History of My Reading: Two Cultures (Part 2)

It was either just before or just after I committed to Knox College that I saw Galesburg, Illinois for the first time, sort of. In our senior year of high school, my debate partner Mike and I won the district debate championship for both the Catholic Forensic League and National Forensic League.  The CFL national finals were in Denver, and along with winners in other categories from our school and the other Catholic high school in the diocese, we went west on trains.

In those pre-Amtrak days, the trip from western Pennsylvania to Chicago was woeful.  The B&O line cared little for passengers, and the train cars were old, stripped nearly bare and were always either too hot or too cold.  But in Chicago that changed.  The eastern trains were limited in height by the tunnels.

 But the western trains were taller and above all, newer.  Passenger service was a dream.  The whole gang of us (plus our chaperone/advisor who thankfully was from the other school-- a young male teacher with a casual manner) had a great time, mostly in the dome car of the Denver Zephyr.  Gliding through Nebraska in a crashing thunderstorm, and watching the lamp on the front of the train swing back and forth across the Colorado range were unforgettable.  (Not to mention the girl I'd met that day who fell asleep with her head on my shoulder.)

I knew that the train would pass through Galesburg, and even stop briefly.  On the way to Denver I nervously awaited Galesburg and tried to see whatever I could.  I didn't see much: a sliver of the CB&Q station that I came to know well, but which is no longer there. Nothing however that looked like a college. Still, this meant that I could travel to college and back by train, which added to the romance.

 After I made my decision and my commitment, I endured the countless School of Hard Knox jokes that spring and summer, and other reactions that wouldn't have been different had I enrolled in the University of Mars. (Though I was grateful for the indifference of my high school's nuns and priests who thereafter considered me a lost cause, if not a lost soul for not choosing a Catholic college.)  Even without such uncomfortable questions and comments, I had my moments of doubt.  If I'd made a big mistake, it seemed irreparable, final, leading to a doomed life.

But in June 1964 a letter arrived from Knox with my first college reading assignment.  It was from Hermann Muelder, Dean of the College.  It was a formal but tidily written letter, saying that incoming freshmen were asked to read two books on the Two Cultures controversy "that has prevailed in scholarly circles on both sides of the Atlantic since 1959."  If we couldn't find these books where we lived--and it was dead certain I couldn't--we could order them from the Knox bookstore, which I promptly did.

 They were The Two Cultures And a Second Look by C.P. Snow, featuring the essay that originally had sparked the debate, and Cultures in Conflict: Perspectives on the Snow-Leavis Controversy, a collection of essays edited by David K. Cornelius and Edwin St. Vincent, which included the first and most famous rejoinder by literary critic F.R. Leavis, and more. There would be a panel discussion by faculty members and group discussions by--us!  Freshmen! during Orientation Week, the letter said.

 "Topics from these readings may, in fact, be used for your examination in Speech and for themes in the English course which you probably will take," the letter added. Though I noted the extra incentive of preparation for an exam and graded course, I was most impressed that I would be introduced to college with a class-wide consideration of ideas based on writings on the subject, and could participate in such a discussion myself, along with classmates and faculty members.  It was exciting, challenging and above all an affirmation of the Knox Idea and therefore of my choice.

Then in September it came time to set sail, or to tie down the boxes, trunk and my new suitcases on the luggage rack of the 1961 Mercury station wagon.

 As the time came nearer, I became fitfully aware of the seeming finality of it all. That day would be a demarcation line in my life. I was going to college some 700 miles away, a bewildering folly that only as the day came nearer my family came to terms with, just as I was having new doubts.

 In a way I owe this propelling away to a couple of slightly older young men whose names I don't remember, and to Sister Cornelia. Sister Cornelia taught religion in my senior year.  Her nasal drone was full of scorn for any attempt to question the textbook version of church history, let alone any nuances of doctrine or morality.  I was her particular target.  I couldn't get far enough away from the likes of her.

 That summer of 1964 I started out working on a painting crew for the county hospital.  It was an education in misery in general, but I noted the two older boys on the crew who were both in local colleges, and obviously unchanged by it.  They were the same brutal, contemptuous, unthinking and unfeeling boys they'd obviously been in high school.  One fantasized about what it would be like to shoot someone.  He was studying to be a doctor.  Again, I couldn't get far enough away from them.

  When the day came to leave however, I suspiciously came down with a cold.  So I started this journey with Corricidin sloshing through my clogged head, as we turned away from the distant overlapping rows of blue mountains to the east, and headed west.  My father drove, my mother in the front seat, my 10 year old sister Debbie in the back seat with me.  My 14 year old sister Kathy didn't come with us.

The day was as cloudy as my head. The drowsy drone of the Pennsylvania Turnpike shortly became the Ohio Turnpike and for awhile the landscape remained basically familiar, as home was left imperceptibly behind.  But on the other side of Indiana the gradually gentler hills began to resolve into a constant flatness.

  By Illinois began the endless fields with the blackest soil I'd ever seen. My mother passed sandwiches back from the front seat along with sweetened tea from a thermos for my cold. My grandmother had sent along a supply of her pastries she called jumbalones.   As we crossed Indiana my mother remarked that she'd never been this far west.  My father hadn't either.

The roads rolled on all day. There was some room left in the back of the station wagon for Debbie to crawl over the seat and play or nap, while I stretched out a bit to doze my cold into submission.

 Then we were in Illinois west of Chicago, which was as far west as I'd been until the previous spring's debate trip to Denver.  I'd gone to Chicago in my 6th grade by train, the result of a contest among paperboys to sell subscriptions.  The gang of us--all boys this time--stayed at the Morrison Hotel and ate at the Forum Cafeteria across the street.  We saw a movie (Hitchcock's Vertigo) and made a brief side trip to the Great Lakes Naval Training Base.  We spent almost as much time on the train to and from Chicago, where I learned to play poker.

 There was no interstate with a Galesburg offramp in those days, as there was when I drove the huge Ryder truck to California almost 22 years ago.  As evening came on, my parents started looking for a motel near a junction to Rt. 150 into Galesburg.  We overshot the mark a bit and wound up near Moline, where we stayed overnight in a wood frame cabin at the Green Acres Modern Motel.

I felt better after a night's sleep, though it may have just been excitement and anxiety that blunted my cold.  It had rained hard during the night and as I would discover later, my mother's fears that the rain would penetrate the canvas covering on top of the luggage rack proved partially justified.  There was a little water stain in one of my new Samsonites, but no real damage to anything.  The stain is still there.

After breakfast at the Green Acres Cafe at the motel, we got onto 150 and, after some worry we were headed in the wrong direction, started seeing the signs for Galesburg.   Once inside the city I saw no sign of a college building, until we passed a very large white frame building with a lot of activity in front of it--especially men and boys carrying suitcases for young women.  It was Whiting Hall, and a few blocks more, there was 261 West Tompkins and Anderson House, my assigned residence.

Pres. Sharvey Umbeck

After checking in (which I described elsewhere), I went off to campus for lunch with my classmates, while the parents lunched with college president Sharvey Umbeck.
Our lunch was a kind of cookout on the Gizmo patio. By then it was sunny, and I could feel my sinuses expanding as I sat eating, probably a burger, although all I remember is potato chips on a paper plate.  From there I got my first view of the Knox campus.

 I returned to what was now my room, took a shower in the facilities at the foot of the stairs on the second floor, and began to unpack in the quiet.  Something I read in a recent Knox Alumni magazine (a new mandolin album from Rick Willy Lindner)  reminded me of a memory: looking out from my third floor turret window to see Rick Lindner below, apparently just arriving, toting at least one black guitar-sized case and a smaller one, which must have been held a mandolin.

 Then my parents and sister returned from a shopping trip in downtown Galesburg with extra items for my room.  While my father affixed a lamp on the wall by my bed, my mother put out a soap dish and toiletries on our small sink with the orange-brown stains from iron in the water.  Debbie gave me a paper bag of candy for my first night of studying.

 They were ready to get back on the road. When my mother was in high school she listened to Notre Dame football games on the radio, and once asked me if I might apply there.  It turned out that South Bend, Indiana wasn't far out of their way, so she was finally going to get to see that campus on their way home.

After helping my father secure the returning empty luggage on top of the Mercury, I stood in front of Anderson House with my mother and sister with the afternoon sun in our eyes, while he snapped a photo. And then they were off, and I was on my own.

 That night we met with senior student advisors, who outlined the rules, put the fear of God into us about the amount of time we needed to study, and warned us against the college health center and its doctor.  In the days after that, a blur of assemblies, events such as the various clubs and organizations presenting themselves, and tests (where we were introduced to Professor Stipp's signature multiple choice exam questions in history: which of the following event happened third?)

Western Civ Prof. John Stipp

But somewhere in there was the promised day of discussions on the Two Cultures books.  This time the two cultures were the sciences and the humanities (or at times, just literature.)  The premise (more or less) was that each misunderstood and disdained the other, and members of each culture did not communicate with members of the other, even in the academic institutions to which they all belonged.

I still have a copy of the main text, C.P. Snow's lecture that started it all.  I lost the other book somewhere along the way, but I have a similar collection published at about the same time called The Scientist vs. The Humanist (edited by George Levine and Owen Thomas, Norton 1963) which probably has many of the same essays.  (For example, it has the same excerpt from Dickens' Hard Times that I actually have a sense memory of reading in the assigned collection.)

It's difficult to summarize what the debate was actually about.  In his "Second Look," Snow wrote that he'd only wanted to talk about the dominance of the traditional emphasis on literature at the expense of science in British education, by which he really meant Oxford and Cambridge.  He didn't see the same problem in American colleges.

 The anthologies further muddy the waters by presenting essays on a similar theme from the 19th century, when what universities taught in literature and the humanities (classics in Latin and Greek, logic and rhetoric, for example) as well as in science (or natural philosophy) was vastly different than even the most traditional Oxbridge curricula in the early 1960s.

 Jonathan Miller (medical doctor and theatre director, performer and creator of science television) later agreed that it was a rather parochial argument among academics.  But it struck a chord and became about something larger, if harder to define. I read these books with something of an open mind, largely because I didn't have the background to know much of what they were arguing about.  (And I must add that re-reading them is still pretty confusing.)

 So off I went to hear the faculty discussion of these books, probably to the theatre in Alumni Hall that was in its last few months of use as an auditorium.  My remembered impression is that while the speakers were informative (unfortunately I don't have a list of them), it became clear after awhile that the discussion was less about whether there were Two Cultures on campus, and more about whose side are you on.

Or maybe that's just how I heard it. To me it felt like a contest, with the loyalty of members of my class as the prize. I remember the science side as being less than impressive.  I recall a few evenhanded speakers, probably somebody like Gabriel Jackson giving historical perspective.  But the only faculty member I can positively identify as being on that panel was a professor of English, William V. Spanos.

With black hair and beard and a booming voice that made him seem a great deal taller than he was, Spanos was characteristically combative.  He undoubtedly railed about science and technology in the same terms as he wrote about them in his book A Casebook on Existentialism, which he finished the next year:

 Scientific rationalists and the technological society "locate reality in the objective realm of measurable matter, and value in the production and utilization of objects. In so doing, they subordinate man to the tool, consciousness to efficiency, and the individual to the social and productive organizations (including educational institutions.)  By the inescapable logic of this system of valuation, the individual becomes dehumanized.  Defined according to his function and evaluated by the degree of his utility, he is reduced to the status of an object..."

It was a sweeping and even breathtaking argument, especially to innocent first year ears.  While this kind of opposition is implied in the Dickens' Hard Times excerpt (Mr. Gradgrind's insisting on nothing but facts, and forbidding the arts as mere fancy) it goes much farther than Snow or other essayists.   Snow's insistence that the future belongs to the scientist (much is made, for example, by literary critic Lionel Trilling of his assertion that scientists "have the future in their bones") does leave this opening, however.

 Literature and the humanities were feeling beleaguered--as indeed they were, at least in society at large--and undervalued, or even considered irrelevant. Probably someone took up the Dickens thread to declare the importance of the derided faculty of imagination as well as the collection and organization of facts. In those days as I recall the role of imagination in science was not emphasized, or even acknowledged.

I started out equally sympathetic to the science side, thanks largely to my romance with science fiction and its heroic scientists, but I also had a respect for the scientific method and for the accomplishments of science.

But when it came time to pick a side--and that time came when we broke up into discussion groups chaired by one or another of the faculty members on stage--I chose to scamper over to Old Main to hear more from Mr. Spanos.  (As I've mentioned before--in fact several times-- if Paul Shepard had not left the faculty the previous spring, I may have made a different choice.)

 It is interesting by the way that the one place that science and literature meet--namely science fiction--is never mentioned in those books, nor was it likely noted in those Knox discussions, for it was much more academically disreputable at the time.  But several science fiction authors and editors talked about Snow's thesis, and even agreed that literature was dangerously isolated from science and its influence on the future (which remains a valid argument concerning mainstream fiction.) Science fiction not only portrays a future shaped by science and technology, but offers critiques of such societies (present as well as future) partly by placing human characters in that context, which is a chief role and function of literature and more generally the humanities.

Considering these books and this debate today, it's hard not to conclude that science and technology have won, in academia and elsewhere, relegating literature and the humanities to the margins. (Though both at times lose out to finance and economics, not to mention leisure studies.)

A recent survey suggests that in the US humanities majors have dropped even more steeply since the Great Recession of 2009, notably including majors in the elite liberal arts schools whose families were statistically likely to survive and recover from the downturn better than others.

 Yet science today is deeply troubled by previously undervalued complications, flaws and self-inflicted crises of confidence because of sloppy and dishonest work.  That's without some blindness to consequences that has plagued science since at least the Manhattan Project.  The great physicist Richard Feynman who said so many wise things, was wrong to suggest that a philosophy of science is irrelevant.

 The most obvious and damaging problems are in the social sciences, particularly behavioral psychology and economics, which threaten to merge.  They are at once heedless of the possibility that human flaws identified by literature for centuries can infect their sciences, filled as they are with hubris, and clueless that some of their astounding findings about human nature have already been dramatized with more accuracy and irony in the oldest stories known.

 Snow raised a political argument that Trilling in particular wrote about (and then Snow doubled-down on it in his "Second Look.")  Snow basically said that while scientists are committed to using their knowledge to lessen suffering in the world, literary writers are indifferent, if not reactionary.  He cited several modernist writers with racist, totalitarian or other destructive political views.  Even Trilling (Snow said) wrote that the essence of modernism was the individual, with no concern for society, therefore for others.

At this remove, it must sound strange to many that Snow is asserting, in today's terms, that scientists (and by extension, professors of science) are liberal or left while literary types are on the right. As for the needs of the individual vs. the demands of society, modernism indeed did champion the individual.  As Spanos argued, the individual was the subject for existentialist and modernist writing partly because technological, mass society was threatening the humanity and integrity of individuals. (Spanos may not have agreed with that "partly," but he wasn't a fiction writer.)

 But while some views on the subject were extreme (though sometimes mostly for contrast, shock and dramatic effect), a concern for the individual and repugnance for conformity did not necessarily add up to a dearth of care for others and the social welfare.  Snow's socially conscious and caring scientist is equally a caricature. Selfishness and careerism were hardly unknown in the sciences, and literary types were known to join the Peace Corps.

Knox College Alumni Hall as it was

Snow concentrated on modern writers, though modernism was pretty much over in the mid 1960s. But it was pretty much the most recent writing covered in Knox literature courses. The New Criticism of the 40s still dominated there as well.

Whatever the flaws within these categories in the literary world, they were merely a preview. Since then we've had postmodernism, a largely silly category, and the once enlightening but ultimately even more ingrown and incomprehensible deconstruction and semiotics dogmas that throttled literature departments 20 or so years later.

 Trilling's point that students could appreciate the brilliant work without agreeing with the writer's politics or other views is worth re-considering in an age and atmosphere in which current and fast-changing values and behaviors tend to shrink what's acceptable in past literature to an intolerant vanishing point, if the writer has one or more currently defined flawed or repugnant views.

But now as then, it's all too complicated to be reduced to a unreal division into Two Cultures.  It's much too overlapping and complex. But we love to chose up into two sides, and start demonizing the other.  Still, if there was more heat than light in the Two Cultures debate, and less than meets the eye in our two assigned books,  it was stimulating.  And rightly or wrongly, probably useful to first years during orientation, pondering their choice of courses, if not their majors.