The Two Cultures
Rebecca Goldstein
In M. Kramer (Ed.), The Jewish Experience in Contemporary Literature: Two Worlds? Special issue of Maggid. The Toby Press, 2004
I meant my title to be vague, I was deliberately cultivating obscurity—like a Frenchified philosopher. “The Two Cultures.” Which two cultures?
The phrase itself famously comes from C.P. Snow, the writer/ scientist/politician of the World War II generation. In his 1959 Rede lecture, Snow dissected a pernicious intellectual trend that he detected and christened. The sciences and technology, on the one hand, he complained, and the arts and humanities on the other, had so diverged from one another, as to all but halt significant communication and curiosity across the great divide. Scientists are illiterate. They couldn’t even name the great books, much less lay claim to having read them. Worse, the artists and humanists (and Snow, as I remember, came down harder on this group than on the scientists), although living in an increasingly technological age, are shamelessly ignorant of how any of it works, of the scientific theories that lay behind it all. This lack of a common universe of discourse and interests impoverishes both sides, Snow implied, impoverishes the culture as a whole.
So there’s that idea, the famous C. P. Snow idea, of the two cultures. And maybe that’s what I had in mind by my title.
But then, of course, this is a conference on writing, on poetry and fiction; and not just on any writing, but on Jewish writing, a celebration of the first program in the world devoted to Jewish writing; and this context suggests other interpretations of the phrase “the two cultures.”
The very notion of Jewish writing, of the Jewish writer, might seem to point a finger, either approbatory or admonishing, at some ghostly fissure in a common culture, to raise up the suggestion of a latent bifurcation, to introduce, as Professor Rudoff put it in her thoughtful remarks opening this conference, “the problematics of ‘ours’.” The suggestion of cultural duality is, perhaps, why the very idea of Jewish writing, of the Jewish writer, makes many writers look quickly around for the nearest exit, including writers who have set the gold standard for Jewish-American writing, such as Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud , Cynthia Ozick, each of whom has emphatically rejected the designation of “Jewish writer.” So there’s that mildly controversial notion of the two cultures, the one that seems possibly to be lurking in the very idea of a Jewish writer, and one which raises questions uncomfortably relevant to this conference.
And then, of course, this isn’t just a conference on Jewish writing, but a conference in Israel on Jewish writing, attended by both Israeli and American writers and scholars. This presents yet another possible interpretation of “the two cultures,” viz. diasporic vs. Israeli culture. C.P. Snow had lamented that the scientists and humanists were becoming profoundly uninteresting to each other, unwilling to stretch their minds to take in the ever more alien experience of the other side. Are we, Israeli and diasporic writer, possibly becoming uninteresting to one another, driven apart by our widening divergence of experience? Has Israel produced an entirely new kind of Jew, too unconnected with the historical forces that shaped our identities in chutz ha-eretz to be grasped even by the well-trained imaginations of non-Israeli Jewish writers? (Having spent a good part of this past weekend with my daughter on the beach at Tel Aviv, I’m inclined to take this possibility very seriously.)
So here are at least three possible interpretations of this phrase, “the two cultures,” two of them of direct relevance to the context provided by this conference, one of them quite irrelevant, having nothing specifically to do with Jewish writers, many of them American, gathering in Israel. And it’s of course to the quite irrelevant idea of the two cultures that I want to speak today, the one that appears to have nothing very much to do with the subject of Jewish writing and Jewish writers.
(Because I have, parenthetically, to confess that every time I’m asked to speak on the topic of Jewish writing, as a Jewish writer, I find myself awkwardly dumbfounded. I was trained to be a philosopher of science, a profession to which I’ve recently returned. There are days when I have a hard time convincing myself that I’ve ever written fiction at all. And my being associated with Jewish writing, no matter how tangentially—though I see from the title of Professor Budick’s talk that perhaps she’ll explain how my connection isn’t quite so tangential—but my being so associated, in whatever way, also never ceases to amaze me. I’ll make a little confession. I’ve been trying to become a typical assimilated American Jew for just about my whole life. It’s pathetic really, I’m just so bad at it. I’ve tried to use my hard-earned, rigorous education as a conduit away from the particularities of my background—from what one of my fictional characters once called the “accidents of precedents.” The subjects that I studied, math and physics and philosophy, most especially philosophy, were subjects I wasn’t supposed to study, given the accidents of my precedents, not as a girl, and especially not as an Orthodox Jewish girl. Especially not philosophy. I first learned a little bit about philosophy when I was a student in a right-wing, all-girls yeshiva. What I learned was that it was the worst thing that you could possibly study. It was in historia—Jewish history--and we were learning about that apikorus Benedictus Spinoza—who was born Baruch Spinoza. See what happens, little girls, when you think you’re so smart and start questioning everything. (It wasn’t my imagination that my teacher’s smouldering eyes were fixed on me.) From Baruch to Benedictus! The very word, apikorus, testifies to the deep suspicion with which our tradition regards philosophy. The word derives from the name of that famous Greek philosopher, Epicuras, who taught of the fundamental importance of pleasure in justifying our ends and also had such a horror of beans. The far more approving adjective and noun ‘epicurean’ is also derived from his name. But for the Jews, the Greek philosopher yielded the word for heretic—more on account of his pleasure-principle than his legume-phobia. When my mother learned that my oldest daughter was going to major at Harvard in philosophy, she offered her a tidy sum of money not to, saying “Look what it did to your mother.” I loved these subjects, math and physics and philosophy, especially philosophy, not only for themselves alone—for their mind-bashing toughness that pushed you to the limits of your understanding and then a tiny bit beyond— but also for how far away from the accidents of my precedents they seemed to be carrying me. Grasping Plato’s Forms, or Einstein’s four-dimensional manifold, or Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, it didn’t matter a hoot who I was, whether girl or boy, Jewish or not, poor or rich. I called the object of my desire “objective knowledge” and the taste of it in my mind was of pure sweet water. I loved above everything the sense that I was reconstituting my mind, transforming the passive ideas that had been handed to me by the conditions of my birth into the active ideas I had derived simply through seeking rational explanations. I loved that all of us who so dedicated ourselves to this rational pursuit could end up with the same ideas; that, in a sense, we could end up with the same mind, the mind of objectivity itself—one approximating Deus sive Natura, as my beloved apikorus Spinoza put it. So my having on occasion written the sort of fiction that gets me invited to conferences such as this one, fiction that positively revels in the accidents of my very Jewish precedents, continues to surprise me. No matter how many times I retake it, I continually flunk out of Assimilation 101.)
Having now spent precious parenthetical minutes telling you what I don’t want to talk about, let me talk a bit about what I do want to talk about: the two cultures of science and technology, on the one hand, and the arts and humanities, on the other. There’s been something rather interesting going on, at least in the English-speaking world, the last few years. Not only have some scientists taken to writing quite literate and vivid accounts of their science, to which the public has responded in bestseller-making numbers--I’m thinking here of such publishing phenomena as Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time and Roger Penrose’s The Emperor’s New Mind. But also a sizable number of literary artists have dipped into the sciences for their subjects, characters, and inspiration.
There have been, just over the last five years, a remarkable number of plays and movies and novels that have devoted themselves to science, and not in the old Frankensteinian mold either, featuring the soulless scientist ruthlessly seeking a knowledge inimical to the well-being of humankind. Rather this new brace of works presents the scientific enterprise in sympathetic, in even heroic, terms.
There was, of course, the academy award winning A Beautiful Mind, presenting the Hollywood version (inspired by Sylvia Nasser’s wonderful biography of the same name) of the strange sojourn through mathematics and madness of the Nobel-prize-winning John Nash, who incidentally I had named “the phantom of Fine Hall” in my first novel, The Mind-Body Problem. I’ve never gotten credit for that epithet , by which even the New York Times had called him at the time of his Nobel, and I want to use this occasion to get my due. When I’d written that novel Nash had been totally in his own world, but still I’d worried about dubbing him with this disparaging title and I’d actually consulted a psychiatrist and asked her: what’s the odds of his ever regaining his faculties? She told me “Oh, it’s practically zero.” And then the epithet stuck, everyone called him “the phantom,” and then he got better, and I was worried, but it seems that he likes the nickname, he calls himself “the phantom,” so it’s all OK.
Anyway, in addition to A Beautiful Mind, there was also the very fine movie Pi, featuring not just two brilliant mathematicians, mentor and disciple, but evil Wall Street types and Cabalistic Jews. I recommend it. There was Michael Frayn’s award-winning Copenhagen, again a great critical and popular success, a three-person drama featuring the quantum physicists, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, as well as Bohr’s wife, Margrethe. The play (rather ponderously, I thought) uses Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle as a metaphor for the uncertainty of ever ascertaining the true motives of human behavior, in this case, Heisenberg’s motive in heading up the Nazi atomic bomb project. Was he trying, as argued by his apologists (among whom the playwright can be numbered), to sabotage it from within, or did he just get his arithmetic very wrong, grossly miscalculating the amount of enriched uranium that would be required to get a nuclear holocaust going? There was also, appearing briefly at Lincoln Center with Alan Alda in the lead role, the play QED about the last days of the sui generis Richard Feynman (that’s ‘QED,’ as in quantum electrical dynamics), and another longer-running play, Proof, a family drama that featured three mathematicians. I also caught a few smaller productions, such as an off-Broadway musical, Star Gazers, that had Galileo, Kepler, and Tycho Brahe singing and hoofing up a storm.
In fiction, as well, there has been some significant interest in the sciences, knowledgeable books that don’t reduce scientists and mathematicians to the clueless automata that we’d seen before but instead offer much more layered, sympathetic portraits. More importantly these works often demonstrate considerable grasp of some of the more subtle and exciting aspects of contemporary math and physics. I’m thinking particularly of the work of Richard Powers, many of whose books demonstrate scientific intimacy, the very celebrated Einstein’s Dreams, by Alan Lightman, and the work, too, of my esteemed fellow panelist, Aryeh Lev Stollman. The very title of his last book, a wonderful collection of short stories The Dialogues of Time and Entropy, indicates the presence of this artistic trend of drawing from the sciences.
What’s going on here? Perhaps the rapprochement is partly a matter of the way in which technology has insinuated itself into the processes by which most—with the exception of a few holdout Luddites—humanists think and artists create. It’s difficult to maintain the old image of the demonically soulless scientists, draining the beauty from the world in the course of explaining it, while gathering one’s evidence from the internet. Snow had placed great emphasis on the fact that our culture is becoming ever more technological, and had asked how the artists and humanists could partake of this technology without its penetrating their thought processes. Well, maybe he was right and the penetration is happening before our eyes. And maybe with the penetration comes an attitudinal change, so that the scientific enterprise is no longer seen as inimical to the free human spirit, but rather as one of its most heroic expressions: the attempt to get outside ourselves, our ego-tainted worldviews, and take in the nature of the world at large, what Einstein called the out-yonder.
In his “Autobiographical Notes” that Einstein supplied with his typical self-mocking good humor for the Festschrift celebrating his 67th birthday compiled by Paul Arthur Schilpp, he explicitly identifies the scientific quest to reach out beyond the borders of one’s own personality and experience in order to make contact with the not-oneself as the spiritual center of his life:
“It is quite clear to me that the religious paradise of youth, which was thus lost, was a first attempt to free myself from the chains of the “merely personal,” from an existence which is dominated by wishes, hopes, and primitive feelings. Out yonder there was this huge world, which exists independently of us human beings and which stands before us like a great eternal riddle, at least partially accessible to our inspection and thinking. The contemplation of this world beckoned like a liberation. . . . . The mental grasp of this extra-personal world within the frame of the given possibilities swam as a highest aim half consciously and half unconsciously before my mind’s eye. . . . The road to this paradise was not as comfortable and alluring as the road to the religious paradise; but its has proved itself as trustworthy, and I have never regretted having chosen it.” This is a deeply eloquent statement of Einstein’s credo as a scientist; science as spiritual salvation, akin to religious salvation. It happens also to be a vivid elucidation of what Spinoza had called amor intellectualis Dei, the intellectual love of God, in Spinoza’s ethics the highest form that our emotional/cognitive/ spiritual development can take.
At other times, Einstein spoke about the role that beauty played in his life as a scientist. For example, when the philosopher of science, Hans Reichenbach, asked Einstein how he had felt when empirical evidence supporting his theory of relativity had finally been gathered—it had awaited a solar eclipse to see whether the gravitational pull of the sun would bend light rays as Einstein’s theory predicted—Einstein had answered Richenbach that he hadn’t been so impressed with this empirical evidence as the rest of the world had. He had already known that the theory was true. It had to be true, he told Reichenbach, because it was so beautiful.
Fellow fiction writers and poets: does this ring a bell? It has to be true because it’s so beautiful? How similar this sounds to our attempts as artists, as writers: this attempt to make our way out of the narrow precincts of our own personalities, to get beyond ourselves, hard as that may be, guided by our commitment to the forms of beauty.
Obviously, there is a great deal of diversity in human nature: who should know this better than we writers? The deep emotions motivating individual scientists and individual artists run the gamut (even in one and the same individual) from the Seussian “look at me! look at me! look at me now!” to Einstein’s impersonal passion.
Einstein’s confession of utter, indifference to the mere empirical evidence for his theory, when beauty was on his side, is very impressive, or ought to be, I think, to us artists, hinting at the profound affinity between our “two cultures.” There is some serious beauty to be found in the mathematical sciences: elegance and refinement and grandeur. And even if one’s taste doesn’t go in that direction, toward that extreme objectivity that tries to leave behind all traces of the human element, even if, as is often the case with us literary types, inhuman visions leave one distinctly cold, still it’s good for us all to remember that deep down, at the deepest levels of their work, the scientists, too, are artists. Faced with two or more theories that are empirically adequate the scientist will resort to aesthetic considerations—elegance, refinement, simplicity, grandeur—in deciding which theory offers the best explanation. All things being equal, the more beautiful theory is the scientifically better theory.
Artist, humanist, and scientist, each in his or her own way committed to an expansiveness in human experience, see themselves, I think, increasingly on the same side of a deeper and more perilous divide, expansiveness of the human spirit versus a violent contraction of it, an atavistic tribalism, often speaking, blasphemously, in the name of religion. More than ever artists and scientists know that they stand on the same side when it comes to the deepest meaning of culture.
I want to tell you a little bit about how it was that I first fell in love with science, with the very idea of science. When I first learned how to read, I was given a library card and I made a strict rule for myself. Every trip to the library I would take out two books: one would be a make-believe storybook, because I loved make-believe stories. The other book would be a good-for-me book, not make-believe but something I could learn from. I was extremely strict with myself. I’d make myself finish the good-for-me book before I allowed myself to read the storybook. One-for-one, no cheating. I would get my books on Friday afternoon so that I would have them to read over shabboss.
One Friday afternoon I brought home from the library a good-for-me book called Our Friend the Atom, and this book really blew me away. It just shook the ramparts of my soul. Here’s what I learned: The world was much farther away from me than I had known. I had thought that all I had to do was open my eyes and there it was, the pretty colored thing. But no, if I just opened my eyes I’d never have known about our friend the atom. I’d never have known that what the world really is is multitudes of neighborhoods of spinning atoms, of protons and neutrons and electrons and charges that came in three flavors, positive, negative and neutral. There was a whole lot more out there, a whole lot more happening out there, than I’d had any idea about.
But there was also less out there than I had thought. Those colors, for example, that I seemed to see out there, the blues and reds and my favorite, the yellows? Nope, not out there at all. The atoms were colorless. The book said so. It seemed to follow that those colors were only. . . where? They were in my mind, like dreams! What else was only in my mind then, and not out there, even though it might seem to be out there? Suddenly it opened up in front of me: that vast abyss between how things seem and how they really are. How could you know how things really are? How did he know about this, the man who had written this great book, Our Friend the Atom?
The fact that science allows us to make this distinction between the way things seem and the way they really are, seemed to me, as a new reader with a library card, too wondrously amazing, and it still seems that way to me. When I grew up a little bit I got to study relativity theory, that theory so beautiful that its theorizer knew even before he had the confirming evidence . . . that it had to be true; and I learned that if you really take the physics seriously then the conclusion you must draw is that time doesn’t really flow. Time is as still as spread space.
Time certainly seems to flow; it seems to fly: the present instantaneously here and then slipping off into the irretrievable past. The flux seems the most distinctive fact there is about time, that fundamental difference between the uncertain future, the fleeting present, the unchangeable past. The temporal flux carries us all from vigorous youth to feeble old age, and that’s only if we’re lucky and get to be old. The flux is poignant, the flux is tragic, the flux is cruel, the flux is . . . . unreal. The physics says so. Too wondrously amazing.
When Einstein was a frail old man he was asked, somewhat insensitively, how he felt about his own impending end. Here is how he answered: “To us believing physicists the distinction between the past, the present and the future is an illusion, albeit a persistent one.” Einstein took the logical consequences of his physics so seriously that it gave him the ultimate transcendence: freedom from fear of his own personal demise.
Escape from the confines of one’s own puny little life, dedication to beauty, glimpses of transcendence. At the deepest layer, art and science are as merged with one another as are the beauty and truth that lies at their deepest structural level
Is there anything at all in what I’ve said here today that is, well, Jewish? There are people in this room much better qualified than I to address this question and I’m afraid that they will. But I have to say that sometimes, almost against my wishes, even I suspect that there might be.
I’ve struggled most of my life to try to come up with a working definition of a good Jew, as I’m certain just about everyone else in this room has, too. By working definition, I, of course, mean one that would work for me. A few years ago I came up with a notion of the good Jew that I like a lot: To be a good Jew means to be torn apart by conflict and contradiction, precisely because there is so much in this world to love—and some of these loves are very difficult, and some downright impossible, to reconcile with one another, meaning that we can’t possibly give ourselves to them all. No, my friends, sadly we can’t. But that doesn’t make them any less lovable. And to deny their lovability is to falsify God’s world.
Alicia Ostriker parenthetically mentioned last night (always pay attention to those parentheses) that she was surprised to learn that the hardest of the ten commandments is said to be the fifth, adjuring us to honor our parents. She said she’d always assumed that the hardest was the seventh, forbidding adultery.
Well, I’m solidly with Alicia on this one. In fact, I would argue that the better a Jew you are the harder it is to keep the seventh, because, being the good Jew that you are, you are vividly attentive to the sheer loveliness of so many. Of course, if you’re a good Jew then you don’t—you can’t—give yourself to all the forms that loveliness takes; but because you’re so very much aware of these myriad forms, because your soul quivers in exultant celebration of them all, well, the seventh is a doozy. We’re meant to feel its dooziness—which is why I think that with all the many sub-groups we Jews have produced, all the liberties of interpretation that we’ve taken with the tradition, we’ve never gone in for asceticism, for that denial of our sensual nature, in love with sensual beauty, that would make keeping the seventh far too easy. That wouldn’t be Jewish.
So to be a good Jew, I would argue, is to arduously attain that love of pure objectivity in which the accidents of precedents matter not a wit. That divine apikorus was a splendid Jew after all, as was Einstein. And to be a good Jew is to love one’s own people, just as one loves one’s own family—that is without much of any sort of good reason at all, certainly not for any reason that would lay claim on a purely objective human being. And loving one’s people means loving their stories.
And so I love Jewish stories, as do all of you here. That doesn’t preclude our loving all other stories as well. Of course we do, as good Jews. That is what is asked of us, what we ask of ourselves: out of our ragingly conflicted souls, stretched wide by the force of loving in so many irreconcilable directions, that we be—that we write—Jewish.