---

I remember talking to my grandfather when I was a child. He was a good specimen of a nineteenth-century artisan. He was highly intelligent, and he had a great deal of character. He had left school at the age of ten, and had educated himself intensely until he was an old man. He had all his class’s passionate faith in education. Yet, he had never had the luck — or, as I now suspect, the worldly force and dexterity — to go very far. In fact, he never went further than maintenance foreman in a tramway depot. His life would seem to his grandchildren laborious and unrewarding almost beyond belief. But it didn’t seem to him quite like that. He was much too sensible a man not to know that he hadn’t been adequately used : he had too much pride not to feel a proper rancour : he was disappointed that he had not done more — and yet, compared with his grandfather, he felt he had done a lot. His grandfather must have been an agricultural labourer. I don’t so much as know his Christian name. He was one of he ‘dark people’, as the old Russian liberals used to call them, completely lost in the great anonymous sludge of history. So far as my grandfather knew, he could not read or write. He was a man of ability, my grandfather thought; my grandfather was pretty unforgiving about what society had done, or had not done, to his ancestors, and did not romanticise their state. It was no fun being an agricultural labourer in the mid to late eighteenth century, in the time that we, snobs that we are, think of only as the time of the Enlightenment and Jane Austen.

The industrial revolution looked very different according to whether one saw it from above or below. It looks very different today according to whether one sees it from Chelsea or from a village in Asia. To people like my grandfather, there was no question that the industrial revolution was less bad than what had gone before. The only question was, how to make it better.

— C.P. Snow, “The Rede Lecture, 1959”, in The Two Cultures: and A Second Look: An Expanded Version of The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1964)
The full text of this lecture (“Intellectuals as Natural Luddites”) can be found here; the full text of the Rede Lecture can be found here.

We are currently having a full service on the first Sunday of each month, and discussing a different short reading each of the remaining Sundays.

On Sunday, 8 September, we will open with a very brief service and chalice lighting, after which members will guide each other through our discussion. This week’s reading is the lecture “Intellectuals as Natural Luddites” from C.P. Snow’s dissection of conflicts between the world of science and technology and the world of literature and academia, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.

All are welcome to participate.

**If you wish to join by ZOOM and do not already have the link, please email us at westforkuu@gmail.com**

Please Join us for Worship.

Our services are Sundays at 10:30 a.m. Eastern Time on ZOOM and in person at the Progressive Women’s Association Event Center, 305 Washington Ave. in downtown Clarksburg, behind the Courthouse.

Children are welcome. The building is wheelchair accessible, with an accessible restroom. You may park in the lot on the west side of the building; DO NOT PARK in the Washington Avenue pay lot. Please enter through the door at the back on the west side of the building.

Map

A coffee hour, a time for discussion and socializing, follows from the end of the service until 12:00 noon. More about us.

If you are a regular attendee, we have added you to our Google Group if we had an email address. If you have not gotten a group email already, please email westforkuu@gmail.com so that we can add you to the group, which we will be using for staying in touch with each other. Public announcements will continue to be posted here on the website and on our Facebook page and Twitter account, as usual.

Email westforkuu@gmail.com or use our contact form for more information or write to us at PO Box 523, Clarksburg WV 26302