By Ben Macintyre (THE TIMES, 14/04/06):
THE BRITISH like to dislike intellectuals. There is something a little too foreign about the intellectual, a little too self-conscious; in truth, a little too French.
I was living in France when the Dictionnaire des intellectuels français was published, a breeze-block tome listing every great Gallic thinker from Raymond Abellio to Emile Zola. Régis Debray, the left-wing sage, estimated that, at this moment, and every moment down the ages, France is home to at least 120,000 intellectuals, including himself. The dictionary runs to 1,300 pages.
Il n’est pas un intello is an insult in France. In Britain, it is more likely to be a compliment, for we like to maintain that we don’t really have any intellectuals at all; or never did, or did in some legendary, more cultured past, but no longer do. There is considerable confusion in this country over what an intellectual actually is, but W. H. Auden probably came closest to the popular attitude:
To the man-in-the-street, who,
I’m sorry to say,
Is a keen observer of life,
The word ‘Intellectual’ suggests straight away
A man who’s untrue to his wife.
Clever Englishmen take particular delight in demeaning intellectuals.Kingsley Amis reflected that an intellectual was most likely to be “some fearful woman who’s going to talk to you about Ezra Pound and hasn’t got large breasts and probably doesn’t wash much”. George Orwell, the greatest British intellectual of the last century, maintained: “The English are not intellectual. They have a horror of abstract thought, they feel no need for any philosophy or systematic ‘world view’.”
More pithily, he dismissed Jean-Paul Sartre as “a bag of wind”. Great British minds think alike: intellectuals tend to be unhygienic, adulterous, small-breasted French windbags.
Yet British anti-intellectualism is as superficial as French intellectual posturing. In his excellent new book Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain, Stefan Collini, Professor of intellectual history at Cambridge, attacks Britain’s mythical self-image as a practical, no-nonsense nation that doesn’t hold with Frenchified philosophising.
“British intelligentsia” still seems a contradiction in terms, yet the British intellectual may be in a healthier state today than ever before. Modern British intellectual life has neither the gloomy, preening vanity of the French variety, nor the ideological sectarianism of American public debate. It is no accident that the two most important public intellectuals in America — Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens — are both British.
For all that British intellectuals are dismissed as the “chattering classes”, their chatter is heard more widely than ever, and taken more seriously. British newspaper comment pages are a ferment of intelligent discourse compared to most other countries (although we hacks should generally be regarded as an intellectual sub- species). Avowedly intellectual publications such as Prospect, the London Review of Books and the TLS not only survive, but also thrive. There is still a widespread belief in the power of ideas to change the world. As Collini points out, the intellectual will continue to play a vital role in observing and shaping society, “whether or not that particular word continues to be used to identify it”.
The lament that pop culture has swamped British intellectual life is heard constantly, and yet Britain has arguably fused the life of the mind with the world of celebrity with extraordinary success — of which Germaine Greer’s appearance on I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here! was the ultimate demonstration. Salman Rushdie, a difficult writer of challenging books, is considered prime fodder for the gossip columns.
The “information age” provides a platform for disseminating ideas that earlier intellectuals, drawn from and usually addressing a privileged elite, could never have imagined.
Yet we consign our “eggheads” and “boffins” to “ivory towers” and “groves of academe”. Politicians who show signs of excess cerebration are regarded as slightly suspicious, and derided as “three-brains”.
There is more to this than British philistinism (though there is certainly some of that). Once again, we may blame the French. The word intellectual came to Britain barely a century ago, linked to the group of thinkers surrounding Zola and supporting Alfred Dreyfus; but British ambivalence towards intellectuals dates back at least as far as the French Revolution, when dreamers and thinkers reconstructed society by deploying abstract ideas, experimental ideology and extreme violence.
The notion of a distinct and often dissident caste distributing wisdom to the masses has never taken root here, in intellectual soil rendered acidic by scepticism, empiricism and a distrust of impractical (ie, French) constructs. That distinction is reflected in the apocryphal remark made by a French diplomat to his British counterpart: “This is all very well in practice, but will it work in theory?” The British intellectual would never describe himself as one. This perhaps explains why a list of the 100 top British intellectuals, in Prospect, caused such a flutter among men and women of letters: those on the list are uncertain whether to be flattered or aggrieved; and those left off it, even more so.
Orwell would have insisted on having his name expunged from any such list. Perhaps that is what defines a British intellectual, for Orwell was the defining anti-intellectual thinker. A genuine polymath, whose plain- spoken passions ranged from art to politics, Orwell raged against intellectuals for their insincerity, for imprecise language and unrealistic posturing. He understood the complacency that came with the term intellectual and rejected it utterly. In response to Sartre’s obscure and self-righteous pronouncements, he could not resist the very British response, in his own words, to “give him a good boot”.
This is why there will never be a Dictionary of British Intellectuals. Orwell would never have agreed to join, on the pure Marxist rationale that such a club might want him as a member.