary theory, and for being tendentious in claiming some conservatives
have borrowed postmodern rhetoric for the sake of disputing “inconvenient”
scientific facts. They are right, of
course, but I am still amused that McIntyre imitates Snow without specifying
Snow’s political and ideological motives for writing about easily observable
habits attributed to disciplines.
McIntyre, a research fellow at the Center for Philosophy
and History of Science at Boston University, will publish his book Respecting Truth: Willful ignorance in the
Internet Age this month with Routledge. If “The Attack on Truth” is a
synecdoche, it is probable that some reviews of his book will be less than
kind. Had he used Peter Dear’s The Intelligibility of Nature: How Science
Makes Sense of the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006) or
Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1962) as templates for examination of ignorance and wisdom, McIntyre might have secured more credibility.
Like some of his intellectual peers, Sir Charles Snow was
very much a man of the West, the British-inflected West, and his fears about
minimal communication between “the men of science and the rest of us” were
genuine in the late 1950s. He feared
that the Russian Communists had the edge on Britain and the United States in
training scientists and engineers, people whom he deemed less racist and
paternalistic than most Europeans and Americans who intervened in the affairs
of Asia and Africa. The rest of us might at that time have included George
Padmore, Richard Wright, and participants in the 1955 Bandung Conference who
were thinking beyond science and literature toward a third culture, a culture
of actions which is neither Western nor Communist in the purest sense. Snow was
not prophetic enough, cosmopolitan enough, to behold the future which he hoped
to influence. Few human beings are
capable of triple consciousness.
To his credit, Snow did recognize the treachery of
unmitigated binary thinking, for he wrote:
The number 2 is a very dangerous number: that is why the
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. (10)
Snow should have proposed that the number 3 is less
dangerous than 2. Dialectic does involve
three basic gestures, does it not? If
dialectic is tempered by ethics, particularly in social and political
discussions, its results do not always reduce us to disadvantages. Snow did
have the modesty to know that his idea of two cultures had “to be regarded with
much suspicion.”
My own binary question about African American writers and
scientists demands a mea culpa,
because I did set it in a context that would have made my nationalist motives
transparent. I am not like that jesting
dude made infamous by Sir Francis Bacon, the shrewd dude who asked “What is
truth?” and promptly washed his Roman fingers. I know that the only “truth” to
be trusted is a perpetual state of inquiry and uncertainty, although I do wash
my African American hands frequently and try to put distance between myself and
utter stupidity. I do not believe Neil
deGrasse Tyson has committed a grave error in making some scientific mysteries
and partial explanations of them “popular” or attractive for non-scientists. I
do believe that I have profited as a writer from having known a little bit
about the thinking of such scientists as St. Elmo Brady (who was tutored by
George Washington Carver) and Slayton Evans (who was much beloved for his work
in chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) and from my
efforts to grasp what quantum theory, fractals, and dark matter might help me
to understand about writing, art, and language.
I do not believe it is a cardinal sin to encourage people, especially
young learners, to study both Ernest Everett Just and Langston Hughes; to tell
them they might gain something of value from reading Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters and doing research on
African American folk medicine in the American South.
I may be forced to say mea culpa for a cargo ship of flaws, but I’ll be damned if I will
say mea culpa for asking whether we
can be more curious than we seem to be in our use of interdisciplinary
thinking, more curious in looking for practical symbiosis of imaginative
expression and hard science.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
June 9, 2015
