“Like children in the arms of automation”: two cultures and everyday life
Caroline Basset
This paper returns to the two cultures debate, sparked by C.P. Snow’s 1959 Rede Lecture,
The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, in which Snow, a novelist, scientist and civil servant, called for an end to the divisions between literary and scientific culture. When F.R. Leavis published a scathing response in the Spectator (1962) he sparked a major furore at the time and a controversy that has lasted over fifty years. The intention in returning to the original debate and its reception is to better understand forms of anxiety and hostility to digital technological developments that emerge as a recurring response to technological innovation, and to explore the degree to which they entail the contestation of cultural capital; the value of technology or technological values. Amongst Leavis’ more scabrous comments was the suggestion that Charles Snow’s novels must be written by a computer brain called Charles - only this, he said, could explain their mechanistic writing and lack of life. This mode of attack/invective was the modus operandi of Leavis’ own critical approach. It indicates the degree to which a quarrel around science and the arts was also (1) always an dispute in which questions concerning technology, refusing that binary distinction between ‘science’ and the ‘arts’, intervened – and (2) a dispute whose intensity might be explored in relation to a hostility to technology and technocratic values rather than being ‘anti-science’. This last may also be explored not only in terms of a learned debate but in relation to broader publics and to everyday life. The paper reports on an archeological return made in two ways: (1) Contemporary media coverage (including specialist journals and newspapers and periodicals) has been explored. (2) The everyday response to the debate has been approached through a consideration of the stage performances of Donald Flanders and Michael Swan in the Drop of Another Hat. This show included a sketch and famous song – still high on any Google list in a search for the first and second law of thermo-dynamics - satirizing C.P. Snow’s paper, his writing, and the very idea of scientific knowledge entering the drawing room. Re-locating the debate to the stage of a London theatre opens up new ways explore what fuelled the intensity of this debate, to ask why and how it captured so much attention amongst the general public. It is certainly the case that re-framing a consideration of the legacy of the two cultures through a return to the Flanders and Swan, and a stage show marked by a strong sense of nostalgia for an older England now destroyed or undermined by modern technologies, exposes the degree to which a debate supposedly framed around literary versus scientific values, actually focused on a general rather than disciplinary clash of cultural capitals. It concerned above all perhaps, the rise of technocratic values and a perceived threat to the ‘whole way of life’ of different – and very English – communities. This returns today in relation to digital cultures.