Fri, Sep 24, 2004 page9

• The intellectuals of yesteryear are gone ... and good riddance

  • By David Aaronovitch / THE OBSERVER
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  The air two weeks ago was full -- for those who breathe such air -- of cultured lamentations. In the first episode of a two-part essay in the London Review of Books, the historian Perry Anderson was describing and accounting for the decline of modern France. For him, the rot could be viewed best in developments in the world of ideas.

  So Anderson contrasted the France that produced a richness of world-class intellectuals such as Levi-Strauss, Barthes, Derrida, Braudel, Lacan and Foucault, with a France that now produces zip. Or, in Anderson's opinion -- in the shapes of Bernard-Henri Levy and Michel Houellebecq -- worse than zip.

  To parallel Anderson's characteristically grand narrative, earlier this month there was also the publication of a new book by Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at Kent University, England, de facto rector of the Institute of Ideas and former swami of Living Marxism, entitled Where Have All The Intellectuals Gone? This is a more obviously British affair, being a well-argued 160-page grumble about dumbing down, the age of spin and (though Furedi never uses the phrase) political correctness.

  Furedi's thesis is that intellectuals in Britain -- defined as universalist thinkers whose main role is to search for Truth (his capitalization) and who intervene in the public affairs of their day -- are dying out. The result is a growing philistinism which envelops all aspects of life, from the academic to the artistic and cultural.

  It's filling universities with students who don't read, political discourse with sound-bites; it's replacing theory with narrow experience, excellence with mediocrity, hard-won understanding with facile comprehension.

  But why is this retreat happening, and who's responsible? Anderson initially blames America -- or rather, the impact of neo-liberal "economic arrangements that began in the era of Thatcher and Reagan," and are now swamping all that was best about France.

  Including its cinema, reducing all that Truffaut to bloody Amelie.

  Furedi denounces a number of enemies. The pursuit of universalist truths has been given a knocking by the rise of postmodernism, he argues. After all, if there can be no truth, why search for Truth? The postmodernists have created an alibi for philistinism through their relativism. Nothing is better than anything else, everything is a -- more or less -- equally valid narrative.

  There is an irony in Furedi's complaint, and one he doesn't acknowledge. It is, of course, that the postmodernist intellectuals (including Anderson's Foucault) are precisely the kind of people who Furedi says he wants to see more of -- intellectuals creating universalist theories on the basis of what appears to them to be true. So one possible answer to the question of whatever happened to intellectuals is that many became postmodernists, and have driven everybody else -- as intellectuals always have -- round the bend.

  Anyway, let them go on their infinite ways and turn to Furedi's other foes. One of which is the managerial class, who have presided over the professionalization of universities, and other cultural centers, and their transformation into institutions which are technocratic, specialized and task-related. This complaint, though, must be about degree. The study of law and medicine, for example - -- staples of the old system -- have always been technocratic. Let alone engineering. The question must rather be about whether there is also space for thought for thought's sake.

  But Furedi's biggest idea is that intellectual life has been undermined by the pursuit of "inclusion" for its own sake. We're talking here about our vulgar, crotch-scratching old pal, the lowest common denominator. Everywhere he looks, Furedi sees dumbing down as a consequence of the desire on the part of what he calls the "cultural elite" not to exclude anyone, or to somehow draw people in.

  Furedi does not define the cultural elite and indeed sometimes doesn't seem to be sure whether there's one or a number of cultural elites. But you know what he means. Everywhere the challenging and the demanding is replaced by the accessible and the attractive.

  I note here that Furedi himself might be cited by an uncharitable critic as being an example of what he himself decries. His list of publications reads like a Sunday supplement flat-plan: Culture of Fear, Paranoid Parenting and Therapy Culture. The contrarian Institute of Ideas has become the first number called by lazy radio producers wanting a five-minute argument.

  This doesn't mean Furedi's wrong. I too can see a tendency towards a sapless tolerance of bad argument, and columnists these days are far more likely to face the criticism that they somehow "offend" people, than that they fail to conform with the political or ethical prejudices of their editors or proprietors. And he's right about the anti-scientific weight given to personal testimony over longitudinal evidence. Just think how the families of a few autistic children have hijacked the debate about the health of all our children, using the argument "we are the parents, therefore we know."

  There is something, however, distinctly reactionary about Furedi's remaining villain, the public policy of broadening access to higher education -- an element of the "inclusion" he dislikes. In Anderson's essay it appears as democratization on the cheap, or "broadening access to education without the resources necessary to maintain the standards of the narrow system." In Furedi it isn't about the resources, it is about loosening the standards so that possible new entrants won't feel excluded. This is access for its own sake -- who cares what the students are doing as long they're there? Not Fame Academy but Whatever Academy.

  That this dumbing down is happening is a hugely popular prejudice among former students who are now middle-aged. At Alan Bennett's remarkably successful play The History Boys in London, the biggest laugh on the night came when the least academic, most working-class and crassest boy -- Rudge -- recounted how he had just been admitted to an Oxford college purely on the basis of his father having been a college servant there. Whatever Bennett's intention, the audience's reaction was clear. Rudge was getting a cherished place not because of merit, but because of inverted snobbery.

  In a favorable review of the Furedi book in New Statesman magazine earlier this month, Terry Eagleton claims that Furedi has no desire to return to a golden past. But I wonder. Thus Furedi argues, on broadening access, that, "in principle, creating equal opportunities for all is a worthwhile objective. Increasing public participation in cultural and intellectual life is a goal that anyone with democratic leanings can support."

  The pusillanimous words "worthwhile" and "can support" stick out, standing in place of a truly progressive "essential" and "must fight for." Furedi will deign to tolerate democratization, but only if the would-be participants match his exacting standards.

  It is the standards, not the democratization that matter.

  He uses an analogy with voting procedures. Misguided people are trying to make voting easier, a process which simply undermines the value of voting. Though he doesn't say so, Furedi implies that, in fact, voting ought to be made more difficult, limited perhaps to people who have read all the manifestoes and who turn up at far-flung polling stations between the hours of midnight and one wearing a red wig.

  This is telling. The "cultural elites" who want broadened access to higher education want it because they think the experience benefits both the student (who -- as a citizen -- has something of a right to be so benefited) and the society. The people who don't want it, it strikes me, are still those who would like to maintain their privileges, safe from scrutiny or (a word that Furedi hates) accountability. They don't want the unwashed walking through their corridors or inspecting their books.

  Too late, Frank. We aren't going back to Cambridge 1936, to that fabulous race of warrior dons who knew everything, to the days when intellectuals were intellectuals and women were their wives and mistresses, to a world when some people always got to talk and never had to listen.
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