Sigmoid Flexure Mundus C.P. Snow

[Terrance]

The most dreadful thing of all is that millions of people in the poor
countries are going to starve to death, before our eyes... upon our
television sets. -C.P.Snow



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. But 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. It can be said simply, and it is this. If 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. 

 That is especially true of this country, where the industrial
revolution happened to us earlier than  elsewhere, during a long spell
of absentmindedness. Perhaps that helps explain our present degree of
crystallization. But, with a little qualification, it is also true, and
surprisingly true, of the United States. 

In both countries, and indeed all over the West, the first wave of the
industrial revolution crept on, without anyone noticing what was
happening. It was, of course-or at least it was destined to become,
under our own eyes, and in our time-by far the biggest transformation in
society since the discovery of agriculture. In fact, those two
revolutions, the agricultural and the industrial scientific, are the
only
qualitative changes in social living that men have ever known. But the
traditional culture didn't notice: or when it did notice, didn't like
what it saw. Not 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 crystallize them in
the forms we know. 

Almost none of the talent, almost none of the imaginative energy, went
back into the revolution which was producing the wealth. The 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 palrt in it. Far-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. No one listened. The
traditional culture didn't listen at all: and the pure scientists, such
as there were, didn't listen very eagerly. 

So far as there was any thinking in nineteenth-century industry, it was
left to cranks and clever workmen. American 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. It had to make
do with the handymen could give it-sometimes, of course, handymen like
Henry Ford, with a dash of genius. 

The curious thing was that in Germany, in the 1830's and 1840's, 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. I don't
begin to understand this.  it doesn't make social sense,  but it was so.
With the result that Ludwig Mond, the son of a court purveyor, went to
Heidelberg and learnt some sound applied chemistry. Siemens, a Prussian
signals
officer, at military academy and university went through what for their
time were excellent courses in electrical engineering. Then 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. Silnilar fortunes were made by German technologists
in the United States. 

Almost everywhere, though, intellectual persons didn't comprehend what
was happening. Certainly the writers didn't. Plenty of them shuddered
away, though the right course for a man of feeling was to contract out;
some,  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. It is hard to think of a writer of high class who
really stretched his imaginative sympathy, who could see at once the
hideous
backstreets, 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 percent of his brother men. Some of the
nineteenth-century Russian novelists might have done; their natures were
broad enough; but they were living in a preindustrial society and didn't
have the opportunity. The 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. 

For, of course, one truth is straightforward. Industrialisation is the
only hope of the poor. I use the word 'hope' in a crude and prosaic
sense. I have not much use for the moral sensibility of anyone who is
too refined to use it so. It is all very well for us, sitting pretty, to
think that material standards of living don't matter all that much. It
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. But 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. In fact,
we know what their choice would be. For, with singular unanimity, in any
country where they had the chance, the poor have walked off the land
into the factories as fast as the factories could take them. 

*Luddites were English workmen of the early nineteenth century who,
fearful of
unemployment, set out to destroy labor-saving machinery in the highlands
and North of
England. Their name is said to derive from a certain Ned Ludd, a
villager of low mentality in Leicestershire, who in 1779 went into a
rage and broke two frames in a stockingmaker's house. Editors' note.