Monday, July 13, 2009
Bridging the Two Cultures of C.P Snow--Part 4
So Snow held science to offer a this-worldly salvation, while Leavis in turn held to the humanities as the promise of salvation for the individual through culture. Is it possible for our students to partake of culture in a different way? Consider the following two areas of literary value: the nature of multicultural literature and the need for ecumenism in matters of taste. As to the first, I trust we are long past the canon wars of the 80's and 90's; however, one aspect of that later debate remains; namely, the question as to whether education in general, and the humanities in particular, function to free us from oppressive collectives or whether they must free us by acknowledging those communities of origin as essential to identity. Both, as we shall see, have their limitations. Charles Taylor in his famous essay, "The Politics of Recognition" notes that the politics of equal identity and dignity assume "universal human potential," as well as a concern with survival of the self. But increasingly this potential includes a politics of the equal recognition of one's identity group and of its survival. Survival policies seek to nurture--his word is "create"--continuing members (58).
Educational policies (such as canonical inclusion) work to protect collective identity from national structures that work against their continued importance. The difference-blind society, it can be charged, is actually highly discriminatory in its imposition of one kind of culture (43). Taylor notes, "The very idea of such a liberalism may be a kind of pragmatic contradiction, a particularism masquerading as the universal '" (44). We must face that even standards of worth are not transcultural (67). Taylor points out that by prejudging equal worth we already act on our Western standards as presupposing the correct ones. Ironically, our predisposition to finding all cultures of positive value actually flattens the actual horizons of encounter across cultures:
The peremptory demand for favorable judgments of worth is paradoxically -perhaps one should say tragically- homogenizing. For it implies that we already have the standards to make such judgments. The standards we have, however, are those of North Atlantic civilization. And so the judgments implicitly and unconsciously will cram the other into our categories. For instance, we will think if their "artists" as creating "works," which we then can include in our canon. By implicitly invoking our standards to judge all civilizations and cultures, the politics of difference can end up making everyone the same. (71)
I would contend that something like this happens in Arnold and Norton's treatment of culture as the religion of cultivation. Even if we bracket out the particular aspects of their life and thought that were highly prejudicial to non-Western societies, what remains is still a set of claims as to what constitutes cultivation and culture. They cannot step outside a particular judgment to what culture is, both in its pedagogical and purported descriptive summations. This phenomenon can be seen in the Snow-Leavis debate. Culture is judged by both authors in differing ways as salvific in that it imparts existential meaning (and or creature comfort) to help shore us up against a world "red in tooth and claw." One strand of history behind the discourse of salvation in Leavis and Snow is the creation of culture as a substitute for piety and the specialization of education into disciplines that undergirded, one could contend even helped create, science's disciplinary existence. They formed a subculture offering material salvation, of "more jam" as Leavis derided it. To judge faith as but one expression of the larger mythos of Kultur, indeed, perhaps even to accept "religion" as an ultimate sociological category, is to render it one humanism in the matrix of many.
As John Millbank has famously said, "The pathos of modern theology is its false humility. . . . once theology surrenders its claim to be a metadiscourse, it cannot any longer articulate the word of the creator God" (1). Either Kultur as anthropological culture or as incarnational history will function as the parameters for the others' meaning. Culture as a category of value already carries with it assumptions about the nature of humans, their purpose, happiness, morality, and so forth. Literary study defined as the study of cultural texts is not a neutral practice that is transferable from one social end to another.
This raises then the second issue: that of the possibility of an ecumenical view of beauty and art. If we do accept Christian faith as the point of functional discourse and not as an expression of Leavis, Trilling, and Norton's cultural salvation, can one avoid the trap Taylor has outlined above? Can a theological reading of a work of literature avoid flattening the work into a two-dimensional purpose? Can we remain open to the Other? Or as, Trilling admits in a sober moment, can we "no more escape from the cultural mode than we can escape from culture itself" (175).
Frank Burch Brown in his Good Taste, Bad Taste, and Christian Taste has suggested that such an openness is indeed possible, though "even ecumenical and inclusive Christian taste must also be in some ways discriminating" (25). Art objects, Brown contends, do not entirely self-generate their own values. Religious texts, for example, are informed by theological readings and practices. More specifically, for our purposes, Christian taste has to be shaped by the virtues of generosity and of charity, of gratitude and being easily taught (193). Such taste begins with a set of community practices, humbles itself in learning a differing set of practices, and eventually reaches a point where the text in question may transcend those cultures of taste in unpredictable ways. Indeed, following Taylor, to attempt to predict how would be to already close down part of what can be learned. Such pedagogy does not preclude our own soteriology. Brown notes, "life typically finds various and surprising ways of turning religious" (251). However, Christian taste must be informed by the enculturation of certain capacities with certain ends in mind. Not any old culture will do. In his reflections on culture, T. S. Eliot warns that at the heart of both individualism and collectivism there is the temptation to idolatry, as well as demonization of opponents:
But for most people, to be able to simplify issues so as to see only the definite external enemy, is extremely exhilarating, and brings about the bright eye and the springy step that go so well with the political uniform. This is an exhilaration that the Christian must deny himself. It comes from an artificial stimulant bound to have bad after-effects. It causes pride, either individual or collective, and pride brings its own doom. For only in humility, charity and purity- and most of all perhaps humility- can we be prepared to receive the grace of God without which human operations are vain. (75)
And thus, literary culture and teaching of a Christian sort must have as its end a purpose other than simply freeing the individual from a parochial ghetto of the mind, more than empowering the individual by recognizing his or her cultural worth, or more than creating a socially useful literature that honors material matters of economic justice and of scientific invention. Each of these may have their place within a larger practice, but that caritas of taste must be cultivated with the end of loving God and neighbor.
As André Maurois has said, "In literature as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others."
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Bridging the Two Cultures of C.P Snow -- Part 3
The Humanities as Salvific Culture
From here on I would like to focus more on the literary side of this debate and the history that undergirds it.
Snow himself rightly understood that Trilling's "freedom from society" was at odds with his own social collective project (96). From whence comes this salvific mission for the teaching, indeed, the politics of the humanities? The mid-to-late 19th century was an important shift in pedagogy from the study of classics for language, logic, rhetoric, and general "mental toughness" to the study of the humanities as cultivating refinement and nobility of mind and eventually as new specialized academic disciplines. "One wonders how much Milton's prominence in literature classes after 1860 owes to his earlier ubiquity in rhetoric courses:" observe historians John Robert and James Turner, "if you could parse Paradise Lost, you could parse anything" (77).
This shift away from classical studies was due in part to the growing loss of a Protestant Christian cohesive vision of education before the Darwinian onslaught, but it was as much due to the in-flux of the German research model, The specialization that Snow would come to partially lament in the next century was required by the new sciences. The humanities ironically first arose in response to this division of knowledge. President Charles W. Eliot, for example, most noted for Harvard's move to the elective system, felt that the students needed some sort of civilizing influence to replace the old Protestant hegemony and looked to the humanities to provide it (81). Specialization at the time was an academic novelty because the classic, old-time college could not conceive equipping one student in a different fashion from another. Despite its adaptation at Harvard and the rise of Brown as the first American research university, the new practice was resisted at many colleges well until after 1900 precisely because it conceived of professorial loyalty as beholding to national and disciplinary organizations rather than to the local college and its surrounding community (Roberts and Turner chapter 5).
And it was precisely non-specialization that the humanities seemed to require. The realm of "culture" was handed the civilizing mission once accorded the senior capstone study of moral philosophy in the old colleges. In the place of its synthesis of Scottish Common Sense Realist philosophy, republican democratic political theory, and broadly evangelical piety, stood sympathy and feeling through an exposure to culture. Humanities instructors and scholars, like Charles Eliot Norton, held that cultural items--art, architecture, music, literature--revealed the spirit of a people; this had both objective and subjective qualities--it could be taught and it could be observed. Norton saw in the rise of the humanities three elements to replace the fading of Christian conviction:
From here on I would like to focus more on the literary side of this debate and the history that undergirds it.
Snow himself rightly understood that Trilling's "freedom from society" was at odds with his own social collective project (96). From whence comes this salvific mission for the teaching, indeed, the politics of the humanities? The mid-to-late 19th century was an important shift in pedagogy from the study of classics for language, logic, rhetoric, and general "mental toughness" to the study of the humanities as cultivating refinement and nobility of mind and eventually as new specialized academic disciplines. "One wonders how much Milton's prominence in literature classes after 1860 owes to his earlier ubiquity in rhetoric courses:" observe historians John Robert and James Turner, "if you could parse Paradise Lost, you could parse anything" (77).
This shift away from classical studies was due in part to the growing loss of a Protestant Christian cohesive vision of education before the Darwinian onslaught, but it was as much due to the in-flux of the German research model, The specialization that Snow would come to partially lament in the next century was required by the new sciences. The humanities ironically first arose in response to this division of knowledge. President Charles W. Eliot, for example, most noted for Harvard's move to the elective system, felt that the students needed some sort of civilizing influence to replace the old Protestant hegemony and looked to the humanities to provide it (81). Specialization at the time was an academic novelty because the classic, old-time college could not conceive equipping one student in a different fashion from another. Despite its adaptation at Harvard and the rise of Brown as the first American research university, the new practice was resisted at many colleges well until after 1900 precisely because it conceived of professorial loyalty as beholding to national and disciplinary organizations rather than to the local college and its surrounding community (Roberts and Turner chapter 5).
And it was precisely non-specialization that the humanities seemed to require. The realm of "culture" was handed the civilizing mission once accorded the senior capstone study of moral philosophy in the old colleges. In the place of its synthesis of Scottish Common Sense Realist philosophy, republican democratic political theory, and broadly evangelical piety, stood sympathy and feeling through an exposure to culture. Humanities instructors and scholars, like Charles Eliot Norton, held that cultural items--art, architecture, music, literature--revealed the spirit of a people; this had both objective and subjective qualities--it could be taught and it could be observed. Norton saw in the rise of the humanities three elements to replace the fading of Christian conviction:
- the nurture aesthetic sensibilities through literary and artistic works;
- the professorial linkages across cultural eras and times;
- and the praise of European civilization as a kind of supercultural whole, though in all fairness Norton did not see Europe as the sole bearer of "civilization" (102-103).
Culture, however understood, became encoded with secular soteriological claims. Its purpose was to provide a comprehensive set of values, meanwhile leaving the physical condition of life to the natural (and eventually social) sciences.
As Turner points out, Norton substituted the vertical connection of humanity to God with a horizontal one of people to people (380). For Norton, the intuition of beauty was a product of human cultural progress. He understood beauty to be tied to moral desires, so that to cultivate one was to nurture the other. Imagination was at the heart of perceiving beauty; he saw this as an intellectual faculty obtained through "reflection, comparison, and remininscence" of images and other sense impressions (Liberal Education 382). In this sense, Norton's project represented the transition between other common sense realist claims for the moral sympathies and the eventually move to moral pragmatism. Turner claims that "Norton invented Western civilization" (384) in the sense that he put together a pedagogical and ideological program out of what others were suggesting piecemeal (384).
Yet at the project's heart were the conditions for its demise. Philology as the study, reconstruction, and interpretation of ancient texts formed the backbone of 18th and 19th century German university research and formed the basis for Norton's project. Philology was guided by cultural context and historicism (Roberts and Turner 97ff.); the first demanded a sense of the ancient culture's differences, while the second taught the constant change and evolution of cultures over time. In the end philological historicism within the humanities worked against anything like holism and eventually opened the way for a non-Christian soteriology to take its seat at the heart of university education, dismissing a unified or normative knowledge. It created a religion of cultivation, but one increasingly subject to emotivist ethics and relativistic truth claims.
By positioning ultimate meaning within the social and artistic milieu alone, it opened the door for William James' judgment of religion as capacity of supernatural feeling, but one without any final truth claims. For James, "Christianity makes sense only as disguised humanism" (Hauerwas 64). Prayer is only subjective authenticity and theological claims are only "over-beliefs" arising from religious feeling (66-68). There can be no final adjudication of what is true. Theologian Ernst Troeltsch would come to label this phenomena the "crisis of historicism" (119), one in which human culture could make only an agnostic gesture to the possibility of something beyond.
And this is what is at the heart of the Snow-Leavis debate. The two were, ironically, more in agreement than one might first think: both see the individual as primary and the conditions of life as finally oppressive and needing to be mitigated. Both also put something like an implicit trust in the humanities as offering the individual some surfeit from societal and biological meaninglessness. For Snow, however, only science can offer physical prosperity, which must be approached collectively while for Leavis and Trilling, the "criticism of life" offers a chance for freedom from the technopoly's oppression and operative conformity. Yet neither can reach a common basis for their pedagogical platforms. It is also highly questionable whether Trilling's attempt to adjudicate the two is any more successful.
Compare their assumptions with contemporary definitions of culture that Trilling recommended to his fellow Liberals in the 1940 Parisian Review, not for their "allegiance" but for their serious "consideration" (22). Historian Christopher Dawson and T.S. Eliot, whom Dawson influenced as part of The Moot and The Sword of the Spirit intellectual and ecumenical circles, held that culture and religion could not separated; indeed, a culture's without a religion was in the process of dying. Dawson held, "We cannot separate culture from religion any more than we can separate our life from our faith. As a living faith must change the life of the believer, so a living religion must influence and transform the social way of life" (Historic Reality 68). Religion, even if observed sociologically, is not one more sociological section of culture; it is not a sign system giving ritual meaning to otherwise material and psychological insufficiencies. Dawson charged that the material reading of history is not wrong to judge some "spiritual aspects of culture as conditioned by its material elements, but in the assertion of an absolute casual dependence of the former on the latter" (Enquiries vii). For Eliot, a people's religion and their culture are intertwined, perhaps really two aspects of the same thing, "culture being, essentially, the incarnation (so to speak) of the religion of a people" (101). Culture is "a whole way of life" (103) and a "lived religion" (104). But no people ever have a perfectly pure religion. Europe, thinks Eliot, has always been more or less Christian but not totally so. By incarnation, the, he means neither a simple relation nor an absolute identification (105ff.). Instead, he sees the two as operating in something like a tandem:
An individual European may not believe that the Christian Faith is true, and yet what he says, and makes, and does, will all spring out of his heritage of Christian culture and depend upon that culture for its meaning. Only a Christian could have reproduced a Voltaire or a Nietzsche. I do not believe that the culture of Europe could survive the complete disappearance of the Christian Faith. And I am convinced of that, not merely because I am a Christian myself, but as a student of social biology. If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes. (200)
As we move into what many see as a post-Christian Europe, the jury remains out as to whether Eliot is correct.
What Trilling found attractive in Eliot's position was the promise of something beyond dialectical materialism of the Left: "What is meant negatively is that man cannot be comprehended in a formula; what is meant positively is the sense of complication and possibility, of surprise, intensification, variety, unfoldment, worth" (29-30). Trilling found in Eliot's politics the hope of a humanity not reducible to the Soviet overman nor the capitalist consumer. He approved in Eliot that "politics is to be judged by what it does for moral perfection, rather than the physical easement of man" (27). Trilling longed for something like a spiritual component to the human culture, even if was unable to conclude that "supernaturalism can aid us" (32).
Even if one finds aspects of Dawson and Eliot's historiography wanting, nonetheless, their insights leave those of us who teach literature in a confessional setting with a particular dilemma that I can only sketch in outline here: Can Trilling and Leavis' answer to Snow be our own? In light of the soteriological substitution each is making, should we be seeking to liberate our students from their cultural parameters? Likewise, what is the relationship between the cultures we study and the faith culture we consciously or unconsciously cultivate in our students' educations?
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Are We Really Paying You for This?
I like sports. College football is one of my favorite things. Most college football fans suffer constant frustration regarding the inability of the college football power brokers to develop a playoff system. I know it frustrates me.
However, I personally do not believe this issue possesses enough significance for Congress to call two hearings! So, Joe Barton and Orrin Hatch cannot find enough to do with the economy, Iraq, Iran and Honduras on the table? Really!!
Here are some of my thoughts. First, stop wasting your time and my tax dollars grand standing!! Second, this article ably lays out why Congress does not have the ability to enact meaningful reform. So, why hold hearings unless you need yet another opportunity to look tough with your fake bravado and anger!
Finally, the BCS is a prime example of the haves getting their way while the have-nots get in line with the hope of securing a top tier bowl. In a battle of the haves vs. the have-nots, which side do politicians generally take?
However, I personally do not believe this issue possesses enough significance for Congress to call two hearings! So, Joe Barton and Orrin Hatch cannot find enough to do with the economy, Iraq, Iran and Honduras on the table? Really!!
Here are some of my thoughts. First, stop wasting your time and my tax dollars grand standing!! Second, this article ably lays out why Congress does not have the ability to enact meaningful reform. So, why hold hearings unless you need yet another opportunity to look tough with your fake bravado and anger!
Finally, the BCS is a prime example of the haves getting their way while the have-nots get in line with the hope of securing a top tier bowl. In a battle of the haves vs. the have-nots, which side do politicians generally take?
The Fog of War
One of the more famous and controversial figures of the 20Th century passed away recently. I am referring of course to Robert Strange McNamara. You were thinking of someone else?
McNamara was famous because he was appointed president of Ford Motors and Secretary of Defense in the Kennedy Administration before his 45Th birthday. In fact, he was the first Ford president outside of the Ford family.
McNamara possessed a rigid and rational mind honed by statistical analysis. His belief in rational policy analysis transformed both the Ford Motor Company and America's military structure.
However, rational analysis does not work for every issue or challenge. War serves as a prime example. McNamara believed he could manage war like he managed an assembly line or a budget. He was wrong and the Vietnam War serves as a constant reminder.
Additionally, another issue with McNamara was his relationship with the truth. He has a way of remembering decisions that absolved him of failure and criticism.
Interesting person. Interesting life.
McNamara was famous because he was appointed president of Ford Motors and Secretary of Defense in the Kennedy Administration before his 45Th birthday. In fact, he was the first Ford president outside of the Ford family.
McNamara possessed a rigid and rational mind honed by statistical analysis. His belief in rational policy analysis transformed both the Ford Motor Company and America's military structure.
However, rational analysis does not work for every issue or challenge. War serves as a prime example. McNamara believed he could manage war like he managed an assembly line or a budget. He was wrong and the Vietnam War serves as a constant reminder.
Additionally, another issue with McNamara was his relationship with the truth. He has a way of remembering decisions that absolved him of failure and criticism.
Interesting person. Interesting life.
Family of nations "with real teeth"
A misguided and dangerous statement from the newest Papal Encyclical Caritas In Veritate.
"In the face of the unrelenting growth of global interdependence, there is a strongly felt need, even in the midst of a global recession, for a reform of the United Nations Organization, and likewise of economic institutions and international finance, so that the concept of the family of nations can acquire real teeth."
What? We need an even more centralized authority with even stronger teeth? I'm all for a reform of the UN, but I'm afraid the encyclical calls for a reform that would give UN more (not less) centralized power. And what does it mean to have a family of nations with real teeth?
"...This seems necessary in order to arrive at a political, juridical and economic order which can increase and give direction to international cooperation for the development of all peoples in solidarity. To manage the global economy; to revive economies hit by the crisis; to avoid any deterioration of the present crisis and the greater imbalances that would result; to bring about integral and timely disarmament, food security and peace; to guarantee the protection of the environment and to regulate migration: for all this, there is urgent need of a true world political authority, as my predecessor Blessed John XXIII indicated some years ago. ..."
I'm afraid His Holiness Benedict the XVIth has just lost one Latvian fan.
Bridging the Two Cultures of C.P Snow -- Part 2
Whose Culture? Which Collective?
Like many in his generation, Snow saw the condition of the individual and of the society as differing problems. He wrote, "Each of us is solitary: each of us dies alone: all right, that's a fate against which we can't struggle--but there is plenty in our condition which is not fate, and against which we are less than human unless we do struggle" (6-7). Human life is bounded by the tragedy of death, and thus, the best hope for humanity in the meanwhile is an end to physical want and suffering. The dilemma as Snow saw it is that the literati fall back in despair, idealizing a traditional aristocratic past, while the scientists seek to reverse suffering, functioning as optimistic stoics in the face of biological decay.
Leavis, as Roger Kimball notes, did understand what was at stake in Snow's distinction between a tragic existential solitaire and a supposed social deliverance. Leavis charged: "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 . . . we have no illusions?" (53). Snow held scientists to be "a culture on the rise," while the literary culture he charged with fearing the future. Leavis, on the other hand, held out hope for what Matthew Arnold had called, "the criticism of life" as giving the individual some measure of success against a technologically oppressive society. Close to the heart of this debate was (and still is) the nature of human meaning and of human happiness and the location of both.
Part of this search for happiness had to do with the very nature of culture as a concept. Snow took a fair amount of criticism for his own use of the word "culture" in the Rede Lecture to describe his two sets of intellectuals. Some objectors insisted that he was really describing a struggle inside one culture, while others argued the term itself was ambiguous at best. Many thought the word was obscurely employed. Yet he defended the word as being clear for most of his audience, indicating "intellectual development, development of the mind." At the same time, he admitted the anthropological definition was also present in his argument since culture indicated a certain shared behavior (62-64).
For Snow, culture meant both a way of living and the educational development of students' native abilities. Leavis, sensing the battle lay in this direction, charged Snow with using "culture" as a mask for intellectual conformity and dull bias; Leavis labeled the Rede Lecture "a document for the study of cliché" (50). Snow's tomfoolery was in reducing intellectual culture to the anthropological--an "everyone knows" mentality. Snow, it seems, had four cultures on his hands, not just two, and quite possibly many more--not only the culture of science and the humanities, but culture as a thing to be cultivated and as a description of social existence, as well as culture as intellectual practice and as pedagogical methodology. His faith in his audience's understanding was in that sense misplaced. "Culture" by the 1950s and 60s, as I've noted in previous posts, was already a deeply contested term, one with a chameleon's ability to ever shift in the hands of its user. Indeed, the pedagogical and anthropological meanings were by no means in easy consensus, and Leavis' vehement response only shows this.
For some the jeremiads of Snow and Leavis amounted to what place the individual had in the collective. With his own 1962 Commentary essay, "The Leavis-Snow Controversy," literary humanist and cultural critic Lionel Trilling entered the debate, which he described as "a miasma of personality-mongering" (150). Trilling believed that Leavis, despite his personal vendetta and bile, held that "moral consciousness, which is also the source of all successful creation, [is] the very root of poetic genius" (151), a position to which Trilling was somewhat sympathetic. Leavis he felt saw literature in much the same way as Arnold saw the "criticism of life." Snow's lecture was, then, a counter-attack on literature seen as a threat to national and global prosperity. It insisted that the literary culture must follow the scientific lead and not act "the part of a loyal opposition" (161). But for Leavis and Trilling this could only deny literature's prime purpose, that is to offer its audience an escape from the confines of the techno-social bondage of modernity, to explore and be free. Trilling recognized in both Snow and Leavis a Christian rhetoric, though one long secularized. Trilling himself was suspicious of Leavis' talk of pedagogical deliverance through a class of aesthetes:
It assumes that all things are causative or indicative of the whole of the cultural life, it proposes to us those intensities of moralized feeling which seem appropriate to our sense that all that is good in life is at stake in every cultural action. An instance of mediocrity or failure in art or thought is not only what it is but also a sin, deserving to be treated as such. These passions are no doubt vivifying: they have the semblance of heroism. (174)
Trilling felt a more moderate approach was needed. Of course, Snow and Leavis were each in turn blind to this soteriological undercurrent. Snow would remark in passing that for certain scientists with religious faith "the sense of the tragic condition [might] not be so strong," but for "most people of deep feeling" this very secular tragedy of existence could not be evaded (6). In turn, Leavis could dismiss Snow's "social hope" as the typical religious "refus[al] to live on the spot where one is" (54). If international community of science seemed to offer one kind of cultural salvation, an end to the poor relations across the Iron Curtain, the "whole man" theory of education (as Trilling would later write) "now stands virtually in the place of religion and may even be thought of as itself a religion" and is "directed toward moral and spiritual renovation; its subject is damnation and salvation" (219, 231).
Trilling observes, "No, the world will not be saved by teaching English at universities, nor, indeed, by any other literary activity. It is very hard to say what will save the world. But we can be perfectly certain that denying the actualities of the world will not work its salvation" (163). Of what Leavis could accuse Snow, Trilling could in turn accuse Leavis and Snow. Each it seems was dealing in the evangelistic revival business. Both, he thought were suspiciously blind to "a politics of a quite ultimate kind . . . the disposition of the modern mind" (148). Trilling recommended a bridge between the two positions, a kind of clinging to the hope of the life of the mind: "The idea of mind which had taught the bookbinder's apprentice to embark on his heroic enterprise of self-instruction also taught the great scientist to place himself beyond specialness of interest which groups prescribe for their members" (176-177).
That we can no longer recommend this disinterestedness without a snort of incredulity is itself a cause for reflection.
Like many in his generation, Snow saw the condition of the individual and of the society as differing problems. He wrote, "Each of us is solitary: each of us dies alone: all right, that's a fate against which we can't struggle--but there is plenty in our condition which is not fate, and against which we are less than human unless we do struggle" (6-7). Human life is bounded by the tragedy of death, and thus, the best hope for humanity in the meanwhile is an end to physical want and suffering. The dilemma as Snow saw it is that the literati fall back in despair, idealizing a traditional aristocratic past, while the scientists seek to reverse suffering, functioning as optimistic stoics in the face of biological decay.
Leavis, as Roger Kimball notes, did understand what was at stake in Snow's distinction between a tragic existential solitaire and a supposed social deliverance. Leavis charged: "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 . . . we have no illusions?" (53). Snow held scientists to be "a culture on the rise," while the literary culture he charged with fearing the future. Leavis, on the other hand, held out hope for what Matthew Arnold had called, "the criticism of life" as giving the individual some measure of success against a technologically oppressive society. Close to the heart of this debate was (and still is) the nature of human meaning and of human happiness and the location of both.
Part of this search for happiness had to do with the very nature of culture as a concept. Snow took a fair amount of criticism for his own use of the word "culture" in the Rede Lecture to describe his two sets of intellectuals. Some objectors insisted that he was really describing a struggle inside one culture, while others argued the term itself was ambiguous at best. Many thought the word was obscurely employed. Yet he defended the word as being clear for most of his audience, indicating "intellectual development, development of the mind." At the same time, he admitted the anthropological definition was also present in his argument since culture indicated a certain shared behavior (62-64).
For Snow, culture meant both a way of living and the educational development of students' native abilities. Leavis, sensing the battle lay in this direction, charged Snow with using "culture" as a mask for intellectual conformity and dull bias; Leavis labeled the Rede Lecture "a document for the study of cliché" (50). Snow's tomfoolery was in reducing intellectual culture to the anthropological--an "everyone knows" mentality. Snow, it seems, had four cultures on his hands, not just two, and quite possibly many more--not only the culture of science and the humanities, but culture as a thing to be cultivated and as a description of social existence, as well as culture as intellectual practice and as pedagogical methodology. His faith in his audience's understanding was in that sense misplaced. "Culture" by the 1950s and 60s, as I've noted in previous posts, was already a deeply contested term, one with a chameleon's ability to ever shift in the hands of its user. Indeed, the pedagogical and anthropological meanings were by no means in easy consensus, and Leavis' vehement response only shows this.
For some the jeremiads of Snow and Leavis amounted to what place the individual had in the collective. With his own 1962 Commentary essay, "The Leavis-Snow Controversy," literary humanist and cultural critic Lionel Trilling entered the debate, which he described as "a miasma of personality-mongering" (150). Trilling believed that Leavis, despite his personal vendetta and bile, held that "moral consciousness, which is also the source of all successful creation, [is] the very root of poetic genius" (151), a position to which Trilling was somewhat sympathetic. Leavis he felt saw literature in much the same way as Arnold saw the "criticism of life." Snow's lecture was, then, a counter-attack on literature seen as a threat to national and global prosperity. It insisted that the literary culture must follow the scientific lead and not act "the part of a loyal opposition" (161). But for Leavis and Trilling this could only deny literature's prime purpose, that is to offer its audience an escape from the confines of the techno-social bondage of modernity, to explore and be free. Trilling recognized in both Snow and Leavis a Christian rhetoric, though one long secularized. Trilling himself was suspicious of Leavis' talk of pedagogical deliverance through a class of aesthetes:
It assumes that all things are causative or indicative of the whole of the cultural life, it proposes to us those intensities of moralized feeling which seem appropriate to our sense that all that is good in life is at stake in every cultural action. An instance of mediocrity or failure in art or thought is not only what it is but also a sin, deserving to be treated as such. These passions are no doubt vivifying: they have the semblance of heroism. (174)
Trilling felt a more moderate approach was needed. Of course, Snow and Leavis were each in turn blind to this soteriological undercurrent. Snow would remark in passing that for certain scientists with religious faith "the sense of the tragic condition [might] not be so strong," but for "most people of deep feeling" this very secular tragedy of existence could not be evaded (6). In turn, Leavis could dismiss Snow's "social hope" as the typical religious "refus[al] to live on the spot where one is" (54). If international community of science seemed to offer one kind of cultural salvation, an end to the poor relations across the Iron Curtain, the "whole man" theory of education (as Trilling would later write) "now stands virtually in the place of religion and may even be thought of as itself a religion" and is "directed toward moral and spiritual renovation; its subject is damnation and salvation" (219, 231).
Trilling observes, "No, the world will not be saved by teaching English at universities, nor, indeed, by any other literary activity. It is very hard to say what will save the world. But we can be perfectly certain that denying the actualities of the world will not work its salvation" (163). Of what Leavis could accuse Snow, Trilling could in turn accuse Leavis and Snow. Each it seems was dealing in the evangelistic revival business. Both, he thought were suspiciously blind to "a politics of a quite ultimate kind . . . the disposition of the modern mind" (148). Trilling recommended a bridge between the two positions, a kind of clinging to the hope of the life of the mind: "The idea of mind which had taught the bookbinder's apprentice to embark on his heroic enterprise of self-instruction also taught the great scientist to place himself beyond specialness of interest which groups prescribe for their members" (176-177).
That we can no longer recommend this disinterestedness without a snort of incredulity is itself a cause for reflection.
Monday, July 6, 2009
Bridging the Two Cultures of C.P Snow-- Part 1
Over the next week or so, I want to indulge in a little intellectual history. I want to explore a debate from the 1950s and 60s about the nature of culture, science, and the humanities. What I want to show is how even "secular" debates often mask religious desires. I hope you'll find this interesting.
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"We accordingly rejoice in the fact of the increased popularity of the university in both of its functions--that of culture and that of specialization"
--William Torrey Harris, US Commissioner of Education (1898)
In his 1959 Rede Lectures, the scientist-novelist C.P. Snow argued that the intellectual world of the West had become bifurcated between the culture of scientists and that of literary intellectuals. While Snow purported to seek a détente between the literary academy and the scientific one, his sympathies were clearly with the later. "Industrialisation is the only hope of the poor," he charged,
It is all very well for one, as a personal choice, to reject industrialisation-- do a modern Walden, if you like, and if you go without much food, see most of your children die in infancy, despise the comforts of literacy, accept twenty years off your own life, then I respect you for the strength of you aesthetic revulsion. But I don't respect you in the slightest if, even passively, you try to impose the same choice on others who are not free to choose. (25-26)
In Snow's view, the literati who wanted to naysay a world of industrial progress are pampered and naïve at best. They exist in isolation from the world's need, living off the prosperity that science has brought their own nations. In his 1963, "A Second Look," Snow went further, painting the modernist school of Lawrence, Eliot and Pound as Luddite and Fascist all at once. He expressed incredulity and contempt, charging that those who dream of a pre-industrial world, really are ignorant as to what makes their own ease possible:
What is a machine-tool? I once asked a literary party; and they looked shifty. Unless one knows, industrial production is as mysterious as witch-doctoring. Or take buttons. Buttons aren't very complicated things: they are being made in millions every day: one has to be a reasonably ferocious Luddite not to think that that is, on the whole, an estimable activity. Yet I would bet that out of men getting first in arts subject at Cambridge this year, not one in ten could give the loosest analysis of the human organisation which it needs. (30)
Snow put much of the blame for this on an educational system arising out of Oxford and Cambridge that stressed over-specialization. The literary types simply never had enough mathematical training. Snow admitted that dangers could lie with natural science, as well, especially of the applied sort, but he felt the greater problem was with a culture of literature that denied applied science's promise for ending global poverty: "Literary intellectuals represent, vocalize, and to some extent shape and predict the mood of the non-scientific culture: they do not make the decisions, but their words seep into the minds of those who do" (61).
Thus, he envisioned a literary culture committed to the promise of applied science's technology, taking their lead from those who knew better how to mitigate the suffering of the physical world. "Changes in education are not going to produce miracles," he observed, but specialized education was a roadblock to a sympathetic public committed to such an expansive social hope.
Between the Rede Lectures and A Second Look, Snow had had cause to stop and consider the other side. His 1960 Godkin Lectures at Harvard, later published as Science and Government examined the inflated scientific council F.A. Lindemann had given the British government during World War II in regards to bombing in Germany. Snow wondered, "Will they say . . . we were wolves with the minds of men? Will they think that we resigned our humanity?" (Shusterman 27-28). He understood that especially in applied science, ethical reflection was a necessity, and he seemed to hope that the artistic culture might offer some help, but clearly he conceived this as one that takes its lead form the inevitable industrial, technological revolution.
While Snow himself was more interested in the larger social mileu within which higher education played a role, his claims about education nonetheless touched a real cord in the nerves of many academicians. His lectures set off an angry public contest, what one writer called, "the Great debate of our age" (Shusterman 25). Literary critic F. R. Leavis' 1960 Richmond Lecture “Two Cultures? The Significance of Lord Snow,” being the most infamous moment, was more a diatribe and a rant than a reasoned answer, so much so that it outraged even the literary set. He accused Snow's culture of science being nothing but unthinking materialism, where "no one will long consent to be without abundant jam, salvation, and lasting felicity to mankind" (59). Leavis' attack was in fact a response to The Two Cultures being used as a secondary school text and was given before a private audience. He only released the text publicly once it had been leaked by one of the attendees and had made its way into the papers.
Unfortunately Leavis' most insightful questions were obscured by the bile and dismissal of Snow's own abilities as a novelist. Nor did it slow down the public's interest in the lectures. By 1961, Snow's original work had already gone through seven printings. Leavis followed in 1966 with "Luddites? Or There is Only One Culture," insisting that human understanding, language, and the university function "as a focus of consciousness and human responsibility" (96) in imparting Western civilization to the next generation, so the humanities should be at the core of a college education.
Part of what makes Snow's and Leavis' polemics still worth reading is that they exemplify fundamental disagreements as to the sciences and the humanities' educational roles within modern society, and yet I will charge when seen from the vantage point of theological conviction, they are curiously alike.
They are, as I will argue this week, two competing soteriologies, seeking to free the individual in some way from an oppressive world of biological or technological necessity. Both seek a reform in education as a way of creating a new class of persons able to work social and moral change, yet both are blind to the spiritual dimension of the polis they seek.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We accordingly rejoice in the fact of the increased popularity of the university in both of its functions--that of culture and that of specialization"
--William Torrey Harris, US Commissioner of Education (1898)
In his 1959 Rede Lectures, the scientist-novelist C.P. Snow argued that the intellectual world of the West had become bifurcated between the culture of scientists and that of literary intellectuals. While Snow purported to seek a détente between the literary academy and the scientific one, his sympathies were clearly with the later. "Industrialisation is the only hope of the poor," he charged,
It is all very well for one, as a personal choice, to reject industrialisation-- do a modern Walden, if you like, and if you go without much food, see most of your children die in infancy, despise the comforts of literacy, accept twenty years off your own life, then I respect you for the strength of you aesthetic revulsion. But I don't respect you in the slightest if, even passively, you try to impose the same choice on others who are not free to choose. (25-26)
In Snow's view, the literati who wanted to naysay a world of industrial progress are pampered and naïve at best. They exist in isolation from the world's need, living off the prosperity that science has brought their own nations. In his 1963, "A Second Look," Snow went further, painting the modernist school of Lawrence, Eliot and Pound as Luddite and Fascist all at once. He expressed incredulity and contempt, charging that those who dream of a pre-industrial world, really are ignorant as to what makes their own ease possible:
What is a machine-tool? I once asked a literary party; and they looked shifty. Unless one knows, industrial production is as mysterious as witch-doctoring. Or take buttons. Buttons aren't very complicated things: they are being made in millions every day: one has to be a reasonably ferocious Luddite not to think that that is, on the whole, an estimable activity. Yet I would bet that out of men getting first in arts subject at Cambridge this year, not one in ten could give the loosest analysis of the human organisation which it needs. (30)
Snow put much of the blame for this on an educational system arising out of Oxford and Cambridge that stressed over-specialization. The literary types simply never had enough mathematical training. Snow admitted that dangers could lie with natural science, as well, especially of the applied sort, but he felt the greater problem was with a culture of literature that denied applied science's promise for ending global poverty: "Literary intellectuals represent, vocalize, and to some extent shape and predict the mood of the non-scientific culture: they do not make the decisions, but their words seep into the minds of those who do" (61).
Thus, he envisioned a literary culture committed to the promise of applied science's technology, taking their lead from those who knew better how to mitigate the suffering of the physical world. "Changes in education are not going to produce miracles," he observed, but specialized education was a roadblock to a sympathetic public committed to such an expansive social hope.
Between the Rede Lectures and A Second Look, Snow had had cause to stop and consider the other side. His 1960 Godkin Lectures at Harvard, later published as Science and Government examined the inflated scientific council F.A. Lindemann had given the British government during World War II in regards to bombing in Germany. Snow wondered, "Will they say . . . we were wolves with the minds of men? Will they think that we resigned our humanity?" (Shusterman 27-28). He understood that especially in applied science, ethical reflection was a necessity, and he seemed to hope that the artistic culture might offer some help, but clearly he conceived this as one that takes its lead form the inevitable industrial, technological revolution.
While Snow himself was more interested in the larger social mileu within which higher education played a role, his claims about education nonetheless touched a real cord in the nerves of many academicians. His lectures set off an angry public contest, what one writer called, "the Great debate of our age" (Shusterman 25). Literary critic F. R. Leavis' 1960 Richmond Lecture “Two Cultures? The Significance of Lord Snow,” being the most infamous moment, was more a diatribe and a rant than a reasoned answer, so much so that it outraged even the literary set. He accused Snow's culture of science being nothing but unthinking materialism, where "no one will long consent to be without abundant jam, salvation, and lasting felicity to mankind" (59). Leavis' attack was in fact a response to The Two Cultures being used as a secondary school text and was given before a private audience. He only released the text publicly once it had been leaked by one of the attendees and had made its way into the papers.
Unfortunately Leavis' most insightful questions were obscured by the bile and dismissal of Snow's own abilities as a novelist. Nor did it slow down the public's interest in the lectures. By 1961, Snow's original work had already gone through seven printings. Leavis followed in 1966 with "Luddites? Or There is Only One Culture," insisting that human understanding, language, and the university function "as a focus of consciousness and human responsibility" (96) in imparting Western civilization to the next generation, so the humanities should be at the core of a college education.
Part of what makes Snow's and Leavis' polemics still worth reading is that they exemplify fundamental disagreements as to the sciences and the humanities' educational roles within modern society, and yet I will charge when seen from the vantage point of theological conviction, they are curiously alike.
They are, as I will argue this week, two competing soteriologies, seeking to free the individual in some way from an oppressive world of biological or technological necessity. Both seek a reform in education as a way of creating a new class of persons able to work social and moral change, yet both are blind to the spiritual dimension of the polis they seek.
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