The Modern Mind

by Peter Watson

  Snow’s lecture provoked an immense reaction. It was discussed in many languages Snow could not speak, so he never knew what was being said (in, for example, Hungary, Japan, Poland). Many of the comments agreed with him, more or less, but from two sources came withering – and in one case very personal – criticism. This latter was none other than F. R. Leavis, who published a lecture he had given on Snow as an article in the Spectator. Leavis attacked Snow on two grounds. At the more serious level, he argued that the methods of literature related to the individual quite differently from the methods of science, ‘because the language of literature was in some sense the language of the individual – not in an obvious sense but at least in a more obvious sense than the language of science.’ ‘For Leavis, neither the physical universe nor the discourse of its notation was possessed by observers in the way in which literature could be possessed by its readers; or by its writers – because he would claim that literature and literary culture was constructed not from words learned but from intercourse.’94 At the same time, however, Leavis also mounted a personal attack on Snow himself. So personal was Leavis’s venom that both the Spectator and the publishers Chatto & Windus, who reprinted the article in an anthology, approached Snow to see if he would sue. He did not, but it is difficult to see how he could not have been hurt.95 Leavis began, ‘If confidence in oneself as a master-mind, qualified by capacity, insight, and knowledge to pronounce authoritatively on the frightening problems of our civilisation, is genius, then there can be no doubt about Sir Charles Snow’s. He has no hesitations.’ When Leavis delivered the lecture, a pause followed this sentence. Then he went on: ‘Yet Snow is, in fact, portentously ignorant.’96

  Nonetheless, the most cogent criticism came not from Leavis but from Lionel Trilling in New York. He put down Leavis, both for his bad manners and for being so personal, and because he had come to the defence of modern writers that, hitherto, he had no time for. At the same time, Trilling thought Snow had absurdly overstated his case. It was impossible, he said, to characterise a vast number of writers in what he described as a ‘cavalier’ way. Science might hang together logically or conceptually, but not literature. The activities that comprise ‘literature’ are too varied to be compared with science in so simple a fashion.97 But was that true? Whatever Trilling might say, the ‘two cultures’ debate is still going on in some quarters – Snow’s lecture was reprinted in 1997 with a long introduction by Stefan Collini detailing its many ramifications all over the world, and in 1999 the BBC held a public debate entitled ‘The Two Cultures 40 Years On.’ It is now obvious at least that Snow was right about the importance of the electronic/information revolution. And Snow himself is remembered more for his lecture than for his novels.98 As will be argued in the conclusion, the end of the twentieth century sees us living in what might be termed a ‘crossover culture,’ where popular (but quite difficult) science books sell almost as well as novels and rather better than books of literary criticism. People are becoming more scientifically literate. Whether or not one agrees wholeheartedly with Snow, it is difficult not to feel that, like Riesman, he had put his finger on something.

  And so, piece by piece, book by book, play by play, song by song, discipline by discipline, the traditional canon began to crumble, or be undermined. For some this change had a liberating effect; for others it was profoundly unsettling, producing a sense of loss. Others, more realistic perhaps, took the changes in their stride. Knowing more science, or being familiar with the works of, say, Chinua Achebe, James Baldwin, or John Osborne, did not necessarily mean throwing traditional works out of the window. But undoubtedly, from the 1950s on, the sense of a common pursuit, a great tradition shared among people who regarded themselves as well educated and cultured, began to break down. Indeed, the very idea of high culture was regarded in many quarters with suspicion. The words ‘high culture’ themselves were often now written embedded (if not yet embalmed) in quotation marks, as if this were an idea not to be trusted or taken seriously. This attitude was fundamental to the new aesthetic which, in the later decades of the century, would become known as postmodernism.

  Despite the viciousness of Leavis’s attack on Snow, there was one especially powerful argument he didn’t use, presumably because he was unaware of it, but which, in the 1950s, would grow increasingly important. Snow had emphasised the success of the scientific approach – empirical, coldly rational, self-modifying. Paradoxically, at the very time Snow and Leavis were trading blows, evidence was accumulating that the ‘culture’ of science was not quite the way Snow portrayed it, that it was actually a far more ‘human’ activity than appeared from a mere reading of what appeared in scientific journals. This new view of science, to which we now turn, would also help shape the so-called postmodern condition.

  27

  FORCES OF NATURE

  By insisting that science was a ‘culture’ just as much as serious literature was, C. P. Snow was emphasising both the intellectual parity of the two activities and, at the same time, their differences. Perhaps the most important difference was the scientific method — the process of empirical observation, rational deduction, and continuous modification in the light of experience. On this basis, scientists were depicted as the most rational of beings, unhindered in their activities by such personal considerations as rivalry, ambition, or ideology. Only the evidence counted. Such a view was supported by the scientific papers published in professional journals. The written style was invariably impersonal to the point of anonymity, with a near-universal formal structure: statement of the problem; review of the literature; method; results; conclusion. In the journals, science proceeded by orderly steps, one at a time.

  There was only one problem with this view: it wasn’t true. It wasn’t close to true. Scientists knew this, but for a variety of reasons, one of which was the insecurity Snow highlighted, it was rarely if ever broadcast. The first person to draw attention to the real nature of science was yet another Austro-Hungarian emigré, Michael Polanyi, who had studied medicine and physical chemistry in Budapest and at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin before World War II. By the end of the hostilities, however, Polanyi was professor of sociology at Manchester University (his brother Karl was an economist at Columbia). In his 1946 Riddell lectures, at the University of Durham, published as Science, Faith and Society, Michael Polanyi advanced two fundamental points about science that would come to form a central plank in the late-twentieth-century sensibility.1 He first said that much of science stems from guesswork and intuition and that although, in theory, science is continually modifiable, in practice it doesn’t work out like that: ‘The part played by new observations and experiment in the process of discovery is usually over-estimated.’2 ‘It is not so much new facts that advance science but new interpretations of known facts, or the discovery of new mechanisms or systems that account for known facts.’ Moreover, advances ‘often have the character of a gestalt, as when people suddenly “see” something that had been meaningless before.’3 His point was that scientists actually behave far more intuitively than they think, and that, rather than being absolutely neutral or disengaged in their research, they start with a conscience, a scientific conscience. This conscience operates in more than one way. It guides the scientist in choosing a path of discovery, but it also guides him in accepting which results are ‘true’ and which are not, or need further study. This conscience, in both senses, is a fundamental motivating force for the scientist.

  Polanyi, unlike others perhaps, saw science as a natural outgrowth of religious society, and he reminded his readers that some of the founders of the Christian church – like Saint Augustine – were very interested in science. For Polanyi, science was inextricably linked to freedom and to an atomised society; only in such an environment could men make up their own minds as true independents. But for him, this was an outgrowth of monotheistic religion, Christianity in particular, which gave the world the idea, the tradition, of ‘transcendent truth,’ beyond any one individ
ual, truth that is ‘out there,’ waiting to be found. He examined the structure of science, observing for example that few fellows of the Royal Society ever objected that any of their colleagues were unworthy, and that few injustices were done, in that no one was left out of the society who was worthy of inclusion. Science, and fairness, are linked.

  Polanyi saw the tradition of science, the search for objective, transcendent truth, as at base a Christian idea, though of course much developed – evolved – beyond the times when there was only revealed religion. The development of science, and the scientific method, he felt, had had an effect on toleration in society, and on freedom, every bit as important as its actual findings. In fact, Polanyi saw an eventual return to God; for him, the development of science, and the scientific way of thinking and working, was merely the latest stage in fulfilling God’s purpose, as man makes moral progress. The fact that scientists operate so much from intuition and according to their consciences only underlines his point.4

  George Orwell disagreed. He believed science to be coldly rational, and no one detested or feared this cold rationalism more than he did. Both Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four are ostensibly political novels. When the latter was published in 1948, it was no less contentious than Orwell’s earlier book and was again interpreted by conservatives as an attack on the totalitarian nature of socialism by a former socialist who had seen the light. But this is not how the author saw it himself. As much as anything, it was a pessimistic attack on science. Orwell was pessimistic partly because he was ill with TB, and partly because the postwar world of 1948 was still very grim in Britain: the meat ration (two chops a week) was not always available, bread and potatoes were still rationed, soap was coarse, razor blades were blunt, elevators didn’t work, and according to Julian Symons, Victory gin gave you ‘the sensation of being hit on the head with a rubber club.’5 But Orwell never stopped being a socialist, and he knew that if it was to develop and succeed, it would have to take on the fact of Stalinism’s brutality and totalitarian nature. And so, among the ideas that Orwell attacks in Nineteen Eighty-Four, for example, is the central argument of The Managerial Revolution by James Burnham, that a ‘managerial class’ – chief among whom were scientists, technicians, administrators, and bureaucrats – was gradually taking over the running of society in all countries, and that terms like socialist and capitalist had less and less meaning.6 But the real power of the book was Orwell’s uncanny ability to evoke and predict totalitarian society, with its scientific and mock-scientific certainties. The book opens with the now-famous line, ‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.’ The clocks do not (yet) strike thirteen, but Orwell’s quasi-scientific ideas about Thought Police, Newspeak, and memory holes (a sort of shredder whereby the past is consigned to oblivion) are already chillingly familiar. Phrases like ‘Big brother is watching you’ have passed into the language partly because the technology now exists to make this possible.

  Orwell’s timing for Nineteen Eighty-Four could not have been better. The year in which the book was published, 1948, saw the beginning of the Berlin blockade, when Stalin cut off electricity to the western zones of the divided city, and all access by road and rail from West Germany. The threat of Stalinism was thus made plain for all to see. The blockade lasted nearly a year, until May 1949, but its effects were more permanent because the whole episode concentrated the minds of the Western powers, who now realised that the Cold War was here to stay. But Orwell’s timing was also good because Nineteen Eighty-Four coincided exactly with a very different set of events taking place on the intellectual front inside Russia which showed, just as much as the Berlin blockade, what Stalinism was all about. This was the Lysenko affair.

  We have already seen, in chapter 17, how in the 1930s Soviet biology was split between traditional geneticists, who supported Western ideas – Darwin, Mendelian laws of inheritance, Morgan’s work on the chromosome and the gene – and those who followed the claims of Trofim Lysenko, who embraced the Lamarckian idea of the inheritance of acquired characteristics.7 During and immediately after World War II the situation inside Russia changed substantially. War concentrates the mind wonderfully, and thanks to the requirements of a highly mechanised and highly technical war, the Russian leadership needed scientists as it had never needed them before. As a result, science inside Russia was rapidly reorganised, with scientists rather than party commissars being placed in charge of key committees. Everything from geology to medicine was revamped in this way, and in several cases leading scientists were elevated to the rank of general. Brought in from the cold after the inquisition of the 1930s, scientists were given priority housing, allowed to eat in the special restaurants otherwise reserved for party apparatchiks and to use the special hospitals and sanitaria that had hitherto been the prerogative only of high party officials. The Council of Ministers even passed a resolution that provided for the building of dachas for academicians. More welcome still was the abolition of strict control over science by party philosophers that had been in place since the mid-1930s.

  The war was particularly beneficial for genetics in Russia because, from 1941 on, Soviet Russia was an ally in particular of the United States and Great Britain. As a direct result of this alliance, the scientific barriers erected by Stalinism in the 1930s were dismantled. Soviet scientists were allowed to travel again, to visit American and British laboratories; foreign scientists (for example, Henry Dale, J. B. S. Haldane, and Ernest Lawrence) were again elected to Russian academies, and foreign journals were once more permitted inside the Soviet Union.8 Many of the Russian geneticists who opposed Lysenko took this opportunity to enlist the aid of Western colleagues – especially British and American biologists, and Russian emigrés in the United States, people like Theodosius Dobzhansky. They were further aided by the development of the ‘evolutionary synthesis’ (see chapter 20), which linked genetics and Darwinism and therefore put intellectual pressure on Michurin and Lysenko. Mendelian and Morgan-style experimentation and theory were reinstated, and thousands of boxes of Drosophila were imported into Russia in the immediate postwar years. As a direct result of all this activity, Lysenko found his formerly strong position under threat, and there was even an attempt to remove him from his position as a member of the praesidium of the Academy of Sciences.9 Letters of complaint were sent to Stalin, and for a while the Soviet leadership, hitherto very much in Lysenko’s camp, stood back from the debate. But only for a while.

  The start of the Cold War proper was signalled in spring 1946 by Winston Churchill’s ‘Iron Curtain’ speech in Fulton, Missouri, but the confrontation really began in March 1947 with the announcement of the ‘Truman Doctrine,’ with aid to Greece and Turkey designed specifically to counteract the influence of communism. Shortly afterwards, Communists were expelled from the coalition governments in France and Italy. In Russia, one of the consequences was a new, strident ideological campaign that became known as zhdanovshchina, after Andrei Zhdanov, a member of the Politburo, who announced a series of resolutions laying down what was and was not politically correct in the media. At first writers and artists were cautioned against ‘servility and slavishness before Western culture,’ but at the end of 1946 an Academy of Social Sciences was created in Moscow under Agitprop control, and in the spring of 1947 zhdanovshchina was extended to philosophy. By the summer, science was included. At the same time, party ideologists resumed their control as authorities over science. Russian scientists who had gone abroad and not returned were now attacked publicly, the election of eminent Western scholars to Russian academies was stopped, and several academic journals were closed, especially those published in foreign languages. So far as science was concerned, Stalinist Russia had come full circle. As the pendulum swung back his way, Lysenko began to reassert his influence. His main initiative was to help organise a major public debate at VASKhNIL, the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences, on the subject of ‘the struggle for existence.’ By putting Darwin centre st
age, it was Lysenko’s intention to highlight not only the division between ‘Mendelian-Morganists’ and ‘Michurinists’ but to extend that division from the narrow field of genetics to the whole of biology, a naked power play. The central issue in the debate was between those who, like Lysenko, denied that there was competition within species, only that interspecific competition existed, and those traditionalists who argued that there was competition throughout all spheres of life. Marx, it will be remembered, had admired Darwin, and had conceived history as a dialectic, a struggle. By Lysenko’s time, however, the official doctrine of Stalinism was that men are equal, that in a socialist society cooperation – and not competition – is what counts, and that differences between people (i.e., within the species) are not hereditary but solely produced by the environment. The debate was therefore designed to smoke out which scientists were in which camp.10

  For some reason Stalin had always warmed to Lysenko. It seems the premier had pronounced views of his own on evolution, which were clearly Lamarckian. One reason for this may have been because Lamarck’s views were felt to accord more closely with Marxism. A more pressing reason may have been that the Michurinist/Lysenkoist approach fitted with Stalin’s rapidly developing views about the Cold War and the need to denounce everything Western. At any rate, he gave Lysenko a special consignment of ‘branching wheat’ to test his theories, and in return the ‘scientist’ kept Stalin regularly informed about the battle between the Michurinists and the Mendelians. And so, when this issue finally reached the Lenin Ad-Union Academy meeting in August 1948, Stalin took Lysenko’s line, even going so far as to annotate conference documents with his own comments.11