Science's new battle lines

摘要

Optimism was not in vogue in literary circles in 1959, at the height of the cold war. Indeed, it had not enjoyed much currency throughout the twentieth century. With the decline of religion, the rise of Freudian psychology and the social and political consequences of industrialization, writers turned inward and found that the only remaining certainty was death. rnOn the charge sheet that physicist and novelist Charles Percy Snow drew up against such "literary intellectuals" in his Rede Lecture of that year at the University of Cambridge, UK, was the belief among writers that scientists are "shallowly optimistic, unaware of man's condition". Snow robustly countered that scientists were perfectly aware of the tragedy of the individual, but that as social beings they felt a compulsion to act to improve the lot of others. "There is plenty in our condition which is not fate, and against which we are less than human unless we do struggle," he said. He was an advocate of science - but also of hope.