There is not much enthusiasm abroad among intellectuals in our time for the day when the last king will be strangled with the entrails of the last priest. It is not just that the liberation of mankind has come to seem an impossibly Utopian enterprise. To most present-day British intellectuals the very concept of commitment to such a cause has become suspect. They are on the whole content with what they have; if they want anything else, it is more of the same sort of thing that they have already. An American sociologist has written of them that “never has an intellectual class found its society and its culture so much to its satisfaction,” and has pictured our university teachers in a state of complacent delight, drinking port and reading Jane Austen. Remember the Spitalfield silk-weavers of the 1840s spending their Sunday leisure drinking porter and reading Tom Paine and you have a clue to how far and in what direction our society has travelled. The great-great-grandsons of the Spitalfield weavers are competing for scholarships to sit at the feet of the port-drinkers; their great-great-granddaughters are keen readers of those women’s magazines in which the blue-eyed, fair-haired, six-foot-tall hero is increasingly likely to turn out to be an academic of some sort.
The sweet smell of the academic’s social success helps to explain his unease when presented with images of radical change. He does not seek to be in any sense a prophet of hope; indeed the very notion seems to him pretentious and vulgar. Those prophets of hope, the great Marxist intellectuals, are treated as the authors of antique texts for commentary and refutation; the idea of “Left intellectuals” is such that when that glittering reflection of the contemporary intellectual scene, Mr. Anthony Crosland, wants to speak of them he has to guard himself by the qualification “if one may use the awful phrase.” Small wonder then that when the contemporary intellectual’s preoccupations are translated into terms of imaginative vision, he appears as one without hope. The repeated assurance of Mr. Butler that we can double our standard of living in the next twenty-five years if we only refrain from rocking the boat sounds very thin and unconvincing compared to the threats of what may happen to us if we don’t. The increase in human powers which once seemed the very root of hope is now far more often a source of dread. The fantasies of Orwell, who was obsessed by the danger of the techniques of power getting into the hands of men of bad will, have only been outdone by the fantasies of Huxley, who sees just as dire consequences in the possibility of them getting into the hands of men of good will.
Yet fantasy here as always reflects life. If the intellectual has nightmares of a conformist future, he has only to wake up to find himself in a conformist present with the intellectuals conforming as hard as anyone else. The writers elevate Western values in Encounter. The scientists play their part at Harwell, Aldermaston and Porton. The teachers and the journalists purvey second-hand versions of the dominant ideas. It is in this conformist culture that power has become a means not to possibility but to a destruction of all possibility. That comparatively primitive technology which took us from gas-light to gas-chambers has been replaced by the achievement which took us from the disintegration of the atomic nucleus to the disintegration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Intellectual achievement hovers between the imagination and the reality of destruction.
It was not always so. We inherit from other times and places a series of images of the intellectual as rebel and critic: Condorcet, hiding from his executioners so that he may finish his Sketch of the Progress of the Human Race; Marx in the Reading Room at the British Museum, surviving on a pittance; Sartre playing his part in the Resistance. On the threshold of our society the intellectual appeared as liberator and revolutionary. But both before and after that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century stimulus to reason the intellectual has too often been a victim of the bureaucracies of the mind. Before there were those corporations of learning, the universities, providing a vital link between the powers of church and state. Since there have been the growing administrative tasks of industry and the civil service on the one hand, with the diffusion of ideas on the other through Press, television and schools, the universities once more providing an important link. Between the collapse of the older order and the rise of the new the intellectual achieved a short-lived independence during which he appeared as a voice of hope, speaking to men who might hear.
It is a mark of the conformism of contemporary intellectuals that not only do they not see themselves as able to speak in this way, but they are no longer able to conceive of there being an audience which might hear and respond. One component of the apathy of the intellectuals is a deep-seated belief in the apathy and conformism of the working class. Yet an addiction to I.T.V. is perhaps no more likely to reduce one to being an impotent spectator of life than is an habitual reading of The Times or the Guardian. The grooves of conformism are different for different social groups. What unites all those who live within them is that their lives are shaped and driven forward by events and decisions which are not of their own making. A lack of will to change this situation and an inability even to recognise it fully infect all classes in our society.
Where intellectuals are specifically concerned, an explanation may be looked for in terms of the specialisation of thought. The formal logician, the prehistorian, the neurologist and the poet all count as intellectuals: why should they have anything to say of outstanding social significance? Should this not be the province of yet another specialist, the sociologist or the political theorist? Part of the answer to this ought to start from the way in which what the sociologists and political theorists have to say today often seems as devoid of immediate political significance as the study of butterflies or Buddhism. But the core of the answer lies in the change in the characteristics of the intellectual. Among our intellectual ancestors, the thinkers of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and their immediate heirs, it was taken for granted that to participate in intellectual life at all was to be committed to the ideas of reason and freedom and to the politics that could make these effective. What we have to ask about the intellectuals is not just what social pressures have driven them into their present unhappy state; but what has happened to emasculate their ideas and what in our culture has robbed the intellect of its social power. To ask this is not of course to ask a question that is only relevant to intellectuals; it is to ask what hinders intellectuals from contributing to a general break-through from apathy.
(excerpted from chapter 10)
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