Britain and the Intellectuals

Britain and the Intellectuals

Mini Teaser: A sentiment seems to have prevailed among the scribbling classes that Britain is in a general state of decline--intellectually, socially, morally. It's just not so.

by Author(s): Ferdinand Mount

Our earlier entanglements of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries began to be quite forgotten. That legendary headline--Fog in Channel, Continent cut off--became increasingly close to reality. We knew a good deal about American life, literature and politics, just as we knew a good deal about Africa, but about what was going on in France, Germany and Italy, despite the supposed miracles of modern communications, we knew less than we had for centuries. Even in the Middle Ages, those few people who were educated knew more of French and German art, literature, scholarship, theology and politics. At best, the average Englishman could name three or four German footballers and several varieties of sausage.

In literature and the arts, this process intensified, rather than the reverse, after Britain joined the European Community in 1973. When I first came to live in London in the 1960s, some people still thought it their duty to keep up with what was going on in the Left Bank in Paris. Sartre and Camus, Moravia and Silone, Brecht and Mann were acknowledged leaders of a shared culture. Peter Daubeny's wonderful theater seasons at the Aldwych brought companies from almost every city in Europe--from Madrid to Moscow. I saw my first Lorca, I saw Hamlet in Russian, and a good deal of Schlegel Shakespeare. But this sense of a European culture opening out to us if anything faded rather than blossomed, and a nervous, tetchy insecurity took hold.

THUS, IT SEEMED to me, we began to get the worst of both worlds. We lacked the self-confidence to modernize our own institutions, and when we joined the Community, we were indeed damaged by the worst aspects of its regulation: a Common Agriculture Policy quite unsuited to our needs, excessive harmonization where what we needed was diversity, and finicky regulation when we had not yet got rid of all the burdensome regulations dating back to the controlled economy of the war years.

And even well into the 1970s and later, the tangible legacy of those war years was with us still. Our parks and squares were still enclosed with the brutalist wire netting that had replaced the elegant Regency and Victorian railings taken away to be melted down for the war effort. London streets still had gaping bomb sites, with ragwort and buddleia bushes turning them into strange mini-paradises of wildlife. A whole stretch of the capital along the river, from the Tower of London down to the Essex mudflats, remained derelict, the largest urban wasteland in Europe, perhaps in the world.

This sensation of unfinished business remaining from the Second World War was, I think, re-inforced for us by our continued commitment to European security. That such a great part of our forces was still part of the British Army of the Rhine froze our mindset. Indeed, it was possible to sit listening on a Sunday morning to the radio program Family Favourites broadcasting old-fashioned numbers sung, say, by Vera Lynn and dedicated by their loved ones to soldiers serving in Paderborn or Bremen, to feel that nothing much had changed in the world since the 1940s.

Certainly little or nothing seemed to have changed at home. Edward Heath repeated Harold Wilson's efforts to tackle the trade unions, with no more success. Another attempt was made to reform the House of Lords--removing the hereditary element in order to restore its authority as a revising chamber. Reformers, including quite a few hereditary peers, had been agitating for this since the end of the nineteenth century, but every time the project was blocked, this time by a not uncharacteristic alliance of the romantic republicans led by Michael Foot and the romantic reactionaries led by Enoch Powell.

It is not as if the House of Commons appeared capable of replenishing the deficiencies of the House of Lords. On the contrary, if anything its procedures were more ossified still. Perhaps the most absurd example was the virtual refusal of the Procedure Committee to adjust the working practices of the House to accommodate the timetable of European legislation, so that for nearly two decades MPs could only feebly bleat as they were shepherded through the lobbies to vote into law a succession of faits accomplis. Meanwhile, in Brussels we took up a negotiating position permanently composed in equal parts of incompetence, suspicion and sloth, regardless of whether there was a Labour or a Conservative government in London. It was by now painfully clear that those suspicions were the consequence of our lack of self-confidence in dealing with the modern world.

THEN came 1979. I do not hero-worship Margaret Thatcher. For one thing, as Montaigne first observed, no man and no woman too is a hero to his or her valet, and I was her political valet for a couple of years. She could be petty vindictive, obtuse. Like almost all successful politicians, she never shrank from repeating herself. And she was a stranger to irony.

Yet far outweighing these minor weaknesses, she radiated a sense of possibility. She always believed that something could be done. And she was determined to see that it was done, if necessary--in fact, preferably--by herself alone if nobody else could be bothered to see it through to the end. Above all else, she possessed a glorious tenacity. And this can-do attitude, as the Americans call it, is perhaps her greatest legacy to us, a legacy that has lasted through the prime ministerships of her two successors and may have some life left in it yet.

It is not my purpose here to rehearse the social, political and economic changes in Britain over the past twenty years. But it does seem bizarre that so many of the intelligentsia should appear reluctant to take account of them. What can be the explanation--or perhaps explanations? I would hesitantly suggest here two lines of thought that may not have much to do with each other, except that, in a peculiar way, they both happen to apply to Britain.

The first is that, whatever they may say, intellectuals are no less vulnerable than "ordinary people" to the seductions of domination; perhaps they are more vulnerable. (I use "domination" rather than "power" in order to be more precise than I was at the beginning of this essay.) Intellectuals want to be the fleas on the top dog. Intermediate centers of power, however real and effective, are too boring to detain their attention. What intellectual has, for example, spent much time contemplating the splendors of English local government even in its heyday? (By intellectuals, I mean generally educated persons who like to take a stand in public affairs; I do not refer to professional historians or political scientists who may range quite impartially over any field, however dim and unglamorous.)

Thus Britain began to lose the attention of geo-intellectuals as soon as it began to shed its remaining pretensions to being one of the superpowers. Loss of Empire equals loss of interest, even for anti-imperialists. To be just out of the bronze medal position is to be an also ran--hence "another Switzerland."

That much may be obvious to the more thoughtful intellectuals, those who have some inkling of the herd instinct that drives their kind and of the miasma of power snobbery, a disease that moves through the air quicker than the foot-and-mouth virus. But perhaps they may be less aware of the potent conjunction of power and shabbiness. This may seem a peculiar quality to invoke. The simplest way to explain what I mean is to refer the puzzled reader to the works of Graham Greene and John le Carre, in which seedy surroundings and squalid behavior achieve a seductive resonance by being backed by power of a huge and sinister intensity. Behind the grimy facades of postwar London, beneath the lugubrious manners and fusty clothes of her inhabitants, there still lurked an imperial power--on the wane certainly, but still capable of acting in a heroic, underhand or brutal fashion to achieve its ends.

Now the buildings are more or less clean, the inhabitants wear designer clothes, and the country is a magnet for inward investment. But for Realpolitikers of the old school the glamour is departed. Of course, the National Health Service is short of money and the state schools are second-rate, but these services were far more dilapidated twenty or thirty years ago and foreign observers then took no notice, because declinism, whether directed toward ones own country or to other people's, is a notoriously erratic pastime (it would be absurd to call it a science). It was, after all, not so long ago that every wide awake publisher in the United States had a hot book on the stocks about how America was losing out to Japan on every technological frontier you could think of. Nor would it be smart to resort instead to a contrarian philosophy. You cannot rely even on futurologists to be wrong all the time.

I would only ask observers to report what they see rather than what fits their fancy. But then that is always a lot to ask.

Essay Types: Essay