NOTHING AND NOTHINGNESS

Intellectual (n): clever dick (Ben McIntyre, The Times, April 14th, 2006)

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. [...]

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”.

“Intellectual” in this context does not just mean one who values learning and ideas. As Johnson showed, it means one who sees human nature and society as blank canvasses upon which he or she shall paint an improved and completely original masterpiece from abstract first principles. Even if the anti-intellectualism of the Anglospheric tradition can sometimes slip into an unfortunate know-nothingism, there is probably no tradition more responsible for preserving freedom and democracy. It is also a tradition that imperils us occasionally, as we have a hard time fathoming and taking seriously the fierce hold ideological madness can have on folks from other parts.