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“The two cultures” today 
by Roger Kimball 
 
The New Criterion home page 
 
It is not a question of annihilating science, but of controlling 
it. Science is totally dependent upon philosophical opinions 
for all of its goals and methods, though it easily forgets this. 
—Friedrich Nietzsche 
[T]he more that the results of science are frankly accepted, 
the more that poetry and eloquence come to be received and 
studied as what in truth they really are,— the criticism of life 
by gifted men, alive and active with extraordinary power. 
—Matthew Arnold 
The Corridors of Power” and “The Two Cultures”: these 
phrases are essentially what remains of the once towering 
reputation of Sir Charles Percy Snow, novelist, pundit, and— 
as his harshest critic, F. R. Leavis, put it—“public relations 
man” for science. C. P. Snow (1905–1980) was the son of a 
provincial church organist who rose to public acclaim and a 
life peerage through a mixture of geniality, application, and 
talent—more or less in that order. He was the embodiment of 
a certain type of educated philistine: bluff, well-meaning, 
clubbable, so well-rounded as to be practically spherical. In 
the Thirties, Snow abandoned an incipient scientific career in 
order to devote himself to writing. He published his first 
novel, a whodunit called Death Under Sail, in 1932. During 
the war, Snow’s technical background helped win him the 
important post of overseeing recruitment for Britain’s 
scientific research (hence his acquaintance with “the 
corridors of power”). And the novels kept appearing. By the 
Fifties, Snow’s novel sequence Strangers and Brothers was 
occasionally compared to A la recherche du temps perdu. 
Today, the word that seems most often used to describe his 
novels—on the rare occasions that they are described—is 
“inert.” In a generous moment, Edmund Wilson defended 
Snow but anticipated the judgment of history in finding his 
novels “almost completely unreadable.” “The corridors of
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power” furnished the title for one of Snow’s novels; it is all 
that is left of the work. Things are a little different with “the 
two cultures.” The phrase has lived on as a vague popular 
shorthand for the rift—a matter of incomprehension tinged 
with hostility—that has grown up between scientists and 
literary intellectuals in the modern world. Lack of precision 
has been part of its appeal: to speak of “the two cultures” is 
to convey regret, censure, and—since one is bold enough to 
name and appreciate a presumably unfortunate circumstance 
—superiority all at once. 
Snow first used the famous phrase in 1956 as the title for an 
article in The New Statesman. The article provided the germ 
for his 1959 Rede Lecture at Cambridge University, The Two 
Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, [1] which was 
subsequently printed in Encounter magazine in two 
installments. It is a brief, avuncular work. In book form it fits 
comfortably into fewer than sixty printed pages and is full of 
men who “muck in as colleagues,” behavior that’s “just not 
on,” etc. Yet as as soon as it appeared, The Two Cultures 
became a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic. The edition 
I have was published in 1961; by then the book was already 
in its seventh printing. 
Its fame got an additional boost a year later when the critic F. 
R. Leavis published his attack on The Two Cultures in The 
Spectator. Originally delivered as the Richmond Lecture at 
Downing College, Cambridge, “Two Cultures? The 
Significance of C. P. Snow” is a devastating rhetorical 
fusillade. It’s not just that no two stones of Snow’s argument 
are left standing: each and every pebble is pulverized; the 
fields are salted; and the entire population is sold into 
slavery. Leavis spoke of “the preposterous and menacing 
absurdity of C. P. Snow’s consecrated public standing,” 
heaped derision on his “embarrassing vulgarity of style,” his 
“panoptic pseudo-cogencies,” his “complete ignorance” of 
history, literature, the history of civilization, and the human 
significance of the Industrial Revolution. “[I]t is ridiculous,” 
Leavis wrote, “to credit him with any capacity for serious 
thinking about the problems on which he offers to advise the 
world.” So much for Snow the sage. What about Snow the 
artist, Snow the novelist? “Snow is, of course, a—no, I can’t 
say that; he isn’t: Snow thinks of himself as a novelist,” 
Leavis thundered, but in fact “his incapacity as a novelist is 
… total”: “as a novelist he doesn’t exist; he doesn’t begin to 
exist. He can’t be said to know what a novel is.” It gets 
worse. Snow is “utterly without a glimmer of what creative 
literature is, or why it matters.” “[N]ot only is he not a 
genius,” Leavis concluded; “he is intellectually as 
undistinguished as it is possible to be.” 
Literary London was stunned and outraged by Leavis’s
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performance (which was something of an official swan song, 
since he retired from teaching that year). At that time, a 
certain degree of rhetorical politesse still marked British 
literary journalism; Leavis had been the opposite of polite. In 
the weeks that followed, The Spectator printed more than 
thirty irate letters, many from eminent personages, most of 
them siding firmly with Snow. It was an extraordinary 
outpouring. One correspondent deplored Leavis’s 
“insincerity, incapacity and envy.” Lord Boothby, claiming 
that there was “not a single constructive thought in his 
lecture,” spoke of Leavis’s “reptilian venom.” Stephen 
Toulmin wrote that the lecture was “an insult to the audience 
and to Snow himself.” Other indignant commentators 
dismissed Leavis’s lecture as “ludicrously overdone,” “a 
demonstration of ill-mannered, self-centered and destructive 
behaviour,” or, more simply, “bemused drivelling.” 
The extreme reaction was partly a response to Leavis’s own 
extremity: Lionel Trilling, reflecting on the controversy in 
Commentary, summed it up when he spoke of the 
“unexampled ferocity” and “bad manners” of Leavis’s attack. 
In fact, Trilling agreed with much that Leavis had to say; but 
he could not abide the scorched-earth rhetoric: “it is,” he 
wrote, “a bad tone, an impermissible tone.” Perhaps so. But 
in the English response there was also a large element of 
snobbery: by 1960 Sir Charles was, well, Sir Charles: a 
member of the Athenaeum, a reviewer for The New 
Statesman, someone whom one knew. Thus Dame Edith 
Sitwell: “Dr. Leavis only attacked Charles because he is 
famous and writes good English.” Charles, indeed. 
The ruffled feathers of London’s intellectual elite make for 
an amusing footnote to the cultural history of the period. But 
the questions raised by The Two Cultures—and by Leavis’s 
searching criticisms of Snow’s position—are something more 
serious. It is not simply that the gulf between scientists and 
literary intellectuals (and the general public, too, of course) 
has grown wider as science has become ever more 
specialized and complex. Because of the extremely technical 
nature of contemporary scientific discourse—think, for 
example, of its deep reliance on abstruse mathematical 
notation—that gulf is unbridgeable and will only widen as 
knowledge progresses. The more pressing issue concerns the 
fate of culture in a world increasingly determined by science 
and technology. Leavis described C. P. Snow as a “portent” 
of our civilization because, in his view, Snow’s argument 
epitomized modern society’s tendency to trivialize culture by 
reducing it to a form of diversion or entertainment. Not that 
diversion and entertainment are necessarily bad things: they 
have their place; but so do art and high culture. The problem, 
as Leavis saw, is that the confusion of art and entertainment 
always proceeds in one direction: toward the adulteration, the 
trivilization, of art. For him, it was not surprising that The
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trivilization, of art. For him, it was not surprising that The 
Two Cultures captured the public imagination: it did so 
precisely because it pandered to the debased notion of culture 
championed by established taste. 
This year marks the thirty-fifth anniversary of Snow’s essay. 
As we look around the cultural landscape today, we see the 
debris of a civilization seemingly bent on cultural suicide: the 
triumph of pop culture in nearly every sphere of artistic 
endeavor, the glorification of mindless sensationalism, the 
attack on the very idea of permanent cultural achievement— 
in the West, anyway, the final years of the twentieth century 
are years of unprecedented material wealth coupled with 
profound cultural and intellectual degradation. C. P. Snow is 
hardly to blame for all this. He is merely a canary in the 
mine. But as such—as a symptom, a “portent”—he still has 
much to tell us. 
Perhaps the first thing that one notices about The Two 
Cultures is its tone, which vacillates wildly between the 
cozily anecdotal and the apocalyptic. On the one hand, we 
find Snow busy meeting the physicist “W. L. Bragg in the 
buffet on Kettering station on a very cold morning in 1939.” 
Without the narrative prop of High Table dinner conversation 
at Cambridge, Snow would be lost. On the other hand, he 
insists that the problem he has outlined is a “problem of the 
entire West.” “This is,” Snow writes toward the end of his 
lecture, “one of the situations where the worst crime is 
innocence.” In some “afterthoughts” on the two-cultures 
controversy that he published in Encounter in 1960, Snow 
refers solemnly to his lecture as a “call to action.” 
But what, exactly, is the problem? And what actions does 
Snow recommend we take? At one moment it’s nothing 
much; the next it’s everything and more. There is that “gulf 
of mutual incomprehension” between scientists and “literary 
intellectuals,” of course. But it soon turns out that there are 
also the “three menaces” of nuclear war, overpopulation, and 
the “gap” between rich and poor nations. (There are many 
gulfs, gaps, chasms, caesurae in The Two Cultures; it 
sometimes seems that Snow’s entire argument has fallen into 
one of of them.) On one page the problem is reforming the 
schools so that “English and American children get a 
reasonable education.” Well, OK. But a few pages later the 
problem is mobilizing Western resources to industrialize 
India. And Africa. And Southeast Asia. And Latin America. 
And the Middle East—all in order to forestall widespread 
starvation, revolution, and anarchy. Snow envisions tens of 
thousands of engineers from Europe and North America 
volunteering “at least ten years out of their lives” to bring the 
“scientific revolution” to the underdeveloped parts of the 
world. Reality check: in Snow’s mind, the Soviet Union was
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way ahead of the West in dealing with these vast 
imponderables. This is, he says, partly because the Russians 
have a “passionate belief in education.” But it is also because 
they have a “deeper insight into the scientific revolution than 
we have, or than the Americans have.” That explains why the 
world is clamoring for Russian automobiles and airplanes, 
you see, and also why the Soviets happened to manage their 
own economy so much more brilliantly than did the West. 
If all this seems like a terrible muddle, it is. In truth, there are 
three sorts of problems in The Two Cultures: trivial, non- 
existent, and misunderstood. Some, such as the famous gulf, 
gap, or chasm between scientists and literary intellectuals, 
are both trivial and misunderstood. Sure, it would be nice if 
“literary intellectuals” knew more science. But the gulf, gap, 
chasm that Snow deplores will never be bridged—from this 
side of the gulf, at any rate—by anyone lacking a good deal 
of highly specialized training. And, pace Snow, it’s not at all 
clear that the gulf really matters. 
As several critics have pointed out, Snow’s terminology can 
be exceedingly slippery. He begins with a dichotomy 
between the world of literary intellectuals and the world of 
physical scientists. (And he eschews anything more 
elaborate: “I have thought a long time about going in for 
further refinements,” Snow writes, “but in the end I have 
decided against it”: No wonder the biochemist Michael 
Yudkin, in a perceptive article on The Two Cultures, noted 
that Snow often seems “more concerned with the number two 
than the term ‘culture.’”) But in order to further his gulf-gap- 
chasm thesis, Snow is soon using “literary intellectual” 
interchangably with “traditional culture.” This fusion yields 
the observation that there is “an unscientific,” even an “anti- 
scientific” flavor to “the whole ‘traditional’ culture.” What 
can this mean? Aristotle, Euclid, Galileo, Copernicus, 
Descartes, Boyle, Newton, Locke, Kant: are there any more 
“traditional” representatives of “the whole ‘traditional 
culture’”? There’s not much anti-scientific aroma emanating 
from those quarters. [2] The real burden of Snow’s thesis was 
accurately summed up by Leavis: “there are the two 
uncommunicating and mutually indifferent cultures, there is 
the need to bring them together, and there is C. P. Snow, 
whose place in history is that he has them both, so that we 
have in him the paradigm of the desired and necessary 
union.” 
At the beginning of his lecture, Snow affects a generous 
even-handedness in his attitude toward scientists and literary 
intellectuals. There’s a bit of criticism for both. If literary 
types tend to be quite appallingly ignorant of even 
rudimentary scientific concepts (Snow seems astounded that 
his writer friends cannot define such basic concepts as mass,
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acceleration, etc.), then it turns out that many scientists are 
unacquainted with the novels of Charles Dickens. But this 
show of even-handedness soon evaporates. The “culture” of 
science, Snow tells us, “contains a great deal of argument, 
usually much more rigorous, and almost always at a higher 
conceptual level, than the literary persons’ arguments.” 
Literary intellectuals are “natural Luddites”; scientists “have 
the future in their bones.” This is a formulation that Snow 
rather likes. “If the scientists have the future in their bones,” 
he writes later, “then the traditional culture responds by 
wishing the future did not exist.” To clinch his argument that 
literary intellectuals (a.k.a. “the traditional culture”) “wish 
the future did not exist,” Snow holds up … George Orwell’s 
Nineteen Eighty-four—as if that harrowing admonitory tale 
could have been written by anyone who did not have a 
passionate concern for the future! 
Snow is especially impatient with what he takes to be the 
politics of “the traditional culture.” He quotes approvingly an 
unnamed “scientist of distinction” who opined that literary 
intellectual writers tended to be “not only politically silly, but 
politically wicked. Didn’t the influence of all they represent 
bring Auschwitz that much closer?” In this context, Snow 
explicitly mentions Yeats, Wyndham Lewis, and Ezra Pound. 
But his indictment is actually much broader: “nine-tenths” of 
the great literary figures of the early twentieth century (he 
specifies the period 1914–1950) are on his reckoning 
politically suspect. The “culture” of science, on the contrary, 
is optimistically forward-looking. But not, Snow hastens to 
add, shallowly optimistic. Scientists, too, appreciate the tragic 
nature of human life—that each of us “dies alone.” But they 
are wise enough to distinguish, with Snow, between the 
“individual condition and the social condition” of man. There 
is, Snow writes, “no reason why, just because the individual 
condition is tragic, so must the social condition be.” The 
prospect of social improvement (what Snow, echoing a 
character from Alice in Wonderland, picturesquely calls the 
prospect of “jam tomorrow”) is a galvanizing force that 
allows the individual to transcend, or at least to forget, his 
private destiny. 
Snow’s argument operates by erasing or ignoring certain 
fundamental distinctions. He goes to a literary party, 
discovers that no one (except himself) can explain the second 
law of thermodynamics, and then concludes triumphantly: 
“yet I was asking something which is about the equivalent of 
Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?” But, as Leavis 
notes, “there is no scientific equivalent of that question; 
equations between orders so disparate are meaningless.” The 
second law of thermodynamics is a piece of specialized 
knowledge, useful or irrelevant depending on the job to be 
done; the works of Shakespeare provide a window into the 
soul of humanity: to read them is tantamount to acquiring
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soul of humanity: to read them is tantamount to acquiring 
self-knowledge. Snow seems blind to this distinction. [3] A 
similar confusion is at work in Snow’s effort to neutralize 
individuality by assimilating it to the project of “social 
hope.” That may sound nobly altruistic. But, as Leavis asks, 
“What is the ‘social condition’ that has nothing to do with the 
‘individual condition’?” 
What is the “social hope” that transcends, 
cancels or makes indifferent the inescapable 
tragic condition of each individual? Where, if 
not in individuals, is what is hoped for … to be 
located? Or are we to find the reality of life in 
hoping for other people a kind of felicity about 
which as proposed for ourselves (“jam,” Snow 
calls it later—we die alone, but there’s jam to be 
had first) we have no illusions? 
Leavis here exposes the central philistinism, the deeply 
anti-cultural bias, of Snow’s position: the idea that the 
individual is merely a fungible token, a representative type, 
whose ultimate value is purely a function of his place in the 
tapestry of society. 
In the end, Snow is a naïve meliorist. For him, a society’s 
material standard of living provides the ultimate, really the 
only, criterion of “the good life”; science is the means of 
raising the standard of living, ergo science is the arbiter of 
value. Culture—literary, artistic culture—is merely a patina 
or gloss added to the substance of material wealth to make it 
shine more brightly. It provides us with no moral challenge 
or insight, because the only serious questions are how to 
keep increasing and effectively distributing the world’s 
wealth, and these are not questions culture is competent to 
address. “The upshot” of Snow’s argument, Leavis writes, “is 
that if you insist on the need for any other kind of concern, 
entailing forethought, action and provision, about the human 
future—any other kind of misgiving—than that which talks 
in terms of productivity, material standards of living, 
hygienic and technological progress, then you are a Luddite.” 
It is worth pausing at this point to note that Leavis grants 
Snow’s subsidiary argument that improvements in scientific 
education would be a good thing. Leavis is not “anti- 
scientific.” Of course “standards of living, hygienic and 
technological progress” are important. None of that is at 
issue. Nor is Leavis in any way suggesting that one should 
“defy, or try to reverse, the accelerating movement of 
external civilisation … that is determined by advancing 
technology.” Barring a world-extinguishing catastrophe, the 
progress of science is inexorable. Leavis accepts that. What 
he denies is that science is a moral resource—he denies, that
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is to say, that there is any such thing as a “culture” of 
science. Science tells us how best to do things we have 
already decided to do, not why we should do them. Its 
province is the province of means not ends. That is its glory 
—and its limitation. 
This is something that the editors of The Spectator grasped 
much more clearly than the many correspondents who wrote 
in to complain about Leavis’s essay. One word that is 
missing from Snow’s essay, they note in an unsigned 
editorial, is “philosophy”—“that effort to impart moral 
direction that was found in the best nineteenth-century 
English writers.” Chief among “the best nineteenth-century 
English writers” was Leavis’s own model and inspiration, 
Matthew Arnold. It is one of history’s small but delicious 
coincidences that in 1882, nearly eighty years before C. P. 
Snow’s Rede Lecture, Arnold was chosen for that honor. His 
Rede lecture— “Literature and Science”—was itself a kind 
of “two cultures” argument. But his point was essentially the 
opposite of Snow’s. Written in response to T. H. Huxley’s 
insistence that literature should and inevitably would be 
supplanted by science, Arnold argued that, “so long as 
human nature is what it is,” culture would continue to 
provide mankind with its fulcrum of moral understanding. 
The tenor of Arnold’s lecture could not have been more 
different from Leavis’s. “The tone of tentative inquiry, which 
befits a being of dim faculties and bounded knowledge, is the 
tone I would wish to take,” Arnold noted with un-Leavisite 
modesty. But his argument anticipates Leavis in striking 
detail. Both are concerned with what Leavis calls “the 
cultural consequences of the technological revolution.” Both 
argue passionately against the trivialization of culture, 
against what Arnold dismissed as “a superficial humanism” 
that is “mainly decorative.” And both looked to culture to 
provide a way of relating, in Arnold’s words, the “results of 
modern science” to “our need for conduct, our need for 
beauty.” This is the crux: that culture is in some deep sense 
inseparable from conduct—from that unscientific but 
ineluctable question, “How should I live my life?” Leavis’s 
point was the same. The stunning upheavals precipitated by 
the march of science and technology had rendered culture— 
the arts and humanities—both more precarious and more 
precious. Leavis understood that the preservation of culture 
—not as entertainment or diversion but as a guide to 
“conduct”—was now more crucial than ever. If mankind was 
to confront the moral challenges of modern science “in full 
intelligent possession of its humanity” and maintain “a basic 
living deference towards that to which, opening as it does 
into the unknown and itself unmeasurable, we know we 
belong,” then the realm of culture had to be protected from 
the reductive forces of a crude scientific rationalism.
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The contemporary relevance of this argument can hardly be 
overestimated. We live at a moment when “the results of 
science” confront us daily with the most extreme moral 
challenges, from abortion on demand and the prospects of 
genetic engineering to the more amorphous challenges 
generated by our society’s assumption that every problem 
facing mankind is susceptible to technological intervention 
and control. In this situation, the temptation to reduce culture 
to a reservoir of titillating pastimes is all but irresistible. 
Rock music, “performance art,” television, video games (not 
to mention drugs, violence, and promiscuous sex): we are 
everywhere encouraged to think of ourselves as complicated 
machines for consuming sensations—the more, and more 
exotic, the better. Culture is no longer an invitation to 
confront our humanity but a series of opportunities to 
impoverish it through diversion. We are, as Eliot put it in 
Four Quartets, “distracted from distraction by distraction.” C. 
P. Snow represents the smiling, jovial face of this 
predicament. Critics like Arnold and Leavis offer us the 
beginnings of an alternative. Many people objected to the 
virulence of Leavis’s attack on Snow. But given the din of 
competing voices, it is a wonder that he was heard at all. 
 
Notes 
Go to the top of the document. 
1. The Two Cultures was recently reissued in paperback by Canto 
Books (Cambridge University Press), with a new introduction by 
Stefan Collini. This edition also includes Snow’s essay “A Second 
Look,” his “afterthoughts” on the two-cultures controversy. Go back 
to the text. 
2. Among other things, Snow’s lecture illustrates the fact that a 
mountain of confusion can be built from a grain of truth. For there is 
an ingredient of irrationalism in Western culture that regularly 
manifests itself in anti-scientific biases of one sort or another. 
Certain varieties of romanticism belong here, as do many less 
agreeable phenomena. But Snow, while he dances around this issue 
—it is what gives his whole “two cultures” thesis a superficial 
plausibility—never really comes to terms with it. In contemporary 
academic culture, a widespread suspicion of the achievements of 
science—often extending to an outright rejection of the idea of 
factual truth—can be seen in many radical movements and 
“theories.” “Cultural constructivism,” deconstruction, radical 
feminism, and many other fashionable ists and isms are aggressively 
anti-empirical. Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt expertly anatomize 
these disparate phenomena in Higher Superstition: The Academic 
Left and Its Quarrels with Science (for a discussion of this book, see 
supra, pages 123–134). They show that this new hostility to science 
is part of a more general hostility to Western values and institutions, 
an anti-Enlightenment hostility that “mocks the idea that … a 
civilization is capable of progressing from ignorance to insight.” Go 
back to the text. 
3. Curiously, he also seems oblivious of the extent to which the second 
law of thermodynamics has impressed itself—vividly if not always
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accurately—upon the imaginations of modern artists, philosophers, 
and theologians via the concept of entropy: the thought that the 
universe is ineluctably “winding down” has proven to be a deeply 
unsettling but also fertile metaphor. Go back to the text. 
From The New Criterion Vol. 12, No. 6, February 1994 
©1994 The New Criterion | Back to the top | www.newcriterion.com