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Ambition in the Two Cultures

IT IS PART of our present intellectual apparatus to deride a belief in the existence of two separate cultures of science and humanistic studies, though the idea retains a ghostly substance in those persons influenced by C. P. Snow. It is true that its original formulation seemed scarcely to go beyond suggesting that physical scientists did not read novels and humanists did not know any mathematics. And it is also true that the solution to the "two cultures problem," since this division in human knowledge was seen as a problem to be solved, was the conventional answer of secular humanism: a liberal education. But even in this form the idea did not deserve the relatively short shrift it got. It is important whether one does science or does literature or other humanistic pursuits. It is not that there is a neat cleavage between the activities of the one or the other, for there are activities which are common to both and activities that are singular to each. Indeed, it is more than the particular assemblage of the activities of individuals that produces the peculiar quality of the two cultures. The social organization of the sciences and the humanities does differ, and it is these differences in social structure that account for the variance in the world view of a scientist and a humanist. Nowhere in recent years is the central character of these differences and similarities more apparent than in the two recent autobiographies written by James Watson (The Double Helix) and Norman Podhoretz (Making It). The books as books differ in many respects. Making It is an odyssey from childhood to the near present, The Double Helix only once deviates from the course of describing that narrow band of time from Watson's arrival in Denmark to the successful capture of priority for the discovery of the structure of DNA. The intellectual styles of the books differ. Podhoretz's style is focused on the internal life: analytic, self-conscious, and introspective. Watson's is naive, innocent, and unconscious of "real" motives. As autobiographers they follow a differing novelistic impulse in recreating the past. The prose styles draw from their significant literary surroundings. Podhoretz, in the tradition of Saul Bellow (see Bellow, 1953), produces the prose and imagery of an Americanized Jewish adventure. Watson writes disguised as the American innocent abroad, his sense of science and Cambridge shaped by C. P. Snow. Finally, the books have been received with considerably differing critical responses. Podhoretz, except for a positive but bullying review by Norman Mailer (1968), has been flogged by nearly every reviewer. The rancor of these reviews seems to combine a continuing jealousy of Podhoretz's precocious success on the part of those who remained only academics, glee at what appears to be a flawed career, and a belief in the necessary moral character of those who participate in the literary life. Watson, on the other hand, has been treated far more positively, especially by nonscientific reviewers who see the book as exposing the naked emperor. Reviews by scientists have been more mixed, with a few attacking him for inaccurate reporting of the specific events or misrepresenting the nature of the scientific enterprise. Other scientists who hate the book refuse to say so in print; partially because they are fearful of a powerful enemy who may re-