Butterflies and Wheels link to Prospect’s list of the top 100 British intellectuals, from which you can vote – ooooh! – for your favourite five.
There’s something deeply depressing about this. It’s that whole idea of an intellectual. One thing I particularly like about British culture is something that’s often taken as its major weakness: its dislike of intellectuals. Through most of the 20th century, intellectuals were almost invariably Marxists or Freudians or both. More recently they’ve been followers of Derrida or Lacan or Althusser or some such modern master. Intellectuals, basically, don’t have a clue. Much of the history of the 20th century is the history of intellectuals getting it wrong. A nation of shopkeepers, traders, money-grubbers, as opposed to those who devote their lives to higher things like the, um, French? Fine by me. We’ve managed to produce some fairly decent culture on our way as we scrabbled to make ourselves rich.
So what do we need intellectuals for? I understand what journalists or philosophers or playwrights do, but what do intellectuals do? Attract acolytes? Formulate Casaubon-style theories-of-everything? Appear on TV to tell us how to live our lives, or what to think on issues of the day? Um, no thanks; I’d rather listen to my newsagent on the subject of, say, Iraq; especially as he wouldn’t be speaking from the assumption that he was my moral and intellectual superior. And that whole telling truth to power thing – it’s self-indulgent, it’s offensive, it’s dated. We no longer – if we ever did – need smart educated people to stand up for us poor stupid proles. We can think for ourselves.
I’m not particularly concerned about the list itself. It’s not like I’m outraged that X or Y are missing. There are some individuals on there whose work I’ve enjoyed or profited from, some who I’ve never agreed with at all, some who I think are massively over-rated, and some I’ve never heard of (Adair Turner?). I imagine most people would have the same reaction. So what? Good luck to them. But our top 100 intellectuals? What a load of self-indulgent media-bollocks.
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