Gardening and cooking, mostly. True, we British were never that keen on fine minds and big ideas, but is the intellectual in mortal danger?
Andrew Anthony Sunday July 8, 2001 The Observer
The British, famously, do not trust intellectuals. We are much more at home cultivating plants than ideas. George Orwell called England 'a nation of flower-lovers', and even the Bloomsbury Group, the last and most celebrated members of a visible intelligentsia, have been transformed over the years into horticulturalists and interior designers. Mention the name now and it's more likely to provoke thoughts of the landscaped grounds and vivid paint schemes of Sissinghurst and Charleston than economic theory or literary experimentation. In an era when gardeners, decorators and chefs are household names, ask the average person in the street to identify a bona fide intellectual and it's a safe bet that they would need to phone a friend (and the friend wouldn't know either).
And who could blame them? For if intellectuals have never enjoyed an exalted position in British culture, then seldom has their standing been so marginal and diminished. Indeed so lowly valued are intellectuals that the word itself is losing currency. For a start, no one seems prepared to use it to describe themselves.
It's a global phenomenon, to be sure, but one that's far more pronounced in Anglo-American culture. A book entitled What Good Are Intellectuals? (edited by Bernard-Henri Lévy) recently canvassed intellectuals (although they were referred to by the less problematic term 'writers') from around the world (among them Salman Rushdie, Susan Sontag, Nadine Gordimer and Mario Vargas Llosa) on what it means to be an intellectual.
No one was able to give a clear answer, which in itself points to an intellectual identity crisis. If there was a consistent theme, it was of commitment and persecution, as if intellectualism was somehow a function of fighting oppression.
The most revealing response was supplied by the American writer Joyce Carol Oates. 'The term "intellectual" is a very self-conscious one in the United States,' she said. 'To speak of oneself as an "intellectual" is equivalent to arrogance and egotism, for it suggests that there is a category of persons who are "not-intellectual".'
And in our egalitarian age that would not do. Americans have an abhorrence of people who, as William Styron put it, 'live in irony towers', in much the same way that the British recoil from what Orwell called the highbrow's 'mechanical sneer'. Rightly or wrongly, the idea of the intellectual is inextricably bound to a sense of class or privilege which nowadays is somehow unacceptable. It suggests a kind of effete separateness that sits uncomfortably in the mass gathering of democratic culture. Orwell wrote of the English intellectual's 'emotional shallowness, estrangement from physical reality' and 'their severance from the common culture of the country'.
'The English,' he observed, 'are not intellectual. They have a horror of abstract thought, they feel no need for any philosophy or systematic "world view".' He was writing at a time - the Second World War - when the stock of intellectuals had bombed. Yet Orwell was himself in many ways the very best kind of British intellectual: transparent, precise, unmoved by fashion, a dedicated bibliophile, with a driving moral and political conviction that informed all of his writing. He was, in short, the paradigm of the public intellectual.
The 'public intellectual' has become the Abominable Snowman of contemporary discourse: there are endless discussions about what one might look like, but no one has actually seen one. What does the phrase actually mean? Almost by definition it must include those rare geniuses whose achievements are so profound - Darwin comes to mind - that they both transform and transcend their fields of work. But more commonly the tradition of the public intellectual - which in this country includes figures like R.H. Tawney and Bertrand Russell - links those thinkers who disseminate ideas beyond the confines of academia or professional circles. And it is this tradition that now looks endangered.
Orwell's great fear was that totalitarianism would destroy intellectual liberty. Instead, as it turned out, mass democracy has afforded us the liberty to reject the intellectual. George Steiner, arguably the country's last unapologetic intellectual, speaks of a political culture that has developed an 'almost conscious extreme philistinism'.
All of this is not necessarily to say that we are less intellectual than in Orwell's day, only that we are even less interested in intellectuals.
'An intellectual,' wrote Albert Camus, 'is someone whose mind watches itself.' Too often, though, intellectuals' minds have been caught not watching the world. The legacy of the twentieth century - with its modernists, revolutionaries, avant gardists, ideologists, apologists, fellow travellers, and the millions of lives destroyed as a consequence of ideas - has left the whole concept of the intellectual embarrassingly surplus to requirements.
Steiner concedes that the British distrust of 'cleverness' has played a vital part in achieving an 'ironic tolerance and political maturity that no other country can rival', as well as preventing the 'murderous ideological arguments that mark European history'. However, he suggests, 'there may be a need to rethink the contempt for intellectuals'. In denigrating intellectuals as a whole, argues Steiner, we lose 'a sense of excitement about ideas' as well as a grand scale of social ambition.
We also lose intellectuals themselves. They mostly go to America where the pockets of intellectuals around New York, the West Coast and leading universities are deep and well-funded. In Britain there is still the idea that a life of the mind is reward in itself.
The drift across the Atlantic is not new, nor is it restricted to academia. Salman Rushdie, for example, is only the latest in a long line of literary emigrants, stretching back to Auden and Isherwood and beyond. Rushdie embodies much of what the British least like about intellectuals. He is arrogant, self-absorbed, a critic of English small-mindedness, and most damningly, a writer of difficult books. That he is also not originally from the these shores seems only to confirm in the public imagination a dubious otherness.
During the fatwa years, Rushdie was the international poster boy for intellectual freedom. It says something, though, about the British paradox of political tolerance and intellectual antipathy that while the state did what was necessary to protect him, Rushdie never enjoyed more than limited public support at home.
Of course there are plenty of intellectuals left in Britain, probably more today than there has ever been, but not public intellectuals. They tend to reside, anonymously, in the expanding folds of academia. And although a handful of so-called media academics such as the historian Niall Ferguson enjoy a profile of sorts, they rarely gain a foothold beyond their specialities.
The last intellectual spotted raising his head recklessly above the parapet of cultural populism was Michael Ignatieff. For a brief period in the late Eighties and early Nineties the writer and critic waged a one-man campaign on television against what he termed the 'three-minute culture'. The most bruising conflict (for the viewer) of his mini-war was a late-night discussion programme called Voices. It featured Ignatieff, some guest egg-head who occasionally was not George Steiner, and a Turkish carpet hanging meaningfully on the minimalist backdrop. Audience figures were so low they failed to register. Those who saw Voices even now feel compelled to share their experience, like veterans of a long-forgotten but harrowing battle, with the tiny collection of fellow witnesses - or survivors.
It was significant that Ignatieff was an outsider, a foreigner, a Canadian, and thus not so restrained by the thought of appearing pretentious or absurd. In France, of course, programmes like Voices air on peak-time television. And, for better or worse, intellectuals such as Bernard-Henri Lévy are as celebrated as TV chefs such as Jamie Oliver are here. Say what you like about Lévy - whose contribution to philosophy is perhaps of the kind that once led Wittgenstein to warn his fellow thinkers never to try to 'shit higher than your arse' - he has no fear of pretentiousness.
You can trace the difference of attitudes back to the French Revolution, and even before, when libertarian philosophers such as Rousseau were viewed here as amoral lunatics. Back in 1948 Orwell wrote: 'I have maintained from the start that [Jean-Paul] Sartre is a bag of wind, though possibly when it comes to Existentialism, which I don't profess to understand, it may not be so.'
Orwell's stance reveals the discomfort that French intellectualism has traditionally provoked this side of the Channel. On the one hand he is dismissive of the obfuscation, on the other slightly intimidated by the possibility that, underneath all the Gallic verbosity, there might just be something to it. Ideas make the British nervous, while in contrast the French appear all too ready to promote them beyond the niggling restraints of reality. There is a story, which may not be apocryphal, that during a high-level meeting between American and French civil servants, the French responded to an American initiative by saying: 'We can see that it works in practice. But will it work in theory?'
David Goodheart, editor of Prospect, perhaps the most demanding political journal in Britain, argues that the diminution of intellectuals is largely a good thing. 'It suggests a healthy lack of deference, which is the mark of a democratic society. And it's also the result of political apathy, which can also be seen as positive because it means there is a stable political consensus.'
On a deeper level, the collapse of the Soviet Union exposed as cruel folly the intelligentsia's weakness for utopianism. It also delivered a lethal blow to Marxism, which, along with Freudianism (also terminally ill), had produced the tool kits with which twentieth-century intellectuals had recast the world.
In a post-ideological age, politics seems limited and predictable and therefore antithetical to intellectual input. Goodheart thinks there are still many bright thinkers involved in politics, but they now have a more practical role. 'Intellectuals had the job of being ideologues,' he says. 'Now they are technocrats.'
To the outsider, though, politics today can appear locked in a distorted orbit, shaped by the media and the new political élite of policy advisers - the wonks. Ideas in this market-researched universe seem to have been superseded by trends, so that ideology has fallen victim to a kind of think-tank futurology. The credo here is thinking the unthinkable. Yet, if the policy initiatives that are produced are anything to go by, it's more often writing the unreadable.
In truth, intellectuals have only occasionally made an impact in British politics. The more fertile territory for thoughtful debate about society in Britain has tended to lie in and around literature: novels, literary reviews, criticism. Over the years the world of British letters has also supplied a vital channel between academia and the public; politics and culture; the media and the intelligentsia.
Little of this half-world seems to have survived the onslaught of modern market forces. And at the very least anecdotally, there is a sense now that anyone with brains is developing TV gameshow formats for global sale, rather than scribbling essays for some impoverished periodical.
According to Martin Amis, the golden era of this mingling of literature and society stretched from 1948, the year that T.S. Eliot published his Notes Towards the Definition of Culture and F.R. Leavis The Great Tradition, until the early Seventies. He attributes its closing to the Opec oil crisis of the early Seventies. The resulting inflation, Amis argues, exposed literary criticism as a 'leisure-class' frippery.
In the introduction to his recent collection of essays and reviews, The War Against Cliché, Amis goes on to recall the twilight years of what he rather grandly calls the Age of Criticism. 'We sat in pubs and coffee bars talking about W. K. Wimsatt and G. Wilson Knight, about Richard Hoggart and Northrop Frye, about Richard Poirier, Tony Tanner and George Steiner. It might have been in such a locale that my friend and colleague Clive James first formulated his view that, while literary criticism is not essential to literature, both are essential to civilisation.'
There are a number of intriguing aspects to this passage. The first, unavoidably, is the idea that people once went to coffee bars to discuss literature and society. Now they go there to talk about coffee. Equally disorienting is the reference to Clive James and 'civilisation'. Didn't he go on to celebrate Japanese contestants sticking spiders down their underpants? Then you wonder when was the last time you heard the words 'Northrop Frye' or 'Wilson Knight' dropped (and it's hard to believe they didn't make an awkward thud even back then) into conversation.
Not long ago the critic Philip Hensher wrote of how the 'conversational, self-conscious brilliance' of Amis's group (which included James, Christopher Hitchens, Julian Barnes and James Fenton) 'retains a considerable fascination'.
This is true. It's partly because the urbane tone they developed - sardonic, irreverent, and coolly knowing - has been much copied, albeit more for style than content. Yet there is also a more general curiosity. Something about the competitive cut and thrust of gifted groups makes them seem as a whole far more compelling than the sum of their individual parts. Whether it be fin de siècle Paris, early twentieth-century Vienna, the New York Partisan Review gang of the Fifties or, if we must, the Bloomsbury set, the image of a circle in which each member raises the intellectual bar carries a sort of epoch-forming appeal.
While it may be fanciful to rank the Amis coterie alongside these groups, they were, nonetheless, the leading lights during the most recent period when the public debate of ideas seemed important. Of that group only Hitchens continues to engage with any zeal in the world of ideas, and he relocated some years ago to the United States. What's best in Hitchens, a prolific essay writer, is what's best in Orwell. There's the same breadth of interest - approaching poetry and politics with equal passion - and the same sense of moral fearlessness. Gore Vidal, the grand dame of American letters, announced not long ago that he had named Hitchens as his successor, his 'dauphin'. At the moment, even allowing for the fact that it's the solemn duty of each generation to elegise the passing of the last, it's hard to imagine Britain producing Hitchens's successor.
Which is why, in the Amis passage, even more quaintly dated than the name Northrop Frye is the notion that literary criticism was once the crucible of socio-political ideas. Interest in society, especially literary interest, has been almost entirely replaced by a preoccupation with the media. Nowadays when we speak of 'Big Brother', we refer not to George Orwell's invention, but to the reality TV show, and there are no end of media commentators to explain what it means.
In the past few decades the fragmentation of culture has combined with an incredible expansion in accessible information, to create an entirely new mental environment, not to mention a completely different kind of audience expectation. Melvyn Bragg, who has provided one of the few media platforms for abstract ideas with radio programmes like Start the Week and In Our Time , argues that intellectuals have yet to respond to these social changes with the imagination and flexibility they demand.
'Popular culture has access to posterity and that has immense consequences,' he says. 'If people want to know what life in the Seventies was like they would be just as likely to look at a video of Fawlty Towers as read a novel. And you have to accept that change. Instead The South Bank Show still gets slagged off for profiling Blur one week and Stravinsky the next.'
Fifty years ago, T.S. Eliot wrote: 'When there is so much to be known, when there are so many fields of knowledge in which the same words are used with different meanings, when everyone knows a little about a great many things, it becomes increasingly difficult for anyone to know whether he knows what he is talking about or not.'
In the media, where not knowing what you're talking about has never been a drawback, the effects of this cultural transformation have been intoxicatingly liberating. We're all postmodernists now, picking and mixing a little theory here, a few pop references there, a splash of irony and a twist of spin. The problem is that amid the hysteria of instant response, there is no shortage of meaning, but very little significance.
No clear voices stand out from the white noise of mass mediation because it is the volume of opinion that matters more than its quality. Mary-Kay Wilmers, editor of the London Review of Books, Britain's preeminent literary publication, feels that, for all the media's expansion and the widening definition of culture, there has in fact been a narrowing of scope, especially in the press. The lifestyle agenda and cult of the celebrity, Wilmers suggests, have become grotesquely uniform in the past decade or two. 'All newspapers are now so much modelled on the Daily Mail,' she complains. Wilmers does not see a lowering of standards among intellectuals themselves, rather that a frenetic mainstream media is intolerant of reflection. 'There's an awful lot of comment about and not much room for anything more thoughtful.'
If the media response to the tectonic shift in culture, and the uncertainty Eliot foresaw, can be portrayed as a lurch towards anti-intellectualism, then academia's answer has been to move in the opposite direction. Indeed, the whole notion of uncertainty has been intellectualised into something like a religious doctrine.
The post-1968 concern with disman tling the existing order of things led to vigorous attacks on Western culture, the literary canon, and even the very concept of being able to judge one piece of work or art better than another. The movement, variously known as post-structuralism or deconstruction, was led, inevitably, by the French.
With the novel pronounced dead and the author similarly deceased, the critic had become a kind of cultural coroner. And as politics and history joined the casualty list, and with the unconscious showing few signs of life, intellectuals had little choice but to retreat to the morgues of academia to dissect the decomposing corpses of their subjects.
'The early Seventies,' Amis claims in The War Against Cliché , 'saw the great controversy about the Two Cultures: Art v Science (or F.R. Leavis v C.P. Snow). Perhaps the most fantastic thing about this cultural moment was that Art seemed to be winning.'
You could probably make the point that at almost any time in twentieth-century history art had been winning. But you could not make that point now. One of the ironies of the postmodern era is that as critical theory has grown more impenetrable and self-defeating, so scientific writing has become more accessible and self-affirming. Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins and Oliver Sacks are among those who have brought an eloquence and immediacy to science that few intellectuals in the arts and socio-political spheres can now match.
Does it matter, this paucity of identifiable, recognisable intellectuals - or, put another way, this unwillingness to allow intellectuals public space (the two tendencies are symbiotic)? Does it matter, that is, to anyone but the overlooked intellectuals? George Steiner answers affirmatively because of the deleterious effects on education, where a lack of role models (a term he dislikes) serves to lower standards.
This may be true, but there is another, simpler reason why intellectuals, for all their faults, should be encouraged and even, in certain cases, celebrated: sometimes they make us think. And, when all's said and done, very few chefs or gardeners can do that.