Who are the masters now?
Kenneth Minogue
Anyone who wishes to trace the movement of modern British sensibility can do no better than look at the books that are published each year by commercial houses. It is a far better guide to what is going on below the surface of the country than what anybody actually says in any of those books. The vogue for selfimprovement, and the passion for passion revealed by the phenomenal sales of love stories are writ large in the titles over the years. The appearance of cheap classics such as Everyman and World's Classics and the rise of the Penguin paperback empire tell one more about the spread of intellectuality from the rich to the less rich than any number of speculations could possibly do. What, then, is revealed by the considerable success of a series of short paperbacks under the title 'Modern Masters' (Fontana/Collins)?
The title alone is enough to make the sophisticated reader wince. The term 'master' as used here must reduce the rest of us to the status of either servants or disciples. For elucidation, one looks to the blurb of the series, for blurbs are to men as bait is to fish. The relevant words hardly improve matters, and they were mercifully dropped from the later volumes:
By Modern Masters we mean the men who have changed and are changing the life and thought of our age. Everybody wants to know who they are and what they say, but hitherto it has often been very difficult to find out. This series makes it easy. Each volume is clear, concise and authoritative. Nothing else can offer in such an acceptable form! an assured grasp of these revolutionary thinkers. The authors are themselves masters, and they have written their books in the belief that general discussion on their subjects will henceforth be more informed and more exciting than ever before.
By these standards, the Readers Digest looks positively highbrow. What is clearly being aimed at is a market with an anxious passion to keep up with things, allied to a pretty strong determination not to be too much bothered. The blurb is also a useful piece of evidence revealing the considerable talent for disciplehood which spread over Britain, in common with other Western countries, in the late 'sixties. It was a form of religiosity having much in common with the Children's Crusade. One of its peaks was clearly the events of May 1968 in France, and it must have been around then that the conception of 'Modern Masters' took place. One way of understanding this conception is, provided by the late George Lichtheim's remark in Lukacs that "the Anglo-American world has for long appeared to continental Europeans as a 'clecentred totality,' to employ the currently fashionable jargon. It is to them a phillistine culture with a void at the centre, lacking anything worth calling a philosophy, that is, any kind of conceptual thinking that tries to make sense of life as a whole, or even of the social order in which culture is embedded." Leaving aside the question of whether cultures are embedded in social orders, or vice versa, we may certainly agree that much is to be explained in terms of the sense of a void. And it is one of the great features of capitalism that it hates to see a void unfilled.
The early selection of subjects for 'Modern Masters' gives a clear impression that they were aimed at the bull session rather than the seminar. Guevara, Fanon and McLuhan came straight out of the newspaper headlines, but
as men of understanding they could hardly be taken seriously and are already fading from view. Their treatment was appropriatelY cavalier. Andrew Sinclair's hagiography of Guevara, which characterised the inventor of the televised firing squad as "one of the more intelligent, more original, more ascetic, more radical, more human and more beautiful men of his age" is precisely what the blurb of the series would lead one to expect. The volume on Camus is not adulatory, but the effect is similar. Conor Cruise O'Brien puts Camus, a considerable literary figure who, though an artist, is genuinely preoccupied with the question of how one ought to live, through the meat grinder of the one thing that seemed to interest O'Brien at the time of writing: colonialism. Camus' The Rebel was ruthlesslY stripped of its subtleties by devices that did not stop short of mistranslation, and Camus, himself was exhibited as a symptom 01 colonialism rather than as an explorer of the human predicament. O'Brien's comment on the absence of Arabs from Camus' allegorical Oran in The Plague — "this artistic finaj solution of the problem of the arabs of Oran
must constitute a significant low in the grisly annals of politico-literary criticism. The surprise of the series, however, has been that from the lowly beginnings of its conception, it has steadily grown to take in more serious areas of thought and more balanced accounts of them. The place in such a series of people like Wittgenstein, Levi
Strauss, and Chomsky suggests that even genuine eminence was being harnessed to the 'Message' industry. Such men, as contributors to their specialised disciplines, have nothing at all to offer the undergraduate in search of the meaning of life; but their popularitY derives from the suggestiveness of their work in fields outside (in these particular cases) philosophy, anthropology, and linguistics. These are all areas where the disciplinarY fences are low, and a good idea will easilY spread from one field to the next. Even a bad idea, propelled by fashion, will circulate pretty, widely. In each of these cases, we fin° balanced and severe accounts of the ideas involved. The volume on Chomsky remains the best seller of the series, showing that merit can still, even in this unlikely arena, displace meretriciousness. One general problem raised by the whnle series is what sort of writer one should put t? work on a 'Master.' Disciples will no doulN: understand the message, but are unlikely illuminate it greatly. Thus Bryan Magee s highly successful Popper presents the master's account of the history of philosoPhY_ as a series of perplexities and probleMs awaiting the arrival of the US cavalry in the form of Popper himself. It is a good in: troduction to Popper but conveys a somew i
ha`: odd view of philosophy' as a whole. Alistaet McIntyre on Marcuse strikes something
the right balance of sympathetic understan t ing combined with the sort of criticism tha„ allows the master's feet of clay to feature full length portrait. Robert Conquest's Lean, is, similarly, a highly condensed and critical. essay. The later volumes of the series, whicr seems to be moving away from headlinr snatching to solider figures, particularlY literary, are much more balanced. This improvement would seem tosugges„t that intellectual standards can survive evers the most ruthless commercial intentions. Itu'e due in part to the general high quality Of t" Writers contributing to the series. If they are hot, as the original blurb claims, 'Masters' in their own right, they are at least intelligent Men of some distinction, and the more one contemplates the gap between masters and their authors the more obvious it becomes t.hat the very idea of a 'Master' is a deplorable importation from outside. For it is clear that the word 'Master' does not have the traditional academic meaning of one who has mastered a field of understanding, but, to abbreviate rather brutally the processes involved, is effectively the English translation of the Oriental term 'guru,' and of the journalistic expression 'celebrity.' Pope and Shakespeare, Hume and Mill, Newton and ,Rutherford — none of these people was a Master' in this debased sense. The whole tradition of English (and for that matter European) thought has been towards an exchange of ideas between men who recogPised each other as equal by virtue of having interesting things to say. The new corruption Is to turn 'Master' into a kind of academic career grade, the next step beyond professor. this can only be a pressure toward inflating What an inquirer has to say by means of extraneous hints of significance, and in the end significance become wearisome. It involves too heavy a ballast of personality for ideas to d.ance freely from mind to mind. The sophist)cated reader would do well to turn away iron) these often pretentious bores and resume what Hobbes originally called "the conversation of mankind."
1(enneth Minogue's latest book is The Concept of a University.
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