BOOKS

Professor Ernest Gellner has made a life's work out of robbing intellectuals of their illusions. He is a kind of academic housebreaker who removes only objects of sentimental value. He began back in the late 50s, when he was at the LSE, with that scandalous work, Words and Things, which argued that the linguistic philosophers then in vogue at Oxford and indeed throughout much of the English-speaking world were wasting their own and their pupils' time and that most of their discoveries were either trivial or mistaken. I can still recall the unconvincing nonchalance with which the targets of his scorn used to say: 'Oh I wouldn't both to read Gellner, it's awfully lightweight stuff.'

Similar reactions have greeted the dis- obliging things Gellner has also had to say, since moving to his Cambridge chair in Social Anthropology, about sociologists and structuralists. If there is a constant theme behind the relentless work of de- molition, it is that life is real, life is earnest and that the serious beliefs that men have held about the nature of the world cannot simply be tossed aside as 'verbal muddles' or 'category mistakes', or drained of sig- nificance by being rearranged into charm- ing and imaginative patterns. For Gellner, it seems, Levi-Strauss is not much better than the Constance Spry of anthropology.

More recently, Gellner has annoyed a whole new lot of people by pointing out that, far from being a mediaeval anachron- ism, Islamic fundamentalism is really rather well suited to the modern world, indeed that it is closer in many ways to the ideals and requirements of modernity than those of any other world religion. A strict unitarianism, a (theoretical) absence of any clergy, hence, in principle, equidistance of all believers from the deity, a strict scripturalism and stress on orderly law-observance, a sober religiosity, avoiding ecstasy and the audio-visual aids of religion — all these features seem highly congruent with an urban bourgeois life style and with commercialism.

Being so 'stripped down' and lacking in quaint idolatries, Islam, Gellner argues, is easier for modern man to swallow whole; its formal denial of castes and priestly privileges prevents it from offending the shibboleths of democracy. Not at all how they like to think of the 'mad mullahs' in the USA. Gellner's strongest condemna- tion is always reserved for the 'romantics' — usually but not invariably on the Left who persist in seeing things or pretending to see things as they are not.

Plough, Sword and Book sets out to provide a cold, clear answer to the great

The way back is blocked

Ferdinand Mount

PLOUGH, SWORD AND BOOK: THE STRUCTURE OF HUMAN HISTORY by Ernest Gellner Collins Harvill, £15.00, pp. 288 question: how did the modern world come into being? It is a remarkable marathon swim through extremely choppy waters. Gellner's stroke is so strong, his sense of direction so steady, his general toughness so impressive, that it comes as a great surprise when, about two-thirds of the way across, he suddenly signals that he has had enough and hauls himself into the escort boat in search of the blanket and thermos.

He starts off in magnificently dismissive form. The agrarian age was 'basically a period of stagnation, oppression and su- perstition'. There is no point in the dishon- est nostalgia which pretends that we would not have found life in the Stone Age brutal and stifling. Still sillier is it to call in Stone Age man to settle our political disputes for us. Even if archaeologists one day dug up a copy of the original social contract, why on earth should we feel bound by its terms? The political philosopher who imagines our forefathers settling down to choose their social order from scratch fails to under- stand that this is asking them `to think themselves away' into a kind of cultural nakedness which would be wholly alien to them. The only people who would dream of trying such a caper are we moderns, priding ourselves as we do on being able to see ourselves stripped of tribe and status.

Nor is there anything at all inevitable about our progress from hunters and berry- pickers to planters and reapers, still less the next, extraordinary jump into urban industrial society. The division of labour is not a natural progression but rather the exception that needs to be explained. If the priests and kings had known what was about to happen, they would have strang- led the first entrepreneur with the guts of the first scientist. Gellner will have none of these comfort- able readjustments which make early man sound really much like us, only deprived of access to penicillin and the electric light. Anthropologists, being professionally averse to denigrating the primitive, are alway trying to make early man's beliefs sound sensible by our own lights and to exaggerate his enthusiasm both for tech- nology and transcendental religion. Primi- tive gods were not trial runs for our own lofty monotheism; they were homely and familiar beings, irascible and sentimental characters, just as much subordinate to the needs of social stability as the available technology of the time. To pretend that early man had any idea of or aspirations towards the progress of scientific know- ledge is grotesquely unhistorical. Early man was not a growth man. Stability was his supreme value. What mattered above all was tribal loyalty and fitting in.

The great break came with the First Commandment — 'Thou shalt have none other gods but me.' Jehovah's claim to exclusive domination makes possible the idea of a unified realm of nature, separate but knowable. Gellner goes most of the way with Max Weber in seeing Protestant- ism (in a general sense, not tied to the specific events of the Reformation) as the spirit of modernity. The Protestant ethos is

not merely the great leveller of all believers: it also levels out the universe itself. A mysterious, distant, ineffable deity no longer stoops to interfere in the daily events which make up the life of Its creation. Miracles cease to be the centre of religion, and order reigns supreme. The days of divine conjuring performances are over. Sacredness is evenly spread out over creation, and no longer singles out some objects, places or events. The orderly and severe deity also becomes unappeasable; Its favours can no longer be bought or influenced.'

No longer are the priests and soldiers, being the guardians of social stability, the only true possessors of dignity. All produc- tive occupations become equally worthy. A gent can even go into trade. The division of labour equalises all occupations, just as the division of knowledge equalises all facts.

'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone, and there is nothing anyone can do about it. Romantics want to put the clock back, to restore the warm, ordered world of the tribe. Ingeniously, 19th-century romantics like Marx tried to integrate the idea of scientific progress with the longing for the return to the tightly knit community. But it wouldn't work. 'No stable faith can be extracted either from the patterns of his- tory or from those of biology. Such pat- terns are too precarious to sustain such a load of moral authority.' These 19th- century god-substitutes may, here and there, continue to hold power by brute force for years to come, but 'their time has gone, and they have lost their bloom'.

Gellner thus far may provide useful reading for those who still wonder why intellectuals hate Mrs Thatcher with such ferocity. It is not simply that she sets their class-nerves twanging; it is also that she presents so bleakly, so uncompromisingly, the atomistic view of the modern world that we are all individuals now and that `there is no such thing as society' in the old sense — which they suspect to be true and wish wasn't.

But then comes the surprise. Just as one expects Gellner to award a knock-out victory to the Individual, he helps the Community back onto its feet and prophe- sies a miracle comeback in the next round.

We are about to return to a more political, less economic world . . We return from contract to status . . . We sorely miss the notion of a fair and morally imposed price, and we may yet return to it on a more general scale.

The free market has had its little day. Liberalism is no longer necessary for the progress of science and technology. The pursuit of affluence is a mug's game. Some deeper, more complex vision of society is what we need to console us in our hours of anxiety. Cold rationality may once again retreat into its ghetto. 'An emotive, ritualistic and anti-rational style of politics may revive again', because it seems that what men 'really want is to belong, to a clearly identified, demarcated, symbolical- ly reinforced community. Moreover, they long to have and know their place within it.' What will it all be like? Well, perhaps a bit like the feudal ethos of Japanese business, with its paternalism and cult of loyalty.

Or again perhaps not. Gellner's last 100 pages seem rather thinly based, to put it politely. No doubt, as he says, social cohesion cannot be based on scientific truth. But he gives us little more reason to expect 'the revival of a new central faith, centrally enforced'. The difficulty is, as he points out so cogently elsewhere, that the' `re-enchantment industry' cannot supply such a faith on a stable basis; religion survives — all too painfully so in the Church of England — 'on a sliding scale of bowdlerisation'; the consumer is free to slot himself in at any point on that scale.

As for the market economy having had its day, tell that to the Chinese. Gellner's anthropology seems rather more authorita- tive than his economics. Technological knowlege does not remove the need for competition and enterprise, any more than the gold and silver from the New World were sufficient to save the Spanish eco- nomy in Philip II's day. The availability of a technique does not guarantee its effective use. While non-market economies may make limping progress of a sort (although plenty have actually gone backwards), the gap between their performance and that of the pack of Western economies is likely to widen and to present a severe political embarrassment to their regimes and even- tually to destabilise them. What else is perestroika all about?

Nor do most people outside the ranks of civilised academe accept the 'positional' argument against the pursuit of affluence, as advanced in Fred Hirsch's Social Limits to Growth. It is true that not everyone can own a Georgian rectory in Hampshire or a Rembrandt and that the pleasures of un- spoilt views and empty roads demand a certain exclusivity. But most types of wealth are not exclusive in this way. Positional wealth is less common than wealth through upgrading (smoked salmon instead of fish paste, the hi-fi cassette instead of the wind-up gramophone), uni- versalising standard items (bath, central heating, telephone), innovating (videos, hang-gliding, mange-touts), or simply adding (more books, tapes, pictures, clothes per person). Some things like holidays and travel may be improved in several of these ways, as well as being dis-improved but not, for most customers, ruined by positional snags (traffic jams, crowded beaches). However much Profes- sor Gellner (recreation: sailing) may de- plore the power-boats clogging up the marinas of the South coast, there is little sign of any halt to the demand for this or any other form of enjoyment of affluence.

And what is true of the spread of material wealth seems true of the spread of individual rights over housing, education, pensions and so on. Why should the masses give up the prospect of these individual liberties and choices almost the moment they have come within sight or reach of them? One can perhaps imagine people who have long taken such perquisites for granted, someone like Mr Tony Benn, say, dreaming of a new communal solidarity. But it seems an odd moment in Western history to prophesy that such hankerings are about to be generalised and embodied in new social structures.

The only real reason Gellner advances is the huge, lumpy weight of 'infrastructure', which modern society demands and which has mostly to be looked after by the State. But surely what we are now discovering is that many of these functions can be per- formed, usually rather better, by private bodies and private citizens.

The world we have lost may have con- tained things we would rather not have lost. It may have been in some ways warmer and friendlier, although in other ways it was undoubtedly bleaker and more desolate. But Gellner offers us little grounds for looking forward to — or fearing — its return. We are as we are and where we are. And, as Gellner himself reminds us when in his flirtier mood, 'the way back is blocked'.