THE CURSE OF THE LITTLE GREY CELLS

British intellectual life today(Daniel Johnson, The New Criterion, September, 2005)

Lately, a refinement, the “public intellectual,” has been imported from the United States. The phrase is now common enough, though some English satirists still think it very droll to make scatological mockery of the pretensions of this species as a “public convenience” (a euphemism for lavatory). A year ago, Prospect magazine ran a poll to find “Britain’’s top 100 public intellectuals.” While the exercise was questionable, not only for its inclusions and exclusions, but also for its inherent vulgarity, the results mercilessly illuminate the advancing mediocrity of British intellectual life.

Top of the list was Richard Dawkins, the Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford. Not even his admirers would claim that Professor Dawkins is an eminent scientist; he was only elected to the Royal Society in 2001, presumably for ornamental reasons. As his title suggests, Dawkins is a popularizer, with a talent for anthropomorphism (“the selfish gene”) rather than an original thinker. Nothing wrong with that, even if such a figure belongs in a television studio rather than an Oxford chair. The best popularizers of science have mostly been great scientists themselves: Einstein, Schroedinger, Feynman, Hawking are all examples. Though true scientists sometimes speculate about the metaphysical consequences of their theories, they rarely claim authority outside their own domain and are usually content to let science and theology coexist, side by side.

Professor Dawkins represents something quite different: the institutionalization of atheism. He is a professor of propaganda, who uses his prestige to promote a militantly secularist and scientistic agenda. His case for atheism boils down to the argument that God is simply bad logic: “The creationist, whether a naive Bible-thumper or an educated bishop, simply postulates an already existing being of prodigious intelligence and complexity.” Dawkins imagines that God should be no less explicable than any other natural phenomenon. But it is he, not the Christian, who is guilty of a category mistake. God, by definition, cannot be explained according to the laws of nature, since He is the source of those laws. One cannot just reduce metaphysics to physics. In many ways, Dawkins is cruder than his Victorian equivalents, Thomas Huxley and Herbert Spencer. That Dawkins is enjoying some success in his endeavor to reverse fifteen centuries of Anglo-Saxon Christianity is demonstrated by the fact that St. Augustine’’s most recent successor as Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, came sixteenth in the Prospect poll. Dr. Williams used to be Professor of Divinity at Oxford; his chief contribution to scholarship was an apologia for Arius, the greatest heretic of antiquity. The success of Dawkins has been won by default. “For the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light.”

Just below Professor Dawkins came two intellectual survivors: the feminist Germaine Greer and the historian Eric Hobsbawm. Just as Dr. Greer remains the angry author of The Female Eunuch long after feminism’s raison d’être disappeared, so Professor Hobsbawm remained a card-carrying Communist until the party dissolved itself. He now rejoices in his status as a Companion of Honour to a monarch whose family would, if the professor’s comrades had ever come to power, almost certainly have shared the grisly fate of their Russian cousins at the hands of Lenin.

The otherwise inexplicable esteem in which the likes of Hobsbawm are still held becomes comprehensible in the light of a recent web poll, conducted by BBC Radio 4, to find Britain’s favorite philosopher. The winner was Karl Marx, with more than twice as many votes as David Hume. Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Plato, and Kant were left far behind. In no country that has recently emerged from the long shadow of Marxism would such a vote be conceivable. But British intellectuals treat Marx as if he were harmless; his advocate, Francis Wheen, wrote a revisionist biography which depicts Marx as a jolly Dickensian character, rather than as the ruthless disseminator of the most destructive doctrine in history. Hume is the antithesis of Marx in every respect—metaphysics, morals, politics, economics—with one exception: religion. It is another sign of how far the secularization of British culture has progressed that of the nation’’s two favorite thinkers, one was an atheist, the other a deist, and both were notorious critics of Christianity.

How do we explain the choice of Marx over Hume, admittedly by a self-selecting sample of the British intelligentsia? After all, Hume was a rigorous thinker, who has influenced almost every philosopher since Kant, whereas Marx was scarcely a philosopher at all. Where Marx’s works are the accumulated outpourings of a revolutionary ideologue, Hume’s thought is empirical, sceptical, conservative: all qualities calculated to appeal to the British. As a historian or essayist, too, Hume is more readable and less dated than Marx, and his personality is incomparably more attractive. The one advantage Marx enjoys over Hume—and it was evidently decisive in the BBC poll—is that Marx’s desire not merely to understand but to reorder the world according to a pseudo-scientific system makes him an archetypal modern intellectual, whereas Hume’s more contemplative cast of mind belongs to an earlier age.

Intellectuals of Marx’s type, who are the products of illiberal societies, are often illiberal themselves. In Continental societies lacking the freedom of the press, figures like Balzac and Zola, Heine and Ibsen, Herzen and Tolstoy performed a necessary function. But just as the Enlightenment savants from Voltaire and Rousseau onwards infused the French Revolution with its unprecedented extremism, culminating in the Terror, so the “revolution of the intellectuals” in 1848 spawned the ideology of socialism which, in its Marxist form, gave the entire twentieth century a totalitarian hue. The intellectual as secular missionary sees his own vocation in levelling the finger of accusation at his own society, economy, and culture. Despite the evidence of a century of grand revolutionary projects, every one of which has ended in catastrophe, this presumption of guilt is still ubiquitous among the self-appointed arbiters of European intellectual life. For them, the purpose of politics is to demolish the past, to rebuild the present from scratch and to mortgage the future, all for the sake of an unexamined and morally dubious premise: that the intellectuals know what is good for the rest and, moreover, how to bring it about.

No one understands the fevered madness of modern intellectual life better than Mr. Johnson’s namesake, Paul Johnson, whose brilliant Intellectuals tracks the stories of all the post-Enlightenment Western savants who combined the preaching of abstract nirvanas and utopian new ways to live with an uncanny ability to inflict pain and havoc on those around them.