PerspectivesAre you interested in submitting a Perspective Article? Be sure to read The Science Advisory Board's Editorial Guides for Perspective Articles. Click here. Can Literature and Science Ever Bond? by Peter Swirski, Ph.D. “Whenever I hear the word Culture... I release the safety catch on my pistol.” -Hannst Johst, playwright, writer, Goebbels crony, and Nazi poet-laureate Hitler’s Germany, in its rendezvous with military and technological destiny, viewed with suspicion, if not disdain, writers, poets, and other assorted liberal intellectuals. What a contrast between their musings and hard utilitarian science. Science was technology, military might, the Panzers and the Luftwaffe–and let’s not forget Zyklon B. Science was a ticket to the future. Science was the third wave. Science would get you up to the heavens, something not even the finest epic could ever do. The best literature could manage was mumble about morals, fantasize about things that were not, and sow dissent and discontent. You could practically hear politicians and bureaucrats chanting like Orwell’s sheep, “Science goooood, literature baaaaad...” Today we live in an enlightened re-renaissance of the 21st century, secure and confident in our knowledge of the past. We have learned our history, and we have learned it well, so as not to repeat it. George Santanyana would be proud. I say, baloney. When C. P. Snow gave his “Two Cultures” lecture in 1959, he may not have imagined that the Great Wall between the scientific and literary cultures would linger past Y2K. Keeping his eyes on the future, Snow warned of the socio-political dangers lurking in the separation of literature and science. In what became an icon of the Two Cultures debate, he pitted the work of Rudolf Claussius against the legacy of Shakespeare, pitying humanists for zero knowledge of the second law of thermodynamics, and scientists for knowing nought of the bard’s art. But, as Snow’s title hinted, his thesis was more complex and urgent than that. The Two Cultures alluded to an 1845 novel by a man who, in his time, typified the spirit of bridging domains commonly thought to be incommensurate. Benjamin Disraeli, British novelist turned prime minister, penned Sybil: The Two Nations in indignation over social conditions that rent Britain into a nation of haves and have-nots. Picking up the gauntlet, Snow targeted what he saw as the root of such social conditions. Science, he maintained, with all the material means at its disposal, foundered on the lack of compassion and political vision. Literature, with its aesthetics du jour, was adrift in the industrial and informational age, estranged from the high-tech reality of breeder reactors, Energia boosters, geostationary satellites, quantum tunnelling, antigen monoclonal antibodies, and other marvels of science. Today, with hindsight of 43 years, Snow’s campaign seems a gallant–if failed–effort to correct the imbalance with which we valorize the type of insights harvested in the sciences and in the arts. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the way we train our next generation of citizens, parents and decision makers. The humanities are garrotted by funding shortages that threaten to turn liberal arts colleges into MIT wannabes, while science faculties bloom, nurtured by donations and endowments from return-on-the-dollar-savvy boards and governments. The unequal marriage of scientific fact and literary fiction is restaged in an annual media pageant, in which a single Nobel Prize is awarded for literature, and four for science (chemistry, physics, economics and medicine). But isn’t it the way it should be? Everyone knows that a cyclotrone costs the equivalent of a hundred literature profs’ salaries, that a genetics lab cannot be bought for a song, or that cancer research is an industry in itself. Next to this club med colossus, literature cannot but appear a cottage industry, a cultural skansen preserved since times immemorial. A book may indeed be your best friend, but if you fall ill, whom will you go to: a writer or a medicine man? If the lights go out, will you call a poetry workshop or a power plant? Off to a business meeting on the other side of the globe, will you take the Airbus or fly on wings of song? Ladies and gentlemen of the jury–I rest my case. Literature and science have as much in common as Apollo, the CEO of the Hellenic Muses, and Apollo the CSM module that went to the Moon. The divisions between literature and science, or, more broadly, between the scientific and humanistic cultures, are as entrenched as ever. But this time, in addition to the traditional hostility, there is a new factor around: information glut. Quantity changes quality, preached Karl Marx, and for once he got it right. Intellectual rapprochement between the Two Cultures is the casualty of the informational explosion within them. More than half of all scientists that ever lived are alive today. More than half of all books ever written were written after the Second World War. Where there were 100,000 science journals in the mid-60s, there are almost one million today. The global number of book copies, pegged at 2.5 billion in 1950, was a whopping 10 billion-plus in 1990. Even pop culture saw it for what it was, a civilization ripping along in the passing lane on the information autobahn. The Police, the more thoughtful lyricists of modern rock, rued in Ghost in the Machine: “Too much information running through my brain/Too much information driving me insane....” One inevitable consequence of progress in any field is its specialization, the hermetic effects of which estrange it from the public domain. Many areas of contemporary inquiry are indeed accessible only to the elites of experts involved in their development. Do terms like pi-mesons, pions, prions, protocaryotic or Münchausen by proxy mean anything but jack to Jack or Jill? What about cytochromes, strange attractors or alleles? The information explosion is a fact of life, and the calls for Renaissance thinkers who would speak the languages of the arts and the tongues of science may belong squarely to the Renaissance. Is it possible to bridge the gap between literature and science in the age where even the closest research associates are driven apart? Biochemistry was once a symbol of reunification of far-flung scientific disciplines–in this case, the burgeoning panoply of the biosciences and organic chemistry. Today it is an informational supernova, Balkanizing into new sub-domains at the rate reminiscent of an inflationary universe. It is no different in literature. The books professors teach are not the same books that students read. Avatars of Larry McMurtry don’t know their Rumiko Takahashi, and aficionados of Arturo Pérez-Reverte inhabit a cultural niche separate from Joe Alex buffs. Literary criticism, tilting at windmills in the name of post-this or neo-that, is as removed from most people’s lives as Thomist scholasticism. For the humanities-bashers, the intellectual hara-kiris of literary theorists and the narrative navel-gazing of postmodernists are just more reasons for absolving science students from the perdition of lit classes. What good is learning about synaesthesia, truncated trochaic tetrameter, or Freytag’s pyramid? What good is making people read subjective, made-up, ambiguous fictions about nonexistent characters’ loves and lives? At least science, impenetrable as it may be, is better than literature at making the world better, right? Right? Wrong. It’s true that we need science. The stakes for modern civilization are just too high. The educated public’s exposure to science today has indeed increased manifold. But the question worth asking is how much of it has translated into real understanding of the nature of things? It’s not a rhetorical question. In a democracy, even one as sclerotic as ours, some issues demand an educated public debate, and the torrent of issues demanding a better-than-average scientific education swells by the minute: cloning, fertility treatments, euthanasia, stem cells, eco-wars, gene-spliced animals and plants, spy-software, tactical nukes, research ethics, cyber culture, budget priorities... But even as we need science, we need literature no less. Not just as a science-fiction handmaiden to nurture a new crop of NASA technophiles. Not as a cultural counterweight to appease die-hard curricular conservatives for whom literature stopped with Milton. Not even as a refuge from the increasingly regimented, militarized and corporate science. No. Literature is not a crutch, but an intellectual and emotional laboratory, indispensable as we time-travel into the future, one day at a time. In literature we find a record of questions that challenged thinkers of yesterday, and will continue to challenge thinkers of tomorrow. In literature we find scientific dilemmas with a human face painted on them, clad in sorrows and joys, stumbling from one crisis to another. Because, my fellow time travellers–AI enthusiasts notwithstanding–we are not just information processors, but steaming cauldrons of feelings and passions, experienced much in the same fashion and for much the same reasons as in the time of Homer. Media trend-mongers have been trumpeting the death of the book culture for decades. Literature, they say, is heading straight for dodo country. And yet, literary tombstones make for imposing memorials, often enduring longer than the greatest scientific theories. For, in the end, literature and science are inseparable manifestations of the same human instinct to interrogate the world, and help the rest of us negotiate the experience of living in it. Peter Swirski, Ph.D. Assistant Professor Comparative Literature University of Alberta Canada pete.swirski@ualberta.ca ### << Previous Next >> [ View All Perspectives ] |
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