How the Humanities and Sciences Relate Today

 

I delivered the following thoughts in conversation with A. C. Grayling at Northeastern University London in February 2026. The idea for the event was born in a conversation with Howard Jacobson two years ago, in which he reminisced about F. R. Leavis’s lecture on C. P. Snow of February 1962. I acknowledge the guidance of Stefan Collini’s introductions to C. P. Snow’s The Two Cultures (Cambridge University Press 1998) and F. R. Leavis’s Two Cultures? The Significance of C. P. Snow (Cambridge University Press 2013).

 

 

On 7th May 1959, the civil servant, novelist and public intellectual C. P. Snow, formerly a chemistry fellow at Christ’s College Cambridge, gave the annual Rede lecture. This lecture series is prestigious and a few instances of it have become famous, but none since Matthew Arnold’s of 1882, which in many ways concerns the same things, has become as famous as this one.

Positive responses to Snow’s lecture filled the press, and its terms entered discussion around the world. As Snow himself later said, he was obviously expressing what had already been felt, independently, by many people, and had said it at the right moment. Over the 1960s he was awarded twenty honorary degrees. He also impacted politics. When Harold Wilson was elected leader of the Labour Party in 1963, his acceptance speech clearly showed the influence of Snow’s ideas: ‘in all our plans for the future, we are redefining and we are restating our Socialism in terms of the scientific revolution … The Britain that is going to be forged in the white heat of this revolution will be no place for restrictive practices’. When he then became Prime Minister a year later, he appointed Snow to a position in his new Ministry of Technology. Snow later became a life peer, and the government spokesperson on technology in the House of Lords.

Three years after Snow had given his Rede lecture, on 28th February 1962, an English Fellow of Downing College Cambridge, then and now one of the world’s most important literary critics – F. R. Leavis – gave the annual, in-house Richmond lecture. In it he revisited Snow’s lecture, attacking many of its arguments, and, still more strongly, Snow’s credentials in making them – in terms so far from those of polite, academic debate that many of the audience members got up and left in protest.

Howard Jacobson, Booker prize-winning novelist, was at the time one of Leavis’s undergraduate students at Downing. He recalls (in an email to me of 5th February 2026):

‘I was in the Great Hall at Downing in the early 60s when Leavis delivered the lecture. It was an extraordinary occasion – not because Leavis put on a show; he was his usual sombre, quiet-voiced self, notwithstanding the skittishness of much of his attack. In fact this was his standard procedure, even in small seminar settings. A grave demeanour, cloaking a sardonic and sometimes even elfin wit. A consciousness of being naughty.  We weren’t to tell anyone – that was the dramatic convention. It was us against the world and we’d be wise to keep what we knew and heard to ourselves – a little band of ineffective literary guerillas.

 

So no – the occasion of the lecture was extraordinary not by virtue of Leavis being anything other than himself but because of the number of Cambridge dignitaries in attendance and their palpable discomfort, not to say distaste, for what Leavis was saying about Snow. One by one they rose, ostentatiously, gathering their robes around them, and left. We, the elect band, counted them out, some of the most esteemed intellectuals at the university. “Look. There goes –” The more of them that left, the more convincing Leavis’s lifelong argument that a coterie of flank-rubbing associates ran literature as a boy’s club, and the more confirmed our sense that we had our work cut out if we were ever to make a difference. We felt outnumbered and heroic.’

Leavis’s lecture provoked a storm. Overwhelmingly the response was in defence of Snow and against Leavis, but Leavis had some supporters, and over the years that have elapsed, and especially more recently, Leavis’s attack on Snow has gained more interest and respect, hence the interest in revisiting the controversy today.

So – what did they say?

Snow said that:

First, between literary intellectuals and scientists there is a gulf of mutual incomprehension. They not only have different knowledge bases but different world views, hence the title of his lecture ‘The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution’.

Second, English society in particular gives more weight to literary than scientific culture – witness the fact that someone can be considered cultured even if they can’t explain the second law of thermodynamics, whereas they can’tbe considered cultured if they haven’t read a single play by Shakespeare, which is the equivalent. They would also be hard put to it to define mass or acceleration, which is the equivalent of not being able to read. Accordingly, the term ‘intellectual’ has been appropriated by those of a humanities orientation.

Third, this gulf, and imbalance of esteem, is holding Britain back. The country is run overwhelmingly by people of humanities backgrounds with no understanding of science, without which Britain cannot hope to keep up with countries such as Germany, the US and, especially, the Soviet Union, which accord their scientists more respect.

Fourth, the under-representation of scientists in political leadership is the more regrettable because they have on balance sounder, more progressive, political instincts than members of the ‘traditional culture’, which has of recent decades included literary giants of spectacularly reactionary, if not actually fascist, views. Scientists’ decency and future-orientation are not incidental to them being scientists; they are inculcated as part of the scientific method: ‘there is a moral component right in the grain of science itself.’

Fifth, scientists not only are more likely to share the laudable ambition of raising the living standards of those living in the least developed countries – doing which has obvious moral urgency – but they have the knowledge to make this happen. By contrast, literary writers of the last century have shown overwhelming hostility to the industrial revolution which raised the living standards of millions, including Snow’s own grandparents. In their resistance to technological and accompanying social change, literary intellectuals can be termed Luddites.

Sixth (and this he only expressed fully in his 1963 follow-up article ‘A Second Look’), scientists on both sides of the Cold War have the potential to transcend and therefore help end it, by working together on their apolitical matters of common concern.

Leavis said:

There is no such thing as scientific ‘culture’, only ‘culture’. There are social and intellectual norms amongst scientists, literary intellectuals, and many other kinds of people, but culture is, as Matthew Arnold argued, ‘the best which has been thought and said in the world’, and that is singular.

Second, Snow slides without acknowledgment between discussing a highly restricted sample of literary writers, and literary intellectuals. Writers and intellectuals are not the same thing (that is, they can be – as Howard Jacobson himself exemplifies – but they are not the same category).

Third, by literary intellectuals Snow actually means the metropolitan journalistic literati (which depressingly increasingly includes literature academics, to the detriment of academia). Snow attacks these literary intellectuals as ignorant of science; Leavis attacks them as ignorant of literature. That is, Snow is attacking a straw man of fashionable dilletantes.

Fourth, the reason that Snow makes this error is that he has no ability to appreciate real culture. To quote a few of those phrases which led some people to leave the room, and The Spectator to pass the pre-publication text of Leavis’s lecture past Snow to see if he would sue for libel (he said that he wouldn’t, and he didn’t): ‘Not only is [Snow] not a genius; he is intellectually as undistinguished as it is possible to be’; ‘He doesn’t know what he means, and doesn’t know he doesn’t know’; ‘Snow is, of course, a – no, I can’t say that; he isn’t; Snow thinks of himself as a novelist’; ‘Snow not only hasn’t in him the beginnings of a novelist; he is utterly without a glimmer of what creative literature is, or why it matters.’

Fifth, Snow shows none of the virtues of a scientist, either in his fiction or in his Two Cultures lecture: ‘Of qualities that one might set to the credit of a scientific training there are none.’ Leavis published his lecture in pamphlet form alongside an essay by Michael Yudkin, a scientist, who wished to point out that Snow did not speak for all scientists. Leavis goes out of his way to clarify that he is not anti-science or scientists.

Sixth, given all the above, the fact that Snow is a famous novelist, promoted by the BBC and the British Council around the world, whose two cultures lecture is now discussed by dozens of students in their Cambridge entrance essays, is a sign of something troubled in British civilization – hence the title of Leavis’s lecture: ‘Two Cultures? The Significanceof CP Snow’ [italics added].

Seventh, that it is wrong to say that English literature has been overwhelmingly hostile to the industrial revolution, or that it has ignored the twentieth century’s major scientific developments. Great writers have carefully documented how technological change has affected individual lives; they are our greatest social historians.

Eighth, what great literature demonstrates is that it is precisely in the face of technological change that we need to muster all our humanity: ‘the advance of science and technology means a human future of change so rapid and of such kinds, of tests and challenges so unprecedented, of decisions and possible non-decisions so momentous and insidious in their consequences, that mankind – this is surely clear – will need to be in full intelligent possession of its full humanity’. This being the case, the humanities, and especially English, should be at the heart of university education.

Ninth and last, when Snow recommended raising material living standards for the poorest of the world, he showed no sense of what else might make life worth living: a sense of significance, of perspective, of aliveness, which great art gives us, and which should be embedded in our experience of work as well as in whatever we do with the rest of our lives.

*          *          *

Leavis is at first glance harder to defend, not just because of his ad hominem attacks. Snow makes some obviously valuable points. Leavis’s response concedes none of these. He also expresses himself in a frequently congested style: ‘How much that is other than robust good conscience there may be in all this it is, in the nature of things, such a state of affairs having been established, difficult to say; in fact, the question hardly applies’ is, to mimic the style, not atypical.

I have been mentally running Leavis’s speech through various contemporary British university policies. He wouldn’t fall foul of the Prevent policy. The institutional response would probably emerge from a battle between the Harassment Policy and the Freedom of Speech policy; I hope that the second would win. It could be argued that his choice of mode meant that the negative response to him overwhelmingly focused on the mode, rather than the contents, of his speech. But one could equally well say that had Leavis merely, in polite, academic terms made a critique of Snow’s arguments, then news of his lecture might never have left the bounds of Downing College, rather than becoming an international controversy that echoes down to today. (I find an instructive comparison between Leavis and George Galloway, whose mode is unique in contemporary British political discourse. When he is interviewed by reporters from mainstream television channels, he consistently refuses to accept the terms of debate put to him, and frequently makes ad hominem attacks; he, likewise, attracts publicity by these means.)

Snow is right to critique the drastic and early specialisation in the British education system, where, even today, school children make something of a choice between the humanities and sciences at age fourteen, are narrowed further by sixteen, and are narrowed to one or at most two subjects by eighteen.

What should be added is the fact that the sciences themselves, in the twentieth century, developed in a way which made their workings less accessible to a general educated audience. When I teach Victorian literature, I point out how much more unified public discourse was then than it was by the late 1950s; Victorians attended public science demonstrations, and could read The Origin of Species in its original form rather than a popularisation thereof.

Nonetheless, popularisation has helped bridge the gap of which Snow complained. The general public has taken an interest in theories of genetics, of chaos, even of (Stephen Hawking’s) Brief History of Time. More recently there has been interest in germ theory, vaccines, AI, and climate science. Much of this popularisation has been conducted through television, starting with Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man, and moving on to broadcasts by Richard Attenborough, Richard Dawkins and Brian Cox. Moreover it is probably fair to say that most people have a better understanding of roughly what it is that scientists do, than of what literary critics do.

Snow’s arguments are inflected by a valid class critique. The natural sciences were culturally looked down on when they moved out of the learned institutes and into the universities in the mid nineteenth century (it was in 1850 that they arrived in Cambridge).

 

This class variable is apparent in the difference between T. H. Huxley, who in 1880 attacked the traditional Classical education which excluded science, and Matthew Arnold, who in his Rede lecture of 1882 responded that science was indeed part of ‘literature’ in its broadest sense, but that knowledge of human culture was necessary in order to be an educated man. Huxley was speaking in a Northern adult education setting; Arnold was in Cambridge’s Senate House.

That said, this class difference is not played out between Snow and Leavis, who were both born into the lower-middle classes. And of course, English specifically had in its origins been the woman’s and poor man’s Classics (being cheaper to teach than ancient languages), and then became of the most popular subjects studied by young working class men when they started entering university in large numbers in the 1950s. (Upon graduating they then came up against class barriers professionally – hence, in part, the phenomenon of the ‘Angry Young Man’). Moreover the nineteen-sixties were more generally a period of bringing culture, in Leavis’s sense of the word, to the masses – for example through Kenneth Clarke’s BBC series Civilisation. This was also an achieved goal of the Soviet Union, where it became the case that teenagers would take themselves to the opera and ballet; this remains the case. I myself have lectured on English literature at the Bauman Institute of engineering in Moscow, since it is considered important there that its students have not only fluent English, but an education in literary classics.

However, in the West, today, we see a return to a connection between culture and class.

 

A 2015 Atlantic article was entitled ‘Rich Kids Study English’, referring to the fact that humanities subjects are becoming the preserve of those who are monied, well-connected, and confident in their own earning potential. The subjects of music, art, drama and foreign languages are retreating to the private schools, and entrance to the performing arts is becoming limited to those born with private means. As we have recently seen, Trinity Hall in Cambridge conceived the strategy of reaching out to certain private schools specifically in order to increase perceived quality of applicants to its humanities subjects. At the same time, science has assumed the role of the gold standard in academia – hence the often uncomfortable extension of such concepts as ‘research’, ‘research questions’, and the like, to the humanities.

At present, humanities subjects have their best chance at thriving in many universities by supporting the studies of those concentrating on other kinds of subjects, including business studies (Snow belatedly added the social sciences as an in-between, third, culture in his 1963 essay). Snow wrote, approvingly: ‘at MIT and Cal Tech … students of the sciences are receiving a serious humanities education’. It should however be asked to what extent culture in Leavis’s sense is in fact being transmitted in such teaching, or whether this is in practice inhibited by an overwhelming concentration on transferable skills. It should also be asked what risks being lost in terms of disciplinary development and cultural custodianship without a base in humanities programmes and discipline-specialist courses.

It might be added that, if Harold Wilson represented left-wing C. P. Snowism, Margaret Thatcher – like Snow a chemist – represented right-wing C. P. Snowism. She favoured ‘practical’ subjects over the humanities, especially history. Her political views treated economics more in terms of natural than social science. It is one important way of characterising the shift in British Conservatism that has occurred during and since Thatcher’s time that it has turned away from a promotion of the arts and humanities – especially for the masses – and towards the sciences [NB there is, by contrast, a movement within the American right to praise, cite, and fund the study of what Leavis means by culture]. Neither form of Snowism has succeeded in halting Britain’s decline in importance in the world relative to, say, China, which not only is now the world’s scientific powerhouse, but is, significantly, investing heavily in the humanities, as this article on the Classics in China indicates.

With regard to Snow’s thesis about social development: he is more right than Leavis allows that anxiety about scientific and technological developments was manifested by literary culture; one thinks of Blake’s Newton, and the resistance of artistic method itself to comprehension by science. There are however important exceptions (notably – outside of Britain – the Futurists). Looked at from the standpoint of the present, it is clear that Snow completely missed out a consideration for the environment, and planetary limitations on human development. He also underestimated the importance of culture and politics. Snow’s optimism, based as it was on faith in the effects of science whilst ignoring the importance of politics, culture, and actual individuals, has been shown to be misplaced. He said that because it was clearly intolerable that there should be such a gulf between the rich and poor countries, it would therefore be overcome, certainly by 2000: ‘Once the trick of getting rich is known, as it now is, the world can’t survive half rich and half poor. It’s just not on.’ It isn’t but it does. Yet arguably Leavis underestimated this too, focusing as he did on the quality of life of the individual, and not how individuals are manipulated into making up the social whole, and how this in turn affects their lives.

Regarding Snow’s point about transcending the Cold War through science: politics ensures that that isn’t allowed to happen, as we can see in today’s Cold and Hot Wars, and governmental embargoes on research collaborations between certain countries. Whether, on either side, scientists are paid to turn swords into ploughshares or ploughshares into swords is determined by public and private funding sources, not scientists’ personal inclinations. But in any case, the idea of scientists as intrinsically likely to be progressive is questionable. Snow was arguing as he did in the middle of a nuclear arms race which was being run by scientists. Snow names certain British writers whose thought, he asserts, brought ‘Auschwitz that much nearer’, whilst overlooking the fact that the atrocities of Auschwitz themselves were implemented with the necessary collaboration of chemists, engineers, and doctors. There are of course always individual scientists who refuse to engage in certain kinds of science on the grounds of conscience, as did the Soviet physicist Andrei Dimitrievich Sakharov when he became appalled by the nuclear bombs that he was designing – and paid the price. (He, by the way, was steeped in what Leavis meant by the word culture.)

Accordingly, Snow omits the entire history of public distrust – sometimes amply justified – of science as potentially sinister. Since Snow’s time that distrust has justifiably come to be attached to big pharma and the military-industrial complex. It is expressed against vaccines, and – amongst the surprisingly few people who take an interest in this topic – the overwhelmingly likely origins of Covid-19 in a scientific research laboratory. The means as well as the ends of science face public opposition – witness the anti-vivisection movement which has run strong in Britain from the 1880s onwards, to the extent that the British government has just (in January 2026) legislated to categorise animal testing as part of ‘vital national infrastructure’ – restricting protests at sites where it is committed, and increasing the prison sentences of those who try to disrupt it (for example by rescuing puppies).

Finally, there is a cultural pushback against AI, as exemplified in those who dismiss out of hand the notion that an AI bot can have feelings or human rights. This is the Luddism of the age of the posthuman. Leavis himself portended the vacuities of AI, saying of Snow’s novels: ‘I am trying to remember where I heard (can I have dreamed it?) that they are composed for him by an electronic brain called Charlie, into which the instructions are fed in the form of the chapter-headings’. Leavis argued that language is the foundation of everything including science; in AI, science becomes the foundation of a language without ‘culture’ in Leavis’s sense.

Snow had important things to say in 1959 – particularly about class, and specialisation, in England. But the triumph of the (non-progressive) parts of his perspective has been too complete, as right-wing Snowism has succeeded left-wing Snowism, and the scale and success of the attack on the humanities has grown.

The response to this can and should in part take the form of cooperation with current trends. Those in the humanities can point to the fact that the skills which employers say they need in graduates, but can’t find enough of, are precisely the skills which are most cultivated by the humanities. That in the age of AI, students would be well-advised to make themselves robot-proof by cultivating those skills that are least replaceable by machines, and which cultivate the flexibility of mind that will allow them to reskill, and change career, multiple times over the lifetimes, as the workplace is reshaped by new technologies. That by dismantling the humanities, and restricting access to the performing arts, the West is diminishing its international cultural capital, and its ability to project soft power and to win hearts and minds, precisely whilst China is wisely investing in precisely these powers.

But the response should also take the form of counter-critique. Public figures who argue against the humanities, whilst themselves being in possession of humanities degrees (which may have given them precisely the cultural capital and confidence to attain their positions of power, and to make their case with the rhetorical skills that they do) should have their hypocrisy pointed out. It should be scrutinised which university subjects are studied by the children of the rich and powerful, and pointed out that these parents may have a vested interest in allowing humanities subjects to retreat from the mass of universities to only the most exclusive, thereby enhancing cultural capital by scarcity value and association with financial capital. Finally and most importantly, it should be pointed out that the holders of power have a vested interest in reducing the number of voters who are trained in critical thinking and intercultural understanding, and who are in possession of the facts and lessons of history. Winston Smith in George Orwell’s 1984 had the job of editing past news articles to fit the latest political dogma; the moving of news online has made such silent editing perfectly possible, and it is today a fact. It is people trained to develop a historical memory who are the least persuadable by the deletion and falsification of the past online, and who are the most retentive of the past’s lessons.

I will leave the last word to Howard Jacobson, as he has revisited the Two Cultures debate from the standpoint of 2026:

‘I was not the most sophisticated of boys.  It took me a while to … reach some understanding of why literature mattered to Leavis as it did. And to get there – why Eliot?  Why Lawrence? And how could two such antithetical geniuses combine to make the thing Leavis meant by culture? – I had to think about the part World War 1 played in his imagination. What isn’t properly understood is the healing mission he was on. His sense of what had been lost, the urgency of his appeal to “civilization” and why that meant so much more than high-table manners. If Snow’s vocabulary as a thinker and a novelist was paper-thin, the fault lay not in science but the absence of urgency, a crushing ignorance as to how language made for culture – language as alive, heard and spoken, specific, dramatic, uniting thought and feeling, the lived past and the living present – a million miles from the acquisition of factual knowledge and know-how, as indeed it is from AI.

 

His great achievement was to show the difference between acquired knowledge and lived experience, saying and feeling, words as expressions of the made-up mind and words as discoveries, the means by which we find out what we didn’t know, or didn’t know we felt, before …’