What We Overlook When We Argue About C.P. Snow's The Two Cultures: Snow's "New International Economic Order"

As I remarked previously, when we discuss C.P. Snow's writing on The Two Cultures we get fixated on the argument about whether there are two cultures at all--and ignore the very large, last, part of the essay derived from the reality he acknowledged that industrialization had raised the standing of science and lowered that of letters, namely the demand of the developing nations that they too great to share in the world's progress by being helped in industrializing themselves.

Considering this it is, of course, significant that the West was in competition with the Soviet bloc--which Snow argued could, if the West refused to help, perform the task of facilitating that industrialization of the developing world by itself (transferring the required knowledge, etc.), to the West's great disadvantage. He then suggested that, for the benefit of all concerned, it would be best if what seemed to him the inevitable effort were a joint one.

Of course, looking back we know that no such effort ever occurred, that indeed outside of an important but still limited portion of East Asia the developing nations remain developing nations more than a half century on, with the gap between "First" World and "Third" grown bigger in many ways. Important to this would seem the fact that Snow overestimated the Soviet Union as a competitor--in line with the way it had been catching up the West in the 1950s, thinking that it was well on the way to success. Instead the Soviet Union was, a little while after that, showing evidences of slipping behind itself--and a long way from the kind of superabundance of techno-industrial strength that would have permitted it to be so open-handed with the developing world. Moreover, even if the Soviet Union had proven as dynamic as Snow thought, and thus brought to bear on the West more pressure to extend such aid to the poorer nations simply to keep itself from being cut out economically and politically, the 1970s, when there really were strong demands from developing nations for a "New International Economic Order," saw the West react very differently. Faced with the Group of Seventy-Seven one saw the emergence of the Group of Seven, and the neoliberal counter-offensive against such visions. Indeed, what really defined relations between the more and less developed nations were the interest rate spike of the "Volcker shock," the Third World debt crisis, the Washington Consensus that, even before the Soviet Union's economic failings left it less and less able to help itself, let alone anyone else, in the ways Snow anticipated, and relegated the '60s and '70s-era visions of a different economic order to the footnotes of history. The result is that his essay appears in this respect a relic not just of Cold War fears, but of the more rationalistic hopes of the mid-twentieth century over which the "zealots of pessimism" had not yet won out .