Excellent blog posting by Timothy Sandefur about why we shouldn't forget C. P Snow's message. Half a century has passed since his Rede lecture and the subsequent vicious spat with F. R Leavis. Sandefur explains what really underlay Leavis' attack on Snow's lecture. Well worth fifteen minutes of your time, if you have any opinions whatsoever on the place of science in society.
I am not a Daily Telegraph reader by habit, mainly because I don't agree with its politics. I will concede that it is a good newspaper that, for a right-wing broadsheet, actually believes in investigative journalism. Unlike, say, the Daily Mail with its daily hymn of hate against dole scroungers, the EU, asylum seekers and other bogeys. I will also concede that it has some good journalists.
One of these journalists was Julie Kirkbride, the Tory MP who was recently exposed by the Telegraph as having used taxpayer's money to fund an extension on her second home. She was one of the 98 MPs who voted to exempt their expense details from the Freedom of Information Act. I seem to remember listening to Ms Kirkbride on a television program years ago, explaining why she wanted to become a Tory MP. It was because she found herself reading and writing Telegraph editorials, finding herself in total agreement with their politics, and wanting to put these politics into action. I wonder if she'd take the same line now.
We British don't export very much nowadays or even manufacture much that anybody might want to buy. Instead, we seem to concentrate on producing particularly unlovely and undesirable cultural attitudes - a closet hatred of Europe; dislike of refugees fleeing violent and brutal regimes; a particular kind of small-mindedness that arises from a vignetted view of the way the world works – and do our damnedest to export these throughout any part of the world that will listen for long enough.
When the world has stopped listening, then it's pretty certain that there will be a receptive domestic audience, somewhere. One of the most peculiarly British but insidious kinds of small-mindedness was rife in the 1950's and is still thriving today. This particular brand of small mindedness arises from the inability to accept that debatable issues may involve considerations beyond the aesthetic and artistic dimensions. In academic life this opens up a schism, rather like C.P Snow's 'Two Cultures'. At a more mundane and parochial level it leads to communities that are unwilling or simply unable to comprehend that there are stakes involved that are bigger than the view from their dining-room window.
I happen to like polar bears. I think they are magnificent animals, and embody everything that Darwin's wonderful theory of evolution set out to describe. Here you have a powerful, supremely adapted creature living in the harshest of environments but thriving all the same. They are, however, a threatened species, simply because humanity has found novel ways of jeopardising the biodiversity of this planet. As our race has become more technologically capable, we have polluted and poisoned our planet and continue to do so. Global temperatures are rising and pack ice is shrinking, and along with it goes the habitat of the polar bear and many other Arctic Species.
The plight of the polar bear in particular ought to serve as a wake-up-call, because it crystallizes our effect upon our environment. We should understand the damage we are doing to our planet and look to mitigate, halt or even or reverse its impact. One way we can start to do this is by providing more of our energy needs through renewable energy sources, such as hydro, wave power, solar and wind. You would think that nobody could really come up with a rational objection to such an approach. You'd be right, but rationality and objecting often part company when sacrifices become necessary.
So, what kind of sacrifice would you be prepared to make to save the polar bear, the ptarmigan, even the lemming, a creature fabled for its own inability to preserve itself? How about an unspoiled view of the countryside? Surely not too much to ask: we put up with pylons in order to be able to light our homes and access the Internet. Why not a few wind turbines?
This is far too much to ask for the likes of the pressure group Save Our Common Mountain Environment (SOCME). This group has been set up to oppose the construction of a nineteen-turbine wind farm on Mynydd-y-Gwair, north of Swansea, South Wales, right next to where my mother currently lives. The wind farm will provide up to 57 MW of generating capacity, enough to power 28,000 homes, but SOCME bitterly oppose this development. On their website they list pages of objections, some on the basis of noise, efficacy, impact upon biodiversity. However, looking at the website one can see that the most vocal and explicit critics are artists and photographers. I suspect that the real reason that they don't like the idea of a wind farm is because they don't like the look of the things. One of these people even goes so far as to describe them as 'white satanic mills'.
When I look at a wind farm, I don't happen to see the Devil. I see a testament to our resourcefulness as a race, our unique ability to harness our scientific and technological knowledge to the benefit of the entire planet, not just one species. I know that there are thousands of tons of carbon dioxide that won't be polluting the atmosphere for the sake of our lighting and our wide-screen tellies. I acknowledge one of the rare occasions on which we can have our cake and eat it. I don't hear the Devil either, as it happens; I drove up to a wind farm several years ago and could hear nothing until I put my ear smack against a pylon. Ultimately, I see us doing our bit as a nation to address the most imminent and threatening global crisis we have probably ever faced, much more so than the recent collapse of the global banking system.
SOCME are blind to this aspect of wind farm development, I suspect, because their movers and shakers come almost exclusively from one of Snow's 'Cultures' and are incapable of appreciating that there might be another perspective. It has been pointed out that the difference between Art and Science is that Art is about change, whereas Science is about progress. The former is culturally specific and subjective, and the latter is shared. Science allows us to agree on certain truths that apply for all of us: that idea that pumping CO2 into the atmosphere might be bad for the climate, for instance, and this agreement at least gives us a mandate as a species for some effective action. I suspect that SOCME would grudgingly acknowledge such arguments but refuse to engage with them or try to twist them to their own purposes. Take away the centring influence and things soon fall apart. A world of Art and no Science, subject only to the ever-changing whims of the aesthetic perspective, would be as terrible as one of Science and no Art, and if you want to know what it looks like, then SOCME provides a prime example.
We won't be able to replace lost species, but we can demolish wind farms when they have served their purpose and we have limitless and clean energy from fusion power. Until then, however, groups like this should stop being so bloody myopic and actually propose some convincing alternatives to the greater spread of renewable energy sources. Otherwise, I suggest that all clear thinking environmentalists should simply ignore them. I can only speak for myself but wish these closet reactionaries the worst outcome possible in their endeavours to shirk their part of our collective environmental responsibility, and I hope that they keep on being pilloried in films like The Age of Stupid. If they can't show us a way forward then they should get out of our way.
