{"id":7474,"date":"2019-06-11T06:42:48","date_gmt":"2019-06-11T06:42:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/?p=7474"},"modified":"2019-06-11T06:42:48","modified_gmt":"2019-06-11T06:42:48","slug":"intellectuals-as-natural-luddites","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2019\/06\/11\/intellectuals-as-natural-luddites\/","title":{"rendered":"Intellectuals as natural luddites"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n
\n

This is an extract from CP Snow's 1959 Rede lecture, \u201c<\/span>The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution<\/i>\u201d<\/span>. \u00a0It was pertinent 60 years ago and remains so today. \u00a0I read the lecture whilst drafting a chapter on ecological imagination for the book that Paul Vare and I are now writing. \u00a0It helps explain the intellectual mess we are in and our divided schools. \u00a0I write this noting yet another attempt (the Auger report<\/a>) to rescue vocational education in England.<\/p>\n

\"The reasons for the existence of the two cultures are many, deep, and complex, some rooted in social histories, some in personal histories, and some in the inner dynamic of the different kinds of mental activity themselves. \u00a0But I want to isolate one which is not so much a reason as a correlative, something which winds in and out of any of these discussions. \u00a0It can be said simply, and it is this. \u00a0If we forget the scientific culture, then the rest of western intellectuals have never tried, wanted, or been able to understand the industrial revolution, much less accept it. \u00a0Intellectuals, in particular literary intellectuals, are natural Luddites.<\/p>\n

That is specially true of this country, where the industrial revolution happened to us earlier than else where, during a long spell of absentmindedness. \u00a0Perhaps that helps explain our present degree of crystallisation. \u00a0But, with a little qualification, it is also true, and surprisingly true, of the United States.<\/p>\n

In both countries, and indeed all over the West, the first wave of the industrial revolution crept on, without anyone noticing what was happening. \u00a0It was, of course or at least it was destined to become, under our own eyes, and in our own time by far the biggest transformation in society since the discovery of agriculture. \u00a0In fact, those two revolutions, the agricultural and the industrial-scientific, are the only qualitative changes in social living that men have ever known. \u00a0But the traditional culture didn\u2019t notice: or when it did notice, didn't like what it saw. \u00a0Not that the traditional culture wasn't doing extremely well out of the revolution; the English educational institutions took their slice of the English nineteenth-century wealth, and perversely, it helped crystallise them in the forms we know.<\/p>\n

Almost none of the talent, almost none of the imaginative energy, went back into the revolution which was producing the wealth. \u00a0The traditional culture became more abstracted from it as it became more wealthy, trained its young men for administration, for the Indian Empire, for the purpose of perpetuating the culture itself, but never in any circumstances to equip them to understand the revolution or take part in it. \u00a0Far-sighted men were beginning to see, before the middle of the nineteenth century, that in order to go on producing wealth, the country needed to train some of its bright minds in science, particularly in applied science. \u00a0No one listened. \u00a0The traditional culture didn't listen at all: and the pure scientists, such as there were, didn't listen very eagerly. \u00a0You will find the story, which in spirit continues down to the present day, in Eric Ashby's Technology and the Academics.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n
\n

The academics had nothing to do with the industrial revolution; as Corrie, the old Master of Jesus, said about trains running into Cambridge on Sunday, `It is equally displeasing to God and to myself'. \u00a0So far as there was any thinking in nineteenth-century industry, it was left to cranks and clever workmen. \u00a0American social historians have told me that much the same was true of the U.S. The industrial revolution, which began developing in New England fifty years or so later than ours, apparently received very little educated talent, either then or later in the nineteenth century. \u00a0It had to make do with the guidance handy men could give it sometimes, of course, handymen like Henry Ford, with a dash of genius.<\/p>\n

The curious thing was that in Germany, in the 1830s and 1840s, long before serious industrialisation had started there, it was possible to get a good university education in applied science, better than anything England or the U.S. could offer for a couple of generations. \u00a0I don't begin to understand this: it doesn't make social sense: but it was so. \u00a0With the result that Ludwig Mond, the son of a court purveyor, went to Heidelberg and learnt some sound applied chemistry. \u00a0Siemens, a Prussian signals officer, at military academy and university went through what for their time were excellent courses in electrical engineering. \u00a0Then they came to England, met no competition at all, brought in other educated Germans, and made fortunes exactly as though they were dealing with a rich, illiterate colonial territory. \u00a0Similar fortunes were made by German technologists in the United States.<\/p>\n

Almost everywhere, though, intellectual persons didn't comprehend what was happening. \u00a0Certainly the writers didn't. \u00a0Plenty of them shuddered away, as though the right course for a man of feeling was to contract out; some, like Ruskin and William Morris and Thoreau and Emerson and Lawrence, tried various kinds of fancies which were not in effect more than screams of horror. \u00a0It is hard to think of a writer of high class who really stretched his imaginative sympathy, who could see at once the hideous back-streets, the smoking chimneys, the internal price and also the prospects of life that were opening out for the poor, the intimations, up to now unknown except to the lucky, which were just coming within reach of the remaining 99.0 per cent of his brother men. \u00a0Some of the nineteenth-century Russian novelists might have done; their natures were broad enough; but they were living in a pre-industrial society and didn't have the opportunity. \u00a0The only writer of world class who seems to have had an understanding of the industrial revolution was Ibsen in his old age: and there wasn't much that old man didn't understand.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n
\n

For, of course, one truth is straightforward. \u00a0Industrialisation is the only hope of the poor. \u00a0I use the word `hope' in a crude and prosaic sense. \u00a0I have not much use for the moral sensibility of anyone who is too refined to use it so. \u00a0It is all very well for us, sitting pretty, to think that material standards of living don't matter all that much. \u00a0It 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 your aesthetic revulsion. \u00a0But 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. \u00a0In fact, we know what their choice would be. \u00a0For, with singular unanimity, in any country where they have had the chance, the poor have walked off the land into the factories as fast as the factories could take them.<\/p>\n

I remember talking to my grandfather when I was a child. \u00a0He was a good specimen of a nineteenth-century artisan. \u00a0He was highly intelligent, and he had a great deal of character. \u00a0He had left school at the age of ten, and had educated himself intensely until he was an old man. \u00a0He had all his class's passionate faith in education. \u00a0Yet, he had never had the luck or, as I now suspect, the worldly force and dexterity to go very far. \u00a0In fact, he never went further than maintenance foreman in a tramway depot. \u00a0His life would seem to his grandchildren laborious and unrewarding almost beyond belief. \u00a0But it didn't seem to him quite like that. \u00a0He was much too sensible a man not to know that he hadn't been adequately used: he had too much pride not to feel a proper rancour: he was disappointed that he had not done more and yet, compared with his grandfather, he felt he had done a lot. \u00a0His grandfather must have been an agricultural labourer. \u00a0I don't so much as know his Christian name. \u00a0He was one of the `dark people', as the old Russian liberals used to call them, completely lost in the great anonymous sludge of history. \u00a0So far as my grandfather knew, he could not read or write. \u00a0He was a man of ability, my grandfather thought; my grandfather was pretty unforgiving about what society had done, or not done, to his ancestors, and did not romanticise their state. \u00a0It was no fun being an agricultural labourer in the mid to late eighteenth century, in the time that we, snobs that we are, think of only as the time of the Enlightenment and Jane Austen.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n
\n

The industrial revolution looked very different according to whether one saw it from above or below. \u00a0It looks very different today according to whether one sees it from Chelsea or from a village in Asia. \u00a0To people like my grandfather, there was no question that the industrial revolution was less bad than what had gone before. \u00a0The only question was, how to make it better.<\/p>\n

In a more sophisticated sense, that is still the question. \u00a0In the advanced countries, we have realised in a rough and ready way what the old industrial revolution brought with it. \u00a0A great increase of population, because applied science went hand in hand with medical science and medical care. \u00a0Enough to eat, for a similar reason. \u00a0Everyone able to read and write, because an industrial society can't work without. \u00a0Health, food, education; nothing but the industrial revolution could have spread them right down to the very poor. \u00a0Those are primary gains there are losses too, of course, one of which is that organising a society for industry makes it easy to organise it for all-out war. \u00a0But the gains remain. \u00a0They are the base of our social hope.<\/p>\n

And yet: do we understand how they have happened? \u00a0Have we begun to comprehend even the old industrial revolution? \u00a0Much less the new scientific revolution in which we stand? \u00a0There never was any thing more necessary to comprehend.\"<\/p>\n

.............................................<\/p>\n

This text can be found on panarchy.org<\/a>\u00a0where you can download the full lecture.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is an extract from CP Snow's 1959 Rede lecture, \u201cThe Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution\u201d. \u00a0It was pertinent 60 years ago and remains so today. \u00a0I read the lecture whilst drafting a chapter on ecological imagination for the...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7474","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7474","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7474"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7474\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7474"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7474"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7474"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}