Dirge for the decline and fall of the Western intelligentsia
Nvhatever else the re-election of Bush signifies, it was a smack in the face for the intelligentsia. Like a crazed Kappelmeister sitting at a nightmare organ, they pulled out all the stops, from the bourdon in lead to the fitfaro, not not excluding the trompeta magna, and what emerged, far from being a thanksgiving gloria in excelsis, was a lugubrious marche fimebre. In America they were all at it, from old Chomsky to that movie-maker who looks like a mushy jumbo cheeseburger. In Germany the Heidegger Left were goosestepping in force. In France the followers of 'Jumping Jack Derricia were at the barricades. Here in England all the usual suspects were on parade, from the Oxford stinks-don to the public-sector playwrights, with the Eumenides-novelists spitting fury. What a caterwauling and trilling! Why are intellectuals so impotent today? It was not always SO. The term, of course, is French and dates hack to the Dreyfus case, most likely to the year 1895. Certainly it is not to be found in the Littre dictionary of 1877. Maurice Paleologue, in his Journal de l'Affaire Dreyfus (1955), recalls an evening of frenzied argument on 15 January 1898, two days after Zola published his sensational letter, /Accuse:
As for this petition which is being circulated among the Intellectuals! The mere fact that one has recently created this word Intellectuals to designate, as though they were an aristocracy, individuals who live in laboratories and libraries, proclaims one of the most ridiculous eccentricities of our time — I mean the pretension of raising writers, scientists, professors and philologists to the rank of supermen.
Shortly afterwards Albert Reville, in his pamphlet Les elopes d'un intellectuel (1898), fiercely proclaimed, `Let us use this word since it has received high consecrations'. Le Temps took it up the same winter, publishing an open letter from Jean Psichari, demanding 'the right of intellectuals' to intervene actively in politics. Le Temps used the term repeatedly, and by summer it was an explosive part of the language. And the intellectuals won their first big battle, which brought them together, helped by the fact that Dreyfus was innocent. Then again, they were men of talent, in some cases genius: Zola himself, Anatole France, Marcel Proust, Daniel Halevy, Clemenceau and so many others. I recall Francois Mauriac, who had been a young Dreyfusard (albeit Catholic), saying to me in 1953, 'We had all the minds of France fighting for her soul.'
Today, I suspect, the intellectuals are impotent because so many of them are no good. In America it is a sign of the times that their leader is the mobile cheeseburger. The Right attracts at least as many stars as the rest: they write in the New Criterion, the National Review, Commentary and the American Spectator, and don't call themselves intellectuals at all. By contrast, the anti-Bush stage army are often ill educated and ignorant. I doubt if any of the so-called pundits who have been holding forth about Iraq in the Guardian have ever been there or know anything about the complex peoples and history of the area. They have no intention of going there either; might be dangerous. They don't mind going to safe, generous America, though. While cursing the US and all its people, they love tripping over to New York to party and collect their royalties. At least those original French intellectuals were prepared to make sacrifices and take risks. Zola went into exile (like Victor Hugo before him) and might well have gone to prison. Today's anti-Americans risk nothing.
I must confess that I got an eye-opener earlier this year when Prospect magazine published a list of what they called 'Britain's top 100 public intellectuals'. I had no idea that the field was so barren. Perhaps the word 'public' explains it. If, in order to qualify, a person has to be prepared to engage in fullfrontal indecent exposure in certain selected prints, that would account for the almost total absence of real talent. Indeed, had not one of two right-wing heavyweights been included to give the illusion of 'balance', the list would have been derisory. Who on earth compiled it? Any alphabetical list which begins with Tariq Ali cannot be meant to be taken seriously. The names that followed, mainly of pushy journalists, TV exhibitionists, motheaten academics and mere shouters, read like a tabloid publicity stunt. When, two decades ago, I wrote my book Intellectuals (1988), I defined one as 'somebody who thinks ideas matter more than people'. This definition may well fit the Prospect list. Many I'd never heard of, but those I know could well be rated m writers who hate people. Indeed the anti-Americans among them — since the USA, more than ever, now embraces every race on earth and is a wondeiful microcosm of our planet — could be said to hate humanity. Some of them with their culture of death (as
the Pope calls it) undoubtedly do. Whether they are all that keen on ideas, however, is more doubtful. Ideas are difficult, slippery things, and require brainpower and literary dexterity to handle usefully. One thing I have learnt is that because a person is an intellectual, especially a 'public' one, it by no means follows that he or she is intelligent.
The Prospect list was compiled so that readers might choose their 'top public intellectual'. I never heard who the winner was. A more fruitful idea than this vulgar competition might have been a historical survey to ascertain whether there has been a decline in the quality of those rejoicing in the accolade of intellectual over the last century or so. I suspect there has — a catastrophic decline, in fact a collapse. I won't go so far back as the years before the first world war, when the field of English life and letters was so rich as almost to defy belief, and even those who might be thought of as intellectuals were an astonishingly varied and noble company (see the early issues of the New Statesman, founded in 1913). Let us, rather, go back to the midThirties and see what and whom we find. In 1935, Victor Gollancz published a book of essays by Prince Dmitri Mirsky (who later died in Stalin's gulag), called The Intelligentsia of Great Britain. The essays were on George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, John Maynard Keynes. G.K. Chesterton, Bertrand Russell, D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolf. Wyndham Lewis, Middleton Murry, Dean Inge, Sir James Jeans, Sir Arthur Eddington, E.M. Forster, O.D.H. Cole, Lytton Strachey, T.S. Eliot and Harold Laski. Quite a prosopography, eh? The gorge may rise at one or two of these names, but of the immensity and variety of talent there is no doubt.
Again, I have been looking at a single copy of Encounter, then edited by Stephen Spender and Mel Lasky, for July 1961, 43 years ago. What a contents list! Here we have T.S. Eliot (still!) and Nigel Dennis, Marcus Cunliffe and Edward Shils, C.A.R. Crosland and Theodore Draper. Malcolm Muggeridge writes on the Queen, Hugh Trevor-Roper savages A.J.P. Taylor's view of Hitler, and Mary McCarthy dissects American playwrights. Even the letters were distinguished. Both these lists, compared with Prospect's painful litany, give the game away. There is a book to he written: The Decline and Fall of the Western Intelligentsia. One reason why it failed SO dismally to oust Bush is quite simple. No talent.
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