| Since knowledge and information are more extensive
today than ever before, it is difficult for any individual to have a good
enough grasp of the general field to be able to do any one subject justice.
The result is a collection of specialists with lop-sided outlooks. Education
seems to be the proper tool to remedy this state of affairs, and there are
two ways in which it can provide the required general framework. The first
is to administer a ready-made world view: either a traditional religious
creed or a social dogma would fill the bill, uniting specialists in their
mutual possession of a common belief and practice about human nature and
the place of men in the world. But such beliefs are now notoriously lacking,
because they have been seen to be implausible: to rely on a world view as
a given fact is to ignore the possibility of new insights, to have an excuse
for narrow-mindedness. This is the alternative: rather than providing children
with a matrix in which to slot what they learn, we should strive to give
them a complete enough picture of the field of human experience and experimentation
for them to be able to impose their own structure on the information that
comes to them, to impose it with evidence rather than by accident. This is
not to say that facts should be dished out in a totally unstructured confusion,
for thought and action have to take place in a framework, and there is no
progress without direction. But the framework should be flexible, and the
direction provisional, so that each individual can be adapting them continually
in the light of experience. This required general picture is not provided by an education confined to the arts (even with a dash of science up to ‘0’ Level). The persistence of this kind of specialised education, in arts and sciences alike, only aggravates the split down the middle of our supposedly common culture which has been noticed by C. P. Snow. The well-known caricatures of scientists failing to read non-scientific books and artists making a noble fetish of failing to understand science are unfortunately perfectly true. And the narrowness of the artists is particularly serious, as it is with them that the power over our culture lies. Arts is the traditionally ‘liberal’ education, and a ‘liberal’ education is still a passport to cultural influence. Obstinate incomprehension of science gives a pervasively unscientific bias to our traditional culture, and the step from unscientific to anti-scientific is small. So to the extent that the future is bound up with science, our culture turns its back on the future, and as a result of this cultural division we sustain a loss as people and as a society – a loss both practical and intellectual and creative. It is as if a whole section of the community, over a whole range of intellectual experience, was tone-deaf, to use Snow’s image. The traditional culture still feels itself to be the whole of culture. The natural order is forgotten, despite the intrinsic value and important consequences of its exploration. Most non-scientists have little conception of the scientific edifice of the physical world, although it can be seen as the greatest collective work of the mind of man. This ‘tone-deafness’ is not innate, but springs from a deficiency in training, a deficiency which must be remedied. For because today’s educated people can no longer communicate with each other in the field of their major intellectual concern we are led to a misinterpretation of the past, a misjudgement of the present, and a denial of our hopes for the future. We don’t equip ourselves properly any more to be able to decide on good action. Where academic life is more specifically concerned, specialisation is linked to orthodoxy and sterility inasmuch as creativity depends on the fusing of notions from two or more previously unrelated regions of enquiry. Specialisation produces closed systems of thought which are hostile to new empirical data in other fields, and correspondingly unwilling to adjust accordingly. This applies both within each of the ‘two cultures’, and to the rift between them. Science affects the way men think of themselves, and this is an artistic concern: arts lends to science the humane perspective without which there can only be undirected groping. The problem is particularly acute today, as I have said, because of the vast extent of knowledge. The system of disseminating information seems likely within a foreseeable time to break down under its own weight. So much is published that important matter is swamped by the inconsequential. We cannot use the knowledge we have accumulated, as anyone who has stood in the Bodleian and reflected for a moment may have felt. It is true that work is being done on computerising the means we use for threading through the maze to the momentarily important item, but it is not the accessibility of the parts which is of prime importance: a prerequisite is the possibility of grasping the whole, for the parts are interdependent and must be seen in relation to the whole, correctly famous for being greater than their sum. The total view is necessary for us to be able to understand the component parts and to extend them intelligently. But even if we could administer a cure, there are still some who shrink with horror at mundane science, lest it should be upgraded at the expense of sublime art. Among them Keats lamented that science unweaves the rainbow and makes a dull ordinariness out of awful things. But is there still no hope for the view that the true beauty of nature will only be revealed when we understand its workings? The picture we form of nature should be more striking when brightly lit, for it is a superstition that it is Nature’s mystery and unrevealed designs that makes her beautiful and moving. But, it is argued, arts is the mind in free flight, ideas being gloriously conceived at the highest level of man’s nature, and science is a humdrum trade, whose study is an apprenticeship rather than an education: it is a practical technique in which the higher functions of the brain lie fallow. This is simply not true, and perhaps it is a view not so widely held today. As Medawar has put it: ‘The equation of science with facts and of the humane arts with ideas is one of the shabby genteelisms which bolsters up the humanist’s self-esteem.’ The dangers of specialisation are widely realised on a superficial level, but the specifically cultural specialisation which I have been discussing goes deep, being more far-reaching than the schoolboy realises when he chooses his ‘A’ Level subjects. He is not only limiting what he will be able to do, which is the commonly perceived disadvantage, but also what he will be able to do. The knowledge that we are children of our time, place and training, that our education helps to determine the quality of our lives, should make us highly critical as we plan our study: well chosen, training can be something of a corrective to the blinkers imposed upon us by time and place. At a lower level, a balanced education would help to free the majority of us from our present excessive reverence for scientists – as if their minds were qualitatively different from ours, their judgements more immune to error. And we would in a technological age have more insight into the new force that is shaping our lives. It is easier to diagnose the problem than to prescribe for its solution. But it is at least clear that the remedy is the concern of education, though the rethinking involved may seem an impossible task. How can we present the vastness of knowledge in its entirety to a mansized brain, and still leave him time to progress? At the very least it should no longer be possible for children to pursue either arts or science exclusively from the age of sixteen, and specialists should expend more effort in the intelligent popularisation of their fields of study. But far more than these superficial changes are required, and the difficulty of seeing what they should be is in danger of leading us to despair of further human intellectual progress. The machine has got clogged with its own cleverness. |