That nice magazine for middlebrow liberals, Prospect, has just drawn up a list
of 100 people from which its middlebrow liberal readership is enjoined to
choose its top “public” intellectuals. Unsurprisingly, almost the entire
list is comprised of thoroughly agreeable middlebrow liberals - and fair
enough, you might think. After all, if that glossy fanzine for
canine-lovers, Dog World, had held a readers’ poll to find its top 10
intellectuals, you would not be shocked to find Peter Purves, Barbara
Woodhouse and - oh, I don’t know - maybe Pongo and Missus battling it out
for the number-one spot. Lesson one: know your audience.
The Prospect list is, therefore, a little biased, but also partisan in a
slightly more subtle way; as a requirement for nomination, these “public”
intellectuals need to have demonstrated an ability to engage with some of
the pressing issues that clearly Prospect feels to be of enormous
significance, such as Islam - good or bad, discuss - and whether George W
Bush is an absolute moron or merely a moron. So, we have people who are
undoubtedly brave, principled and talented, but could not possibly be
considered “intellectuals” - the former Dutch politician Ayaan
Hirsi Ali and Salman Rushdie, for example. Then a whole raft of basically
broadsheet hacks who are somehow deemed to have a sophisticated world-view
and barrels of insight because they have taken part in debates about the war
in Iraq. Such as, uh, Anne Applebaum and Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens an
intellectual? Don’t. Be. Silly. You have the suspicion that Prospect was
only a hair’s breadth away from including the journalist Yasmin
Alibhai-Brown, Bono and Mutya, the ex-Sugababe.
To be fair, there are some people on the list who are neither liberal nor
middlebrow, such as Ken Livingstone’s mate, the Islamic cleric Yusuf “Stone
the queers and kill the Jews” al-Qaradawi; but he’s the sort of lowbrow
nonliberal whom British liberals have persuaded themselves, through some
complex psychological process, to respect. And there is the political
scientist Francis Fukuyama, too - which establishes the important principle
that you can still be a bona fide intellectual even if you are proven to be
100% wrong about the end of history before even your second book has been
published. There is but a tiny scattering of true scientists (as opposed to
economists or sociologists) on the list, and only those who have allied
their scientific investigations to some sort of weighty and topical
political thesis, such as destroying God or banning patio heaters.
There is throughout a conscientious attempt to achieve diversity, with a
healthy representation of women, academics from what was once called the
Third World - and even zoophiles such as Peter Singer, the Aussie
philosopher who thinks having sex with dogs isn’t necessarily cruel,
presumably if they give their consent beforehand. (Perhaps with a beguiling
yap, or maybe lying on their back, waving their little paws in the air.) I’m
almost certain there are disabled and transgendered public intellectuals on
the list, though I cannot be entirely sure, not knowing them all personally.
The real problem, of course, is the magnificent double oxymoron inherent in
the enterprise. First, you should not rank “public intellectuals”, whatever
they might be, in the manner of one of those television top-40 countdown
programmes presented by Paul O’Grady or Matt Lucas.
It is the most quintessentially anti-intellectual notion - “And coming up
later ... who’ll be our number one? [Cue exciting music from Kaiser Chiefs,
cut to stills of the ancient Greek cynic Diogenes, Sir Isaac Newton and John
Stuart Mill.] To cast your vote, ring 0845 67890, calls cost 69p a minute
from a BT line...” And so on.
These days, we cannot get enough of lists, top 10s and countdowns, of ranking
everything, regardless of a total lack of grounds for comparability. It is a
comparatively recent phenomenon, with its roots, I suspect, in the most
bovine elements of pop culture. And, even given the strange confines of
Prospect’s list, how do you choose between the biologist Richard Dawkins and
Vaclav Havel, the former Czech president? How do you weigh them up, those
titans from utterly different disciplines? You don’t - it’s dumb. It
doesn’t make much sense when the formula is applied to television comedy
programmes or pop songs, but it’s even dumber when considering these rather
arbitrarily defined intellectuals, even if it’s done in a faux-ironic manner.
The second oxymoron lurks in the title itself: “public intellectual”. What on
earth is that when it’s at home? In an accompanying explanatory article,
Hitchens tries to define his terms, although he could have saved himself
some time by just writing “me” and having done with it. It seems that
Prospect wants people who have strayed well beyond their disciplines, if
they ever had a discipline in the first place, and energetically applied
themselves to fashionable issues such as poverty, religion, world peace and
whether or not George W Bush is a moron. So you have Richard Dawkins - who
is included more, I suspect, for his assaults on Christianity (about which
he knows little and understands even less) than for his unquestionably
brilliant updating of Charles Darwin. Elsewhere, you have a bunch of people
who have shown an ability to render complex highbrow concepts into readable
middlebrow newspaper articles and pop nonfiction, and a raft of polymath
journos who have read some stuff and partially understand it.
Even here, the world of science is egregiously underrepresented; you have the
feeling that, if Prospect had run its article in the 1920s or 1930s, there
would have been no room for the physicists Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and
Ernest Rutherford, or for the philosopher Henri-Louis Bergson. Nor, indeed,
for another physicist, Erwin Schrödinger, though I suppose his cat might
have got a look-in.
The point being that, because we have a problem with science, because
collectively we find it difficult stuff, the scientists have thus
disqualified themselves, precisely as a consequence of their
intellectualism, from being considered “public”. Of course, their impact on
the world has been exponentially greater than that of even the most adored
social scientist (such as the Prospect nominee Jürgen Habermas, that jovial
German poster boy for 1968, and the world’s last surviving true Marxist),
but scientists, real academicians, tend not to talk about things unless they
are very, very sure about them. And certainly not to the press or the
television cameras.
There’s a problem, too, with the deep structure of the enterprise, to misuse a
term that emanates from another Prospect nominee, the linguistics guru Noam
Chomsky. (Incidentally, gambling fans, I’d put a few quid on old Noam
winning the competition, if I were you - he won easily last time they ran
it. Not, I suspect, as a consequence of his genuinely ground-breaking work
on transformational-generative grammar - nothing so abstruse and high-flown
as that - but because of his more recent considered opinions on whether or
not George W Bush is a moron.) The grounds on which these “public
intellectuals” are invited to strut their stuff have been prepared by
nonintellectuals, by the moronic inferno, as Saul Bellow first put it, of
daily misery: poverty, the nastiness of the USA, global warming, sectarian
loathing, etc. But one mark of a true intellectual is a certain
counterintuitive disposition to see beyond what the world (and the likes of
Prospect) sees as the defining issues and to create a new paradigm.
Still, let’s do some more specific carping. If economists are to be afforded
the status “intellectual”, why is there no room for Alan Greenspan, the
former chairman of the Federal Reserve, probably the most “public” economist
of the past 20 years? And, if novelists like Rushdie are given quarter, why
no room for Britain’s two most thoughtful and innovative writers of the past
40 years, JG Ballard and Gordon Burn? Both of them can show you dystopia in
a handful of dust - but then nobody, as far as I am aware, has threatened to
chop their heads off. Perhaps that is what defines Sir Salman, whom I
nonetheless greatly respect, as an intellectual. Likewise the brave and
principled Somalia-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
Two obvious contenders from the world of science are the biologist James D
Watson and the sociologist Charles Murray. Not only did Watson provide us
with all that DNA business, he has ventured, recently, into a more public
political arena - although not exactly in a manner of which Prospect would
approve - by claiming black people are “less intelligent” than whites.
Political bias keeps both him and Murray, with his dangerous bell curve, out
of the picture. Less controversially, how about Simon Baron-Cohen at the
Autism Research Institute in Cambridge, who, in addition to helping explain,
at last, this most harrowing and distressing of conditions, has contributed
theories of the brain that will have an impact on everybody. And the
astronomer Martin Rees?
I cannot think, offhand, of anything more public, more transforming or in its
philosophical implications more “intellectual” than the world wide web, but
there is no room on the list for its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee. Perhaps he
should ring up Prospect and tell them what he thinks of George W Bush,
unless he quite likes George W Bush, in which case he’d be better off
keeping his mouth shut. Berners-Lee continues to intellectualise, in public,
about the future of the internet, incidentally.
Roger Scruton, probably Britain’s best-known philosopher, is excluded because
he is very right-wing, I assume. I cannot even hazard why the socioeconomist
Amitai Etzioni is not considered sufficiently worthy. One could go on and on -
and so, I suppose, we should thank Prospect for opening the debate. Even if
it is, in the end, a silly debate.
Scruton kills foxes - surely that's not intellectual.
Charlie Bear, Geneva, Switzerland
has A.C. Graying been nominated?
carmel chapman, byron bay, australia