The One Culture

190 Pages·1970·2.312 MB·English

by  William H. Davenport, Thomas F. Irvine, James P. Hartnett and William F. Hughes (Auth.)

The
One
Culture
By
William H. Davenport
Harvey Mudd College
Claremont, California
Pergamon Press
New York/Toronto/Oxford
Sydney/Braunschweig
PERGAMON PRESS INC.
Maxwell House, Fairview Park, Elmsford, N.Y. 10523
PERGAMON OF CANADA LTD.
207 Queen's Quay West, Toronto 117, Ontario
PERGAMON PRESS LTD.
Headington Hill Hall, Oxford
PERGAMON PRESS (AUST.) PTY. LTD.
Rushcutters Bay, Sydney, N.S.W.
VIEWEG & SOHN GmbH
Burgplatz 1, Braunschweig
Copyright© 1970, Pergamon Press Inc.
Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 70-106054
Printed in the United States of America
AH rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission
of the copyright holder.
CP. Snow quotations are from CP. Snow: THE TWO
CULTURES: AND A SECOND LOOK, 1964. Reprinted
by permission of Cambridge University Press, New York.
08-016322-X
Pergamon
Unified Engineering
Series
GENERAL EDITORS
Thomas F. Irvine, Jr.
State University of New York at Stony Brook
James P. Hartnett
University of Illinois at Chicago Circle
Continuous Media Section
EDITOR
William F. Hughes
Carnegie-Mellon University
Engineering Design Section
EDITOR
Allen B. Rosenstein
University of California, Los Angeles
Engineering Systems Section
EDITOR
Arthur T. Murphy
PMC Colleges
Humanities and Social Sciences Section
EDITOR
William H. Davenport
Harvey Mudd College
Information Dynamics Section
EDITOR
Allen B. Rosenstein
University of California, Los Angeles
Materials Engineering Section
EDITOR
Daniel Rosenthal
University of California, Los Angeles
Engineering Laboratory Section
EDITORS
James P. Hartnett
Thomas F. Irvine, Jr.
For Isobel
Preface
THIS BOOK is designed to be of use to any student or lay-
man who is interested in or concerned about the state of
culture, particularly American culture, in this Age of Tech-
nology. It is not an attempt to match the style of CP. Snow
(Lord Snow), the acerb retorts of F.R. Leavis, or the aplomb
of Lionel Trilling, the first being the celebrated scientist
and novelist who wrote The Two Cultures and the latter
pair perhaps his most prominent critics. Nor is it an at-
tempt to set up a uniform, standard culture in which
assembly-line automata march off the job daily when the
whistle blows in order to get home for the TV news. Rath-
er, it is an attempt to review the two culture argument ten
years afterwards, to document the continuing battle be-
tween technology and the humanities, to bring Snow up to
date (there having been vast changes in both British and
American educational systems since he wrote), and to
appeal for a broader culture in which a man may specialize
still, but lead a fuller life and be of more value to society. I
have long felt that there was an argument for bringing the
cultures together. In the following pages the reader may
discover what it is. I can count on at least one strong sup-
porter—Paul Goodman, who has written the following in
The New York Review;
In The Two Cultures, CP. Snow berated the humanists for
their irrelevance when two-thirds of mankind are starving
and what is needed is science and technology. They have
perhaps been irrelevant; but unless technology is itself more
humanistic and philosophical, it is of no use. There is only
one culture, (italics mine)
XI
The One Culture
In a way this book is an anthology of ideas with a running
connecting commentary by myself, an eclectic synthesis if
you will. In addition to my obvious debt to the sources
quoted in the following, I owe much in a personal way to
many people and I should like to thank them for their help,
advice, and criticism. At Harvey Mudd College, my home
base since 1957, I am grateful to Joseph Piatt, president;
William Radley, John Rae, George McKelvey, Zaner Faust,
the college research committee, and Margaret Thompson
for various forms of assistance and encouragement. Going
back to the early sixties, I must express appreciation to the
many friends and colleagues at U.C.L.A. who almost down
to the present worked with me on the Educational Devel-
opment Program in the School of Engineering supported
by the Ford Foundation. As consultant to the Humanities
Sub-committee, I learned a good deal about how to blend
humanities, social sciences, and engineering in general
courses. Much of the material in Chapter III reflects this
program. In particular I thank the late Dean L.M.K. Boel-
ter and Professor Allen Rosenstein, co-principal investiga-
tors, Bonham Campbell, Jacob Frankel (now faculty Dean
at Harvey Mudd), and Daniel Rosenthal, my collaborator
on a Pergamon text named Engineering: Its Role and
Function in Human Society, and now a part-time colleague
in Claremont, working on the Sloan Foundation with me
on the continuing problem of blending engineering and
humanities.
In the summer of 1968,1 spent a month in England and
Scotland visiting nine new technological universities at the
suggestion of Sir Eric Ashby, Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge
University. These institutions, which were not around when
Snow wrote, are incorporating and planning courses in social
sciences and humanities as part of a slowly developing pro-
gram in British education which approaches the American
ideal of learning for all who can and will study. Here, from
among the many who welcomed and helped me, I salute the
following: Vice-Chancellor Topping, at Brunei; Sir Robert
Burley, at City; A.M.Duncan of Loughborough; Donald
Cardwell, of Manchester Institute of Science and Technol-
XII
Preface
ogy; Keith Reader, at Rugby College of Engineering Tech-
nology; D.R.Gordon, Strathclyde; and Vice-Chancellor
Moore and Professor Gerald Walters, at Bath. My visits,
which are discussed also in Chapter HI, were made possible
by grants from Harvey Mudd College and Pergamon Press,
the staff of the latter having been most courteous and coop-
erative on both sides of the Atlantic. I am particularly in-
debted to Robert Maxwell, M.P., Detlev Raymond, Fred-
eric Squires, Henry Paasonen, Sylvia M. Halpern and her
staff.
I passed the academic year 1968-69 on sabbatical at
Harvard University where, thanks to the invitation of Em-
manuel Mesthene, Director of the Program on Technology
and Society, I did research, attended seminars, and met
and talked with many helpful individuals. Professor Ever-
ett Mendelsohn of the Department of History of Science at
Harvard had made me a guest of the Department, where I
also profited from talks with its chairman, I. Bernard
Cohen. The Program made it possible to attend the fre-
quent lunches of the Science and Public Policy group as
my education continued. While I was working at Widener
Library and at 61 Kirkland Street, Cambridge, my life was
made fuller and more enjoyable by many people, far too
many to thank properly. At the Program, where most of
Chapter II was born, I owed much to Tom Parmenter,
Charles Hampden-Turner, Mitzi Gerrish, and Jane Draper
and her staff, particularly Sheryl Haines, Kat Wright, and
Patti Gordon.
While at Harvard, I was most fortunate to visit, talk
with, and listen to such established writers and scholars as
Don Price, Gerald Holton, and Lewis Mumford, all of
whom went out of their way to be helpful. At nearby Sim-
mons College, Professor Wylie Sypher, author of the recent
Literature and Technology, was an indefatigable corre-
spondent as was Professor Leo Marx at not-too-distant
Amherst. Others who were kind enough to answer ques-
tions by mail include Joseph Wood Krutch, J. Bronowski,
Archibald MacLeish, Martin Esslin, and Leonard Pronko.
This is not mere name dropping. The kindness of all these
XIII
The One Culture
ladies and gentlemen was far beyond the call of duty. I
wish I could do more than merely thank them.
There are m^ny others who have directly and indirectly
contributed to the making of this book, and I am sure to
have failed to mention all the proper names. To them my
apologies for inadvertent omission. Finally, to my wife Iso-
bel, I owe more than I can say for keeping me going
through the coldest and snowiest Cambridge winter since
'88. Without her help I never could have finished the job.
And at this writing during the last days of a long hot Cali-
fornia summer, I appreciate the morale maintenance fur-
ther provided by my daughter Linda. There is now nothing
more to say than to invoke the ancient formula, "Go, little
book," and hope it will provide some teaching and some
delight.
Claremont, California WILLIAM H. DAVENPORT
XIV
Chapter I
The Ί\νο Cultures:
Another Look at
Images and Attitudes
"They have a curious distorted
image of each other. "
-CP. Snow
"To everyone's relief the squabble about the two cul-
tures has subsided," wrote an astute art critic quite recent-
ly in his introduction to a work on literature and technol-
ogy, adding later on a reference to "the wearisome debate
about our two cultures." 1 Wearisome the debate may be,
but it has definitely not subsided. The phrase itself is here
to stay for a long time. In fact, its occult force is compara-
ble to that of "Strength Through Joy" or "The Great Soci-
ety." It has a ring. In the tenth year since CP. Snow
delivered his famous Rede lecture and published it (1959),
the Dean of Harvard College, Franklin L. Ford, offered a
program for science within the humanities in an effort to
stop excessive specialization which "threatens to splinter
our general culture into not two cultures (pace CP. Snow),
but an infinity of narrowly circumscribed cultures having
nothing to say to one another." 2 In the previous June,
merely to cite one more example, S.K. Overbeck had writ-
ten the following in a newsletter on art and technology:
Several years ago, discussions of art and technology began
with the handy citation of CP. Snow's famous 'two cul-
tures' assertion that art and science did not mix, that liter-
ary culture,' traditionally the lodestone of the arts, was
separated from 'scientific culture' by a yawning gap. in the
most modern arts today, the gap no longer yawns. It hardly
exists.3
Two cultures may be trying to become one, or one and a
half, or three, as we shall soon see, but there is little doubt
that the phrase is still very much in the minds and conver-
sation of academics, intellectuals, and informed laymen.
1
The One Culture
Writing eighteen years earlier than Snow, Herbert J.
Muller noted that science and literature have been at odds
since the nineteenth century and that, while there can be
no absolute antagonism between such major interests, "the
old combatants still sniff at one another; they still want
victory."4 Gerald Walters explains what happened to the
original unitary culture that broke down:
The new industrial middle class found social respectability
in an educational system which perpetuated, in a revised
form, the traditional classical attitudes, in which there was
little room for science and none for technology. Pure sci-
ence ultimately recovered social status by the end of the
nineteenth century, but not, if the Snow thesis is to be
accepted, to the point where it became an integral part of a
living culture.5
It remained for CP. Snow to tell university people what
many of them suspected and some knew for a fact. The
main points of his original lecture and the sequel four
years later (A Second Look) may need refreshing for some
readers and are probably unknown to others; accordingly,
at this point I shall do a quick summary. Snow felt that
more and more polarization was taking place between liter-
ary intellectuals and scientists. 6 The scientists are ignorant
of Shakespeare and the humanists of the Second Law of
Thermodynamics. This is a great loss for us all, and we had
better rethink our education, Snow went on, for "three
menaces . . . stand in our way—Η-Bomb war, overpopula-
tion, the gap between the rich and the poor. This is one of
the situations where the worst crime is innocence." 7 Actu-
ally, of course, Snow's lecture "was a plea for more knowl-
edge of science among literary intellectuals and more knowl-
edge of literature among scientists," as the Spectator edi-
torialized later.8
At the time, however, all was not so straightforward and
simple. Snow had struck several nerves, and it quickly be-
came apparent in the press on both sides of the Atlantic
that the topic of two cultures was one on which many
were prepared (and unprepared) to speak. The loudest
voice in England was that of F.R. Leavis, whose manner
2