Persian Poets Need Not Apply - 29 March 2002

After many years during which most days were spent thinking about government and watching how the world turns, there come days when the news is so awful - this time from Afghanistan, as always, alas, from Jerusalem - that almost any other topic begs to be talked about.

This is one of those days.

Reading in bed the other night I came on a fascinating episode, a short conversation, between a British prime minister and his foreign secretary.

Although the PM had known his secretary well for - oh, 25 years - he said one day: "I understand you picked up a first class degree at Oxford. What was it in?"

Answer: Persian poetry.

"Ah," said the PM, "that's why you're foreign secretary."

This set me thinking about a simple but very significant difference between English - and I don't mean British, Scotland does not apply here - between English and American high school education, that I've never, I think, talked about and the best way I can introduce it is with an experience I had and shan't ever forget many years ago.

I see from my diary the date was 1975. The place was the government's atomic research centre - at one time the very, very secret atomic research centre - at Los Alamos in New Mexico where in the spring of 1945 the first atomic bomb was tested.

And it worked, throwing up an awesome mushroom cloud and letting off a prolonged burst of light, brighter than a thousand suns.

This 1975 visit was not my first. I'd spent several days there a few years earlier filming an account of the making of the bomb for a television series on the history of America and I looked forward to renewing acquaintance with the staff.

So at the first evening's cocktail party I felt at ease.

I moved in, in the most gentlemanly way, on a pretty girl with very dark eyes and it turned out a knowledge of many dark, occult things - occult meaning hidden from - me at any rate.

A big, cheerful, roguish man moved in too and he asked her what she was in and the dialogue that follows is exactly as I recorded it at the time.

"Excuse me, Miss Hayward, what did you say you're in?"

"Well it used to be shattering protons but now I guess I'm into pion bombardment."

"Is that so?" asked the man, not in the least put off.

"Well," he said, after a swift pull on his martini, "it's like a two-dollar bet on a hundred-to-one shot, but if the horse comes in - just think."

"That's right," she said, "you'd leave the healthy tissue untouched."

"My, my," said the man, "not exactly the end of X-rays but a mighty jump forward."

"That's right," she said.

"That's right," I said, having learned that useful phrase from a friend who uses it so he never has to say "I don't know".

I wandered off to other company when a thoughtful man came up to me and said something like: "How do you feel about the interlinear scanning with the accelerated portis friggis?"

"I err, I err - it's really a puzzle to me."

"Hum," he said and walked off.

I very quickly sneaked and snuck off to the library and dived - dove - for the New Webster Dictionary, which can be trusted more than any other with scientific words.

So I discovered: A pion is of three mesons - mesons, by the way, with an e - is of three mesons that are positive, negative or neutral, have a mass approximately 270 times that of an electron and play an important role in the binding forces within the nucleus of an atom. Right on.

This experience was simply an extreme example of how an Englishman who thinks of himself as educated finds himself out of his depth.

When I arrived in the United States, long before you were born, I was very soon startled to hear my new friends, all of whom were college men of 19 to 21, I was a graduate fellow of 24 years of age and some of them at first called me "sir".

I was struck, if not startled, to notice how often and how confidently they used medical expressions I'd never heard of.

They mentioned easily having trouble with their deviated septum or the grippe or they couldn't play football for a while on account of a badly bruised tibia.

The startling thing to me was that they knew what they were talking about.

I, fresh from years of continuous study at Cambridge, was absolutely at sea and I soon found out why.

My friends, whatever they were now studying - arts, physics, geography, literature - they all had had a compulsory course in high school in biology.

None of my friends in England had ever heard of biology until and unless they were going into a science which in those days put them outside the pale of cultivated company.

Only last year I was reading about a medical institute in Hanover, Germany, to which European patients of every nationality came for treatment.

The director asked about the relative ease in treating different nationals - who was most knowledgeable or most scared or hard to explain to - and the director said that the English were far and away the easiest to handle because, he said, of all Europeans English men knew least about their bodies and how they worked and therefore were almost reverential to the doctor.

Well I have to say that among my generation at school and the next one certainly, none of my literary friends would know a chromosome from a cockroach.

And I remember a visiting English sports writer coming in on a conversation I was having with a doctor here, and he said later that when he caught up with us he thought at first, on hearing about the spleen, he thought it must be a race meeting - like the Grand National.

I'm sure this has all changed since nearly a half a century ago when the late CP Snow raised a cultural storm, especially in the ancient universities, by saying that in England then there were two cultures that lived side by side in mutual incomprehension and even hostility.

There was the culture of literary arts people who think of themselves as the cultivated and there were the physical scientists who may know little literature but are amazed at the narrowness, the constraint, the literary intellectuals' ignorance of so much of the life and the world about them.

This has certainly been true in my time but as I say it has been very much less so in America, perhaps it never was so here.

The word "incomprehension" between the two cultures reminds me of a passage in the memoirs of a famous prime minister of Britain.

He was, during the Second War, the British minister in charge of allied headquarters in North Africa and therefore his main job was to foster and keep smooth British relations with the commander-in-chief of allied forces, one General Dwight D Eisenhower.

The man - his name was Macmillan - wrote in his diary, after he'd spent some days and evenings with the general, he wrote: "He is a man of charm and candour and determination but I fear woefully ill-educated."

Let it not be noised abroad that General Eisenhower had the same trouble with Mr Macmillan but had the tact or foresight not to put it in his memoirs about the Second War.

But whereas Mr Macmillan found Eisenhower deficient I imagine in quotations from Virgil and Wordsworth, he was woefully ill-educated in mathematics, engineering, strategy and tactics, especially the economics of industrial warfare about which Eisenhower's prescience had made General Marshall insist he become supreme commander.

In fact strong hints are peppered through various memoirs of the difficulty American leaders had in discussing hot and cold war nuclear problems with British cabinet ministers who had had a mainly literary education, or being Labour men an all-absorbing interest in problems of trades unions and management.

It's been said that the big failure, on the other hand, of the presidency of Jimmy Carter - an extraordinarily intelligent man - was that he would not, dare not, leave details of any policy in any department to his subordinates.

And this, I believe, was due to his having studied nuclear physics and served as an aide to the famous Admiral Rickover in the national nuclear submarine programme.

I once spent a few days watching the training of the submariners and will never forget a teacher sitting at one end of a small theatre which had at the other end a complete simulated model of a submarine's control deck.

There were about 50 switches to deal with and if you performed only 48 or 49 you could plunge the ship out of control.

And I remember the teacher, a commander, a Texan, I remember him off duty a most sly and delightful man, but in the theatre he screamed at his pupil: "Ma-lone, nahnty-nahn per cent is useless Ma-lone, you just crashed on the ocean flow-er!"

For Jimmy Carter he was not sure that anyone else in the White House could perform 100%.

Now this is an extreme case of knowing too much of a particular specialty.

But in general I'm willing to bet that 10 years from now foreign secretaries and secretaries of state will have to have some background in physics and chemistry.

Persian poets need not apply.

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