Nor Shall My Sword

Nor Shall My Sword: Discourses on Pluralism, Compassion, and Social Hope by FR Leavis, 228 pages

In 1959, CP Snow delivered his famous and tremendously influential lecture The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, in which he excoriated the standard bearers of the "traditional culture" for their ignorance of science.  This was coupled, he claimed, to an ingrained hostility to science on the part of writers and artists dating back to the Romantic movement at least.  By the mid-twentieth century, however, the supreme benefits of science and technology should be apparent to all, and the arts ought to be the handmaiden of science rather than its enemy. 

FR Leavis explicitly renounces any reactionary or Luddite agenda.  He is not urging a return to some bucolic pre-industrial past.  At the same time, he is insistent that, while technology certainly has made great strides towards satisfying man's material needs, the greatest needs of human beings are not material.  In Snow's claims for the priority of science he senses a "spiritual Philistinism" leading to "cultural disinheritance".  Only through a creative engagement with the humanist tradition can genuinely humane solutions be found to human problems.  This, however, requires a sense of continuity between past and present, a sense which ought to be inculcated by the universities, whose function is precisely to serve as creative centers.  To do otherwise is to reduce the university to a technical school and to expose society to the hubris of the enlightened ignoramus, leading to a future in which humanity is imperiled by mechanism, and personality extinguished by technocracy.

Nor Shall My Sword is a collection of lectures and essays on these themes.  Unfortunately, at times Leavis becomes rhetorically overheated, lowering himself to personal criticism of his opponents - his own repeated insistence that this is fully justified only highlights the problem.  Oddly, the introduction, where the author places this book in the context of his overall body of work, is the most difficult part - after that, Leavis is writing in a persuasive mode, because Nor Shall My Sword is not an academic treatise, but a battle cry.  This is both its strength and its weakness.