Against Allegory

More than ten years on from the 2008 financial crisis, two trends of global statism remain dominant: Beijing-led “exceptional neoliberalism” and the emerging “illiberal democracy” topped by Trumponomics, with racist populism looming at the back of both. Even though these persistent programs are remnants of the ideological, national, and economic wars of the previous century, the boundary separating them is permeable. Jiang Rong 姜 戎’s prizewinning novel, Wolf Totem 《狼图腾》, helps us see this porosity. Wolf Totem is the first “Chinese Cultural Revolution” (fictional) memoir written explicitly for Chinese nationals and yet goes on to engage the sensibility of readers from a Western historical and ideological context. This essay critically identifies certain acts of reading Wolf Totem and looks at the way these selected readings, all allegorical in their approach, step across the literary subject to build symbolic extensions that stretch thin the wolves for various purposes. Collectively, such acts of reading expose both an important quality of our historical moment and the ideological function of literary intellectuals within it. They show that our era is one of skepticism about the status quo, one in which certain antidemocratic drives commiserate over historical conflicts and strategize for an extended, ongoing, and relentless process of global dominance. The popular reception of Wolf Totem crystallizes the thrust and conduct of these seeming competing drives. In the final analysis, this essay follows through the symptoms of these drives to reveal a kind of energetics or “primitivist social ethos” alive in the unified way humanity makes extinct any life forms unsubscribed to global statisms in their Beijing or “illiberal democratic” forms.

Science and Dissent

Reading C.P. Snow’s 1959 lecture, ‘Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution’ in 2017, I was struck by the ways in which the essay, written over half a century ago, addresses issues that I’ve been engaged with for most of my life. Snow defined a world of cultures split between: ‘Literary intellectuals at one pole, at the other scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension, sometimes hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding.’ I’ve encountered this lack of understanding in my own profession and in public life. But it was Snow’s closing argument that really grabbed my attention: he proposed to his Cambridge audience that they had ‘better look at education with a fresh eye’ and that there was a ‘good deal to learn from the Russians’. Not really. If, as Snow proposed, ‘Scientists have the future in their bones’, we’d all do better to respond to the cool reason of dissidents such as Andrei Sakharov and Anatol Sharansky and to recognize the ultimate power of free speech, which only exists in a free society.

Two Cultures versus General Education

On reading C.P. Snow’s ‘The Two Cultures and The Scientific Revolution’, I was struck by the deep split he describes between scientists and literary intellectuals. One cause he proposes is the age-old specialization of English education, where each of the two cultures has long been segmented into rigidly defined subcultures. I came to learn about UK specialization in the 1980s in Brazil when I mentored a student for his Masters degree based on a study of leishmaniasis and its insect vector, the sand fly. When the student later went to England for his PhD, he was not required to learn about any other parasites – or other any other vectors – to pass his examinations. A different story from what would have happened at the Harvard School of Public Health where, for his PhD, he would have taken a variety of courses and been examined on all the parasites infecting humans as well as all the other insect vectors, not just sand flies.

Introduction: The Snow of Yesteryear

This Focus presents a bouquet of personal essays written in response to re-reading C.P. Snow’s historic formulation of ‘The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution’. Each of the authors, in person and in writing, stands in the vanguard of contemporary science and/or the liberal arts. Their essays, based on Snow’s description of a cultural gap between scientists and the ‘literary intellectuals’, will explore the state of the two cultures today and probe whether the digital age has put our humanist heritage at risk. Six decades after Snow’s presentation, we’ll ask if the cultural split he defined remains pertinent in the age of Twitter – and if our common culture faces greater threats today.