C. P. Snow - Rede Lecture 1959
The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution
 On 7th May 1959, the physicist and author C. P. Snow
( Charles Percy Snow 1905—1980 ), then fifty-three years old and a former research chemist and more recently
a top civil servant and best-selling novelist, delivered
the annual Rede Lecture in the Senate
House of the University of Cambridge.
Its title — “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution” — referred to a gulf of mutual incomprehension and a
mutual lack of sympathy and appreciation
that Snow identified as having grown up between “literary intellectuals” on the one hand and “natural
scientists” on the other.
Snow's lecture, which set out to show that this gulf between two cultures was not merely an obstacle to
scientific progress but even represented a threat to the survival of western civilisation,
elaborated themes he had already mentioned in the influential political
magazine, New Statesman, three years earlier.
Snow suggested that western societies typically
had ruling classes composed principally of humanities graduates who were effectively ill-equipped to
appreciate what science had to offer. Snow identified three key menaces arising from the existence of nuclear
weapons, over-population, and the gap between rich and poor nations as pressing instances of where "literary
intellectuals" who in Snow's view were "natural luddites" failed to see that solutions might come
from "natural scientists" who, again in Snow's view, held "the future in their bones".
Snow suggested
there was an urgent need for the spreading of scientific innovation to poorer countries.
Snow tried to make the case that the once powerful Venetian Republic, for all its accomplishment,
wealth and influence nevertheless dwindled into relative obscurity dues to failures to adapt.
He compared Britain with Venice in its decadence:
"Like us, [the Venetians] had once been fabulously lucky. They had become rich, as we did, by accident…
They knew, just as clearly as we know, that the current of history had begun to flow against them. Many
of them gave their minds to working out ways to keep going. It would have meant breaking the pattern
into which they had crystallised. They were fond of the pattern, just as we are fond of ours. They never
found the will to break it."
"For the sake of the intellectual life, for the sake of this country's special danger, 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 and the whole West to look
at our education with fresh eyes."
C. P. Snow subsequently published an expanded version of his Rede Lecture
The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.
"The intellectual life of the whole of western society is increasingly being split into
two polar groups...literary intellectuals at one pole - at the other scientists, and as the most representative,
the physical scientists. Between the two a gulf of incomprehension."
"A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the
traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity
at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could
describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something
which is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?
"
In his lecture Snow said: "So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority
of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it
as their Neolithic ancestors would have had ... 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, 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."
Initial reactions to the lecture were overwhelmingly favourable. But the real
storm came three years later, in 1962, when the literary critic F. R. Leavis, a
reader of English at Cambridge, ferociously attacked Snow's thesis
in another high profile Cambridge lecture, the Richmond lecture, taking as his theme
Two Cultures? The Significance of C. P. Snow. Leavis described Snow as "intellectually as
undistinguished as it is possible to be", adding that his lecture "exhibits an
utter lack of intellectual distinction and an embarrassing vulgarity of style".
The Rede lecture, complained Leavis, showed no evidence of any scientific
training or rigorous scientific habits. Nor, moreover, did Snow know anything
about history. Leavis's lecture provoked an outcry.
In 1963 Snow revisited the controversy in The Two Cultures: A Second Look.
Here he restated his position. Advanced western society, he said, has lost even
the pretence of a common culture. Education is the means to salvation:
"Education, mainly in primary and secondary schools, but also in colleges and
universities. There is no excuse for letting another generation be as vastly
ignorant, or as devoid of understanding and sympathy, as we are ourselves."
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