I had lunch with my associate dean yesterday, always a good way to distract myself from the miserable soup and salad combination. We got on to the subject of public intellectuals, and whether there are or could be such things ever again. In the Victorian period, there were people like John Ruskin and Matthew Arnold, essayists who were genuinely popular in the sense that a seriously large proportion of the population would have heard of them. I’d include Parnell in Ireland, and Newman across the Isles. Carpenter and the Webbs were probably too obscure, though I think George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells would have counted. Harold Laski and Gwyn Thomas were mid-century examples of this breed.
We moved on to the intellectual culture of the political parties. It’s hard to believe now our politicians are ex-PR men and little more than ugly celebrities, but from the 40s to the 60s, UK political parties were stuffed with actual intellectuals, particularly the Labour Party. Harold Wilson was a former Oxford don, and he surrounded himself with similar people: Crosland, Crossman, Gaitskell (another party leader who died young), Taverne were all serious thinkers. Not that this made them pleasant or politically right, of course (largely too rightwing for my tastes), but there was a sense that public culture was and should be directed by philosophy and ideology. Now, intelligence is seen as a weakness: witness Cameron’s witless bullying in the House of Commons and the general tactical opportunism of our politics and media’s ‘gotcha’ obsession, or the unappetising sight of John Kerry being attacked during his Presidential campaign for ‘looking French’ (because he speaks it), let alone the Republican Party’s absolute rejection of any candidate who thinks listening to scientists might be a good idea, and the candidates’ rush to ingratiate themselves with the descendants of the Know-Nothings and Ham-and-Eggs populists at the expense of judgement, intelligence and moral authority. These people are ‘pointy-heads’ and Poindexters now.
What’s striking about many of these people is how odd, spiky and complicated they were. Virtually none of them would get through the selection process of a major political party in the modern period. They often held contradictory or ambiguous views. They were independently-minded in a way that’s entirely unacceptable in the ‘managed democracy’ of current parties. They led ‘complicated’ private lives (H. G. Wells reputedly had the biggest generative organ in literature, and was keen to exercise it). These people would have been horrified at the notion of being ‘on-message’. They were also polymathic: the politicians weren’t simply policy wonks: they knew about science, art, literature, abroad… and there were outlets for it. Scholars, literary critics, artists and others were frequent guests on shows such as The Brains Trust. On that show, intelligent people were asked to spontaneously answer wide-ranging questions from members of the public. It wasn’t always clear in advance what the answer would be. In contrast, if you gave me a list of the guests on Question Time and a list of the questions, I could write down what their responses would be, in advance. Every politician comes armed with a list of put-downs and soundbites from which they won’t be deflected. The businessman will talk about ‘flexible employment’ and ‘market efficiency’. The union leader will promise a weak radicalism. Melanie Philips will connect environmentalism with antisemitism. They all go through the motions.
via The Plashing Vole: y traethodydd: Friday conundrum: where are the public intellectuals?.
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