The Two Cultures
C. P. Snow（查尔斯·珀西·斯诺 Charles Percy Snow）
作者：斯诺最值得人们注意的是他关于他“两种文化”这一概念的讲演与书籍。这一概念在他的《两种文化与科学变革》（The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution，1959年出版）。在这本书中，斯诺注意到科学与人文中联系的中断对解决世界上的问题是一个主要障碍。
斯诺特别提到如今世界上教育的质量正在逐步地降低。比如说，很多科学家从未读过查尔斯·狄更斯的作品，同样，艺术工作者对科学也同样的不熟悉。他写道：
斯诺的演讲在发表之时引起了很多的骚动，一部分原因是他在陈述观点时不愿妥协的态度。他被文学评论家F·R·利维斯（F. R. Leavis）强烈地抨击。这一激烈的争辩甚至使夫兰达斯与史旺创作了一首主题是热力学第一与第二定律的喜剧歌曲，并起名为《第一与第二定律》（First and Second Law）。斯诺写到：
斯诺同时注意到了另一个分化，即富国与穷国之间的分化。
1 “It’s rather odd,” said G. H. Hardy, one afternoon in the early Thirties, “but when we hear about intellectuals nowadays, it doesn’t include people like me and J. J. Thomson and Rutherford.” Hardy was the first mathematician of his generation, J. J. Thomson the first physicist of his; as for Rutherford, he was one of the greatest scientists who have ever lived. Some bright young literary person (I forget the exact context) putting them outside the enclosure reserved for
intellectuals seemed to Hardy the best joke for some time. It does not seem quite such a good joke now. The separation between the two cultures has been getting deeper under our eyes; there is now precious little communication between them, little but different kinds of incomprehension1 and dislike.
2 The traditional culture, which is, of course, mainly literary, is behaving like a state whose power is rapidly declining—standing on its precarious2 dignity, spending far too much energy on Alexandrian intricacies, [1] occasionally letting fly in fits of aggressive pique3 quite beyond its means, [2] too much on the defensive4 to show any generous imagination to the forces, which must inevitably reshape it. Whereas the scientific culture is expansive, not restrictive, confident at the roots, the more confident after its bout5 of Oppenheimerian self-criticism, certain that history is on its side, impatient, intolerant, and creative rather than critical, good-natured and brash6. Neither culture knows the virtues of the other; often it seems they deliberately do not want to know. [3] The resentment, which the traditional culture feels for the scientific, is shaded with fear; from the other side, the resentment is not shaded so much as brimming7 with irritation. When scientists are faced with an expression of the traditional culture, it tends (to borrow Mr. William Cooper’s eloquent phrase) to make their feet ache.
3 It does not need saying that [4]generalizations of this kind are bound to look silly at the edges. There are a good many scientists indistinguishable from literary persons, and vice versa. Even the stereotype generalizations about scientists are misleading without some sort of detail—e.g., the generalization that scientists as a group stand on the political Left. This is only partly true. A very high proportion of
engineers is almost as conservative as doctors; of pure scientists; the same would apply to chemists. It is only among physicists and biologists that one finds the Left in strength. If one compared the whole body of scientists with their opposite numbers of the traditional culture (writers, academics, and so on), the total result might be a few per cent, more towards the Left wing, but not more than that. [5]Nevertheless, as a first approximation, the scientific culture is real enough, and so is its difference from the traditional. For anyone like myself, by education a scientist, by calling a writer, at one time moving between groups of scientists and writers in the same evening, the difference has seemed dramatic.
4 The first thing, impossible to miss, is that scientists are on the up and up; they have the strength of a social force behind them. If they are English, they share the experience common to us all—of being in a country sliding economically downhill—but in addition (and to many of them it seems psychologically more important) they belong to something more than a profession, to something more like a directing class of a new society. [6]In a sense oddly divorced from politics, they are the new men. Even the steadiest and most politically conservative of scientific veterans, [7] lurking8 in dignity in their colleges, has some kind of link with the world to come. They do not hate it as their colleagues do; part of their mind is open to it; [8]almost against their will, there is a residual glimmer of kinship there. The young English scientists may and do curse their luck; increasingly they fret9 about the rigidities of their universities, about the ossification10 of the traditional culture which, to the scientists, makes the universities cold and dead; they violently envy their Russian counterparts who have money and equipment without discernible11 limit, who have the whole field wide open. But still they stay
pretty resilient12: the same social force sweeps them on. Harwell and Winscale have just as much spirit as Los Alamos and Chalk River: the neat petty bourgeois houses, the tough and clever young, the crowds of children: they are symbols, frontier towns.
5 There is a touch of the frontier qualities, in fact, about the whole scientific culture. Its tone is, for example, steadily heterosexual. The difference in social manners between Harwell and Hampstead or as far as that goes between Los Alamos and Greenwich Village, would make an anthropologist blink. [9]About the whole scientific culture, there is an absence—surprising to outsiders—of the feline13 and oblique14. Sometimes it seems that scientists relish15 speaking the truth, especially when it is unpleasant. The climate of personal relations is singularly bracing16, not to say harsh: it strikes bleakly on those unused to it, who suddenly find that [10] the scientists’ way of deciding on action is by a full-dress argument, with no regard for sensibilities and no holds barred17. No body of people ever believed more in dialectic as the primary method of attaining sense; [11]and if you want a picture of scientists in their off-moments, it could be just one of a knock-about18 argument. Under the argument there glitter egotisms as rapacious19 as any of ours: but, unlike ours, the egotisms are driven by a common purpose.
6 How much of the traditional culture gets through to them? The answer is not simple. A good many scientists, including some of the most gifted, have the tastes of literary persons, read the same things, and lead as much. Broadly, though, [12] the infiltration20 is much less . History gets across to a certain extent, in particular
social history: the sheer mechanics21 of living, how men ate, built, traveled, worked, touches a good many scientific imaginations, and so they have fastened on22 such works as Trevelyan’s Social History, and Professor Gordon Childe’s books. Philosophy, the scientific culture view with indifference, especially metaphysics. As Rutherford said cheerfully to Samuel Alexander: “When you think of all the years you’ve been talking about those things, Alexander, and what does it all add up to? Hot air, nothing but hot air.” A bit less exuberantly23, that is what contemporary scientists would say. They regard it as a major intellectual virtue, to know what not to think about. [13]They might touch their hats to24 linguistic analysis, as a relatively honorable way of wasting time; not so to existentialism25.
7 The arts? The only one which is cultivated among scientists is music. It goes both wide and deep; there may possibly be a greater density of musical appreciation than in the traditional culture. In comparison, the graphic arts (except architecture) score little, and poetry not at all. [14]Some novels work their way through, but not as a rule the novels which literary persons set most value on. [15]The two cultures have so few points of contact that the diffusion26 of novels shows the same sort of delay, and exhibits the same oddities, as though they were getting into translation in a foreign country. It is only fairly recently, for instance, that Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh has become more than names. And, just as it is rather startling to find that in Italy Bruce Marshall is by a long shot the best-known British novelist, so it jolts27 one to hear scientists talking with attention of the works of Nevil Shute. In fact, there is a good reason for that: Mr. Shute was himself a high-class engineer, and a book like No Highway is packed
with technical stuff that is not only accurate but often original. Incidentally, there are benefits to be gained from listening to intelligent men, [16]utterly removed from the literary scene and unconcerned as to who’s in and who’s out. One can pick up such a comment as a scientist once made, that it looked to him as though the current preoccupations28 of the New Criticism, the extreme concentration on a tiny passage, had made us curiously insensitive to the total flavor of a work, to its cumulative29 effects, to the epic qualities in literature. But, on the other side of the coin, one is just as likely to listen to three of the most massive intellects in Europe happily discussing the merits of The Wallet of Kai-Lung.
8 When you meet the younger rank-and-file30 of scientists, it often seems that they do not read at all. The prestige of the traditional culture is high enough for some of them to make a gallant31 shot at it. [17]Oddly enough, the novelist whose name to them has become a token of esoteric32 literary excellence is that difficult highbr
ow33 Dickens. [18]They approach him in a grim and dutiful spirit as though tackling Finnegan’s Wake, and feel a sense of achievement if they manage to read a book through. But most young technicians do not fly so high when you ask them what they read—“As a married man,” one says, “I prefer the garden.” Another says: “I always like just to use my books as tools.” (Difficult to resist speculating what kind of tool a book would make. A sort of hammer? A crude digging instrument?)
9 That, or something like it, is a measure of the incommunicability of the two
cultures. On their side the scientists are losing a great deal. Some of that loss is inevitable: it must and would happen in any society at our technical level. [19]But in this country we make it quite unnecessarily worse by our educational patterns. On the other side, how much does the traditional culture lose by the separation?
10 I am inclined to think, even more. Not only practically—we are familiar with those arguments by now—but also intellectually and morally. The intellectual loss is a little difficult to appraise34. Most scientists would claim that you couldn’t comprehend the world unless you know the structure of science, in particular of physical science. In a sense, and a perfectly genuine sense, that is true. Not to have read War and Peace and La Cousine Bette and La Chartreuse de Parme is not to be educated; but so is not to have a glimmer of the Second Law of Thermodynamics35. Yet that case ought not to be pressed too far. It is more justifiable to say that those without any scientific understanding miss a whole body of experience: they are rather like the tone deaf, from whom all musical experience is cut off and who have to get on without it. The intellectual invasions of science are, however, penetrating deeper. Psycho-analysis once looked like a deep invasion, but that was a false alarm; cybernetics may turn out to be the real thing, driving down into the problems of will and cause and motive. If so, those who do not understand the method will not understand the depths of their own cultures.
11 But the greatest enrichment the scientific culture could give us is—though it does not originate like that—a moral one. Among scientists, deep-natured men know, as starkly36 as any men have known, that the individual human condition is
tragic; [20]for all its triumphs and joys, the essence of it is loneliness and the end death. But what they will not admit is that, because the individual condition is tragic, therefore the social condition must be tragic, too. [21]Because a man must die, that is no excuse for his dying before his time and after a servile37 life. The impulse behind the scientists drives them to limit the area of tragedy, to take nothing as tragic that can conceivably38 lie within men’s will. [22] They have nothing but contempt for those representatives of the traditional culture who use a deep insight into man’s fate to obscure39 the truth, just to hang on to a few perks40. Dostoevski sucking up to the Chancellor Pobedonostsev, who thought the only thing wrong with slavery was that there was not enough of it; the political decadence of the avant-garde41 of 1914, with Ezra Pound finishing up broadcasting for the fascists; Claudel agreeing sanctimoniously42 with the Marshal about the virtue in others’ suffering; Faulkner giving sentimental reasons for treating Negroes as a different species. They are all symptoms of the deepest temptation of the clerks—which is to say: “[23]Because man’s condition is tragic, everyone ought to stay in their place, with mine as it happens somewhere near the top.” From that particular temptation, made up of defeat, self-indulgence, and moral vanity, the scientific culture is almost totally immune. It is that kind of moral health of the scientists, which, in the last few years, the rest of us have needed most; and of which, because the two cultures scarcely touch, we have been most deprived.
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