Interstitial Lives

Retired! Yet he looks so young. A clue to the man, who, quickly glancing at the mirror, I could mistake for myself. Our backgrounds sharing a few features, the trajectories follow similar paths; though the differences are large; our destinations counties apart. Now the time to take a good look into that glass; compare these two profiles...Richard Marshall’s a cameo on the Internet screen; mine a faint shadow on the Wensum and the Taff.

A tricky channel to negotiate, as I sail this estuary: do I keep to the deep water of Richard’s life, or sink on the rocks of my own?1

What strikes immediately is the tone and texture, quite different from the other interviews. Doubtless much to do with Zoom; but other factors interest me. Alan has entered foreign territory: the lower levels of the professional class, and an age cohort when it was cool and clever to be punk. Out of campus there’s a looseness in response; Richard ranging over the landscape of an anecdote, unlike Alan’s academics, who stick to the track of a question. Inevitably I take a digression, thinking of exams, of how they limit the mind; also enrich it, when the rules not just followed are used productively (Alan’s tracks can go on for miles). It’s laxer in life. In pub or caff, where the game is to entertain not inform, the story structures the response. A dull fact not sexy enough to interest an audience, especially as Jim has just said something obscene about the missus, we dress Miss Idea in a silk chemise and stuff Dr Theory into tight leathers. You want analysis? Wackford Wit will serve you sir.2 Asked about his ancestors, Richard loops around his aunts and cousins, then veers down a tributary to tell a wonderful tale about Kathleen Cronk; before he returns mainstream, to meet up with his grandfathers: a policeman and a Boots-man. The mental organisation is looser, more associative than with Alan’s other interlocutors. No surprise to find that Richard paints. Philosopher and artist.3 Thus the attraction to those he calls enchanted; mostly religious types, who corral the world within the fence of an idea.

We’ve met this type before.

Idea and reality; life and thought: no separation please! Here headmaster and philosopher share the same house, which suggests the ideal, integrated lifestyle; his sensibility fitting nicely with the profession. In fact the relationship to pull them apart; the routine tasks and organisational politics emptying out the substance of the ideas. A tension resolved by splitting day-job from night-time activity; the idea and the life never quite fusing, although neither do they separate entirely, the persona too integrated for that. This creates a distinctive personality, for whom ideas, imbued with feeling and personal meaning, are both essential and peripheral to one’s existence. No academic to live in this way, or feel its peculiar tensions.4 Why, no doubt, Richard was attracted to Ernest Gellner, who offered a compelling explanation for a man divided between the careerism of the petite-professional class and the evangelism of his own reading. Best not to muddle them up; or else you’ll find a school report in Hume’s treatise, Spinoza looking up from the Annual Accounts. It is to live a split existence, our task to come to terms with it. A difficult, often frustrating business. The disenchantment of the modern age.

Too simple.

Many have wrestled with this predicament; which may lead to a splitting of the personality, and the creation of a secret alienated self.5 Modern literature an exploration into this murky, often quite ugly, territory, inhabited by the lost and the obscene.6 Such characters are waiting for a crisis; that psychological earthquake that pulls them apart. Breakdown the only way to create a self free of the public role, its coercive identities.

It was time for me to begin imitating others, to resemble them.7

Gellner had the knack of analysing the malady; yet there was something curious about the way he went about it; so much relish, a certain delight; what gusto! Unlike Chagall, who tellingly didn’t like school, there was something strangely unseparated about Gellner. For despite his theories stating the contrary, he was very much at home in his world: this disenchanted thinker comfy with his disenchantment. A perfect fit! as with most academics, whose ideas float free of their domestic and professional duties. For although professors are embodied in their intellectual work the substance of this work doesn’t correspond to the way they live their lives. I recall Chomsky’s disdain for the Oxford communists who condemned the LSE riots in the 1960s. Tie-dye in the study, three-piece suit on the street.

Gellner, in many ways a typical don, transcended such limitations by being a thinker of genius. It is when thought ceases to be thought and becomes insight; wild, eccentric, occasionally explosive. Once Oxbridge, whose uniqueness obscures many things, was full of such characters.8 The scientist happy in her laboratory ‘murdering’ nature; a sceptic at home in a sceptical age; although with characters like Hume it takes strange forms: scepticism of scepticism. Gellner follows the same peculiar path. For sure we have the lament over that lost Czech past, a cosy Gemeinschaft; plus the self-image of a rational puritan squarely facing the cold, rule-bound Gesellschaften. Taken together they suggest a tension, a man pulled in two directions. I think the evidence of the biography suggests otherwise: that Czech past little more than mood music; Dvořák on the turntable after a hard day’s thinking. Nowhere do I see the kind of anomie we associate with the deracinated of thought and life.9 All low key. This man has found his niche.10

Ha! Ha! You see where I’m heading. Gellner's theories not only describe they validate one kind of life; that of mid-century corporate man,11 where the routines, sometimes rigorous sometimes not, allowed plenty of time for leisure, even romance (if that way inclined).12 A relaxed atmosphere, where belief was not onerous. So don’t upset the apple cart, we’ll have no fanatics here. Thus the insistence on scientific method and his ruthless demolition of ersatz replacements for Judaeo-Christianity. Ethics kept to a minimum inside the corporation, as we get on with the business at hand. Those who want to underwrite their lives with an ethic will be alienated from such corporate communities, where success depends on staying within the rules, draining off the emotional involvement which disrupts what is supposed to be an easy-going place. Bernard Williams in! F.R. Leavis out! Preachers such a bore at high table. There were rules in Oxford and Cambridge, but so lax as to accommodate the maverick, providing they were clever, witty and didn’t take themselves too seriously.13 Gellner’s place! Yet a genius in the quads will also be a little outside them.14 An edge.

God is pure intelligence.15

Gellner believed in ideas, which he put before material forces.16 But ideas had to have a foundation, some meaningful connection to the world. Being an academic such a ground couldn’t be feeling or fact - as with an artist or the rest of us - but had to rest on theoretical assumptions. Difficulties galore! For the natural bent of an idea, as Hume showed, is to float free of this world, reason creating its own reality. It is why Hobbes was right: the more educated we are the more foolish we are likely to be....17 Hobbes, thinking at a time when the metaphysical basis of thought was doubted, had raised an awkward question: how to tether it to some authority, now that God had sent the old king to the chopping block. The very substance of philosophy - ideas - had become its own acute problem. His answer: to create a purely artificial realm, which was its own authority. Already we see a similar move with Descartes, when the idea itself becomes divine; but this had many flaws - how can one idea (of God) validate a different one (of science)? - and satisfied few.18 In Hobbes this view is naturalised: the public sphere to become our holy ground.19 But the weakness of this theory is the power of the embodied authority: the Leviathan is absolute, but should the tyrant or junta that represents the beast also be so?20 Are they identical? Hobbes thought he had proved his theory, through his employment of the new science; alas he covered up its weaknesses with the old rhetoric.21 We had to wait to Hume to find the solution: there can be no rational ground to the idea. Science only to take you so far.

....a kind of magical facility in the soul, which, tho’ it be always most perfect in the great geniuses, and it probably what we call a genius, is however inexplicable by the utmost effects of human understanding.22

The philosopher in Gellner could not accept the inexplicable about his own subject. He wanted to ground his ideas in more than feeling, mood, a vague atmosphere, genius. Like Hobbes, he found his authority in science, though of a different, post-Newtonian kind: experiment, method, a filing-cabinet of cognitive achievement. God, kicked out of Heaven, lies sprawled across the Cambridge Science Park. Epistemology was Gellner’s religion; one appropriate to modern times when knowledge and ethics part company; for ethics is a false floor, apt to collapse when put under the heaviest experimental pressure. Scientific method to provide the intellectual foundations, which are very secure indeed.23 Inevitably there was tension (as with all great thinkers, whose insights arise from severe distortions of the real); the social sciences not a science, while philosophy tends towards the humanities. The fit not quite there; which may account for the fertility of Gellner’s ideas with their argumentative strain. The results are both striking - marvellous theories - and a little odd: the ubiquity of that structural-functionalism, his version of the scientific method.24 A theory had become the means not only of analysis but of validation. Structural- functionalism the epistemological foundation; the actual ground the relations between ideas and the social phenomena they describe.25

The roots of a concept to be found in mud and manure, though of a very special sort: the stuff we find on wellington boots he turns into conceptual fertiliser. For unlike Hume’s - or Alan’s - worldview Gellner’s is wholly intellectual, despite his anthropological fieldwork.26 At base his world is still grounded on an idea; this the basis of all religions; for here Descartes was right: God is a concept, the one that rules our lives.

Gellner unusual because he believed in many ideas, not just one.

How tell the religious type? Meaning is paramount; but a meaning tied down to a big idea. The stronger the religion the greater the physiological warmth. Think of Gellner’s polemical heat; his vigorous attacks on the hippies of academe; those potheads who took their hashish dreams for realities. Marxism, Freudianism, ethnomethodology, the Orientalism of Edward Said, all attacked because of sloppy thinking. With Gellner cleverness was a virtue, mental rigor an ethic. An old Roman, whose honour won on the battle-pages of hard thinking. Yet nobody thinks the pagans, with their many gods, the sacred separated from the secular, were divided men.27

There are peculiarities in Gellner’s biography that would create an edge: the move to England, those different disciplines, the migration from the lower-middle class to the pseudo-aristocratic Oxford, his friendship with Popper. The edge prominent in his first book, an attack on his alma mater, our elite’s finishing school.28 Nevertheless he settled into academic life (but struggled with administration).29 A don amongst dons. One scene, though, did make him uncomfortable: the academic cult; those ersatz monotheisms of Freud, Wittgenstein and Marx. Attacking such figures he was, I suspect, protecting himself against their disciples, who preferred following gurus to thinking for themselves (in this respect Gellner was a life-long Kantian). The most curious feature of these secular masters: all were religious types of a fanatical kind. A residue of the Jewish Enlightenment, whose unforgiving secularism not only rejected but hated the Orthodox faith, with its mental clamps on the mind. Marx & Co belong to those generations which in absorbing the secularism had not lost the orthodox sensibility; life still to be contained inside the covers of a canon.30 Gellner comes later. A pure secularist with only traces of that unforgiving sensibility. Was he smashing idols? Of course! But this a pagan not a puritan; content to keep the different parts of his life apart.

Jesus freaks not welcome here.

The majority of intellectuals want to enchant the world with some mad idea: Christ, Liberty, the Market, Class, Sex, Race.... They also want to be heeded. Once upon a time this was easy, when the State had its official religion; and the priest, the only entertainment in town, held his congregation from the pulpit.31 Less so today, when chapel and synagogue cannot compete with the television set. One reason why intellectuals tend toward the radical wings of the political spectrum; such radicalism feeding off those suffocating ideologies which demand absolute loyalty. As Hume knew, no point having an idea if you can’t shout it down a megaphone: ideas to be simple - class war - and capable of explaining all phenomena - the sex instinct - to attract mass attention. You put a hand up, and interrupt me...these are clever people.

The pronouncements of the learned can be reduced to a very small number of general rules.32

Descartes could be innocent. The great value of an idea for the intellectual is its coercion. An idea able to exert absolute control over others.33 It’s why the moral crusader quickly mutates into the secret police (when in office). The truly free thinker, for whom ideas are serious play, always at the mercy of whose natural habitat is the Inquisition.

Ideas. Hard as diamonds. Soft as plasticine. Which to be? Much depends on personality. With Gellner, a typical great thinker, it was both; his judgement to decide what’s solid/fluid. Super-smart with a touch of the petit-bourgeois, their literalness;34 a perfect combination for insights, as the metaphysics of an idea bash into the facts of the case.35 Stubbornness crucial to originality. Critical of others, such characters are apt to be tolerant, because secure in their own beliefs, as much emotional as intellectual.36 Such tolerance allowing in ideas by other means, which the unconscious then transforms.37 Contrast the extremely clever floating off into pure metaphysics, where concepts are little more than toys. Unserious play. The merely clever, able to comprehend and use ideas, are the most likely to accept prevailing theories or join academic cults; this a source of instability and fanaticism, as the ideas, not grounded by experience, become the testing ground of their authenticity; identity now inseparable from the idea, which is a faith. It’s why universities can be such troublesome places for the original mind. Gellner was fortunate. Secure in himself - an advantage of genius - he could engage with the cultists with no fear of losing his soul. It made him a wonderful polemicist. Again typical. Great thinkers think against their masters - Plato (Socrates); Marx (Hegel); Chomsky (Zelig Harris) -; almost as if needing the friction of dissent to generate original thought. At the very least argument helps define themselves more clearly. There are dangers. They are apt to exclude too much, not let quite enough in. Gellner rejected his bêtes noires too totally.38

A great mind opens vast new territories; then builds the highest walls to protect them.

Intellectuals seek a single idea to explain a society.39 Modern science has not only rejected such a project but undermined all attempts to do so - the facts of the experiment outweigh any meaning - much to the chagrin of those who need a meaning-full cosmology. One consequence is that morality and knowledge separate out, a division of intellectual labour distinct to the modern age.40 But this is changing. With its success Science becomes the meta-explanation for all phenomena; every aspect of humanity given its scientific gloss; even though morality, aesthetics, meaning, even life itself, are beyond its grasp. No matter. Science to be our new monotheism, everything explained through its terms. Already there’s the medicalisation of ethics; where behaviour ascribed to disease and disability not sin. A rebranding most believe an advance.41 Gellner too had his white coat; and in his lab he reduced ideas to function; although he went his own way, that contempt for intellectual foolishness akin to moral outrage. It’s why a man who took ideas very seriously indeed, didn’t, perhaps, take them quite seriously enough.42

Safer in the very old days, when science but a pimple on civilisation’s backside?

                   There was one room,

However, that was full of

Jars, test-tubes

And wet sinks. Poisonous smells

Came from it, rumours,

Reports. The pupils who

Worked there had glasses and

Tall skulls. They were pale and

Looked at us as though we were part

Of a boring experiment.43

Science is often mistaken with toleration. Yet tolerance was a response to the religious wars, and the need to accommodate different Christian faiths within the same polity. Tolerance then extended as Christianity and science proceeded on parallel paths; the churches concentrating on the ethical, leaving the cosmos to the scientists. This plurality of worldviews created a space between them, in which the maverick and the heretic could live safely (in England at least). Although there’s an aspect of the Scientific Revolution we are apt to overlook. At its start modern science tried to monopolise the universe. Descartes the first great attempt to make the New Science a cosmology, by grounding it on God; an omniscient concept. Science (body) rested on meaning (the deity), which had become a pure metaphysics (mind). It is the Mechanical Philosophy, whose epitome is Leibniz with his Great Clockmaker. This Machine suffused with divine meaning - reason is ubiquitous - the universe becomes its own validation: the most rational (therefore the most Good) possible. Who reads Leibniz now?44 But then Descartes is often misunderstood. Though the first modern thinker, he hadn’t clambered that far out of the scholastic past.45 For Descartes it was essential that life and idea, his epistemology and his ethics, be integrated; he achieved this by attempting to found knowledge on the idea of God (who is both all-knowing and beneficent). He failed.46 Precisely this failure keeping science within its proper limits. Lucky for our descendants. Lucky for the scientists; for in freeing them from ethics they escaped the Church.

The French Enlightenment was a return to the monopolist tendencies of the Cartesian metaphysics (one reason why Descartes a bugbear).47 While Locke and Newton sought an accommodation between science and Christianity, these French fanatics wanted to destroy the Catholic Church. Evangelicals for Reason; their chiliasm reaching its apogee in the wreckage of the French Revolution.

Thus all probable reasoning is nothing but a species of sensation. ’Tis not solely in poetry and music, we must follow our taste and sentiment, but likewise in philosophy. When I am convinced of any principle, ’tis only an idea, which strikes more strongly upon me. When I give the preference to one set of arguments above another, I do nothing but decide from my feeling concerning the superiority of their influence.48

They should have listened to the Scots.49 David Hume is the great anti-Enlightenment thinker. A sceptic of reason, he showed that neither knowledge nor the self has a rational ground. Reason thus a treacherous friend; likely to tear us asunder - his own breakdown - or to fabricate metaphysical fantasies, leading us astray. The parts do not fit together. We must rely not on rationality but on our intuitions and habits to get us through the day. No accident that Hume calls his work literature.50 He the most sophisticated of philosophers, attuned to the subtleties of thought, action and atmosphere; the reason for his originality not only in philosophy and ethics, but history and economics. Hume practised the humane art. The oddball of his age.51

Kant wasn’t so wise. Although recognising the split between the moral and the scientific, he believed that both could be grounded on different but similar principles. With Kant ethics becomes another branch of knowledge (a theology without the theological).52 The beginning of the end of the morality as a separate sphere.

Only an intolerant age to think the Enlightenment a project of toleration.

There is a story we are told, of a divided world, breaking down into evermore fragments. Its great myth T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. The intellectual history belies this tale. Romanticism, in the name of an organic whole, reacted against the insanity of the Enlightenment, its totalitarian reason. In Britain the Romantic reaction saw the revival of gothic Christianity and medievalism amongst the Victorian avant-garde.53 A place and time when science and religion could live side by side.54 But starting with Darwin, then speeding up since, the monopolistic tendencies of the scientific mind have expanded, until many now believe it explains all things. Reducing Christianity to an object of knowledge,55 the duller scientists treat it as if some intellectual disease. All social ideas assigned a cause and given a pill. The trajectory of Modern Age has always been towards unity. Life to end up in the prison house of rationality.56

Once knowledge was believed a sin. Today life is thought a malady. Both are total visions.

Gellner is unusual because he both accepts the split and has no desire to mend it.57 Thus his detachment from ideological party and professional clique; his enemies not the Protestant sects of Hume and Hobbes but the Judaeo-secular cults that replaced them. That said, the bias is towards the rational and the analytic, which squeezes epistemology and ethics a little too close together; so that all - philosophy and society - become questions of knowledge, requiring a solid standard.58 It’s there in his philistinism (aesthetics plays no role in his thought), which he exaggerated for rhetorical effect.59 Wittgenstein the obvious contrast. Wracked by the split, and showing all the signs of the exile, who, attracted and repelled by his new country, ends up repudiating either or both.60

Alan nudges me. You said the split was largely a myth. For most, yes. While even amongst intellectuals it is largely illusory: their ideas totalising visions. We have to look elsewhere for the split persona, then gauge its varying effects, which, psychological and social, arise from the emotions, their need to feel in tune with the locale. Either no ideas at all, or the ideas to fit with how we live. Wittgenstein the extreme and paradigmatic case of a thinker out of place.61 Gellner exhibiting this tension in quieter ways, and finding a coherence in Kant’s solution to the problem, which coincided with his own lifestyle. In an interview Alan says that Gellner liked the idea of the inside, but found the actuality claustrophobic. Here is the edge to his polemics and the source of his original ideas. But it is an edge only; no ravine divides this personality.

She looked closely at the houses in the Virtudes area, for the homes of the poor always filled her with tender interest. The badly dressed women who came to the door, the ragged dirty children playing in the street drew her gaze, because she envied this peaceful existence even, though it was obscure and poverty-stricken. Such a life could not be for her, because she was out of her natural environment. She had been born to be a working girl; she didn’t care for working like a bishop does, to possess what he thought to be his spiritual right. But someone took her from that first mould, to cast her into a very different life; then different hands took hold of her and bore her along. In the end still more hands took it upon themselves to convert her into a lady. They put her in a convent to remould her; and that she was like a living doll, played with by some invisible, unknown power, to which she could not give a name.62

Once Gellner and Noam Chomsky were friends. Chomsky, however, makes a much more radical spilt between his scientific work and his ethics.63 It is surely telling that they fell out over politics.64 For politics exposes the limits to Gellner’s sensibility and thought. Politics, as Hume knew, is all about the contingent.

...the vital part played by religion, and ‘enthusiasm’, which is unaccountable and altogether beyond the ken of the philosopher. In so far as the English owe their freedom to the Puritans, they owe it to something wholly contingent and inexplicable.65

Difficult to fit the ‘inexplicable’ into sociological reasoning. Politics the grit in the structural- functionalist machine. That’s not all. Though attuned to the interplay between material forces and ideas Gellner treated both with too much detachment. A Cartesian Moon Man who appreciated the pleasures of Malinowski’s Trobrianders, he wouldn’t be seen in a canoe doing the kula. Yet ideas don’t float down from the sky...they rely on priests, rulers, madmen and fanatics for their success. Gellner’s work, brilliant as it is - he illuminates so much - doesn't quite capture the interplay between idea and society, where much depends on personalities and circumstance. The French Revolution. The English Civil War. Both created religions that conquered the globe. Alan says that the origins of a society are crucial to its understanding. So true! We can’t grasp modern England without considering the demolition job done to the old place between the 1520s and 1650s.66 It was religious and political enthusiasm, as Hume knew, that created the liberal regimes of the 18th- century; the mercantile paradise of today built on a few crazy concepts and their sociopathic adherents. Science the passive bystander to this strange drama; life’s irony. Only after a regime established, and the ideological assumptions set, can structural- functionalism be our guide; it tells us nothing about the regime’s origins. I suspect Gellner leaned on this theory because of the philosopher in him; the stable concept preferred to its evolution over time. Politics is messy. V.S. Naipaul our guide.

It is with my political career as with that gesture. I used to say, with sincerity, that nothing in my life had prepared me for it. To the end I behaved as though it was to be judged as just another aspect of my dandyism. Criminal error! I exaggerated my frivolity, even to myself. For I find I have indeed been describing the youth and early manhood of a leader of some sort, a politician, or at least a disturber. I have established his isolation, his complex hurt and particular frenzy. And I believe I have also established, perhaps in this proclaimed frivolity, this lack of judgement and balance, the deep feeling of irrelevance and intrusion, his unsuitability for the role into which he as drawn, and his inevitable failure. From playacting to disorder: it is the pattern.67

Politics requires an understanding of personalities, plus a firm grasp of the historical detail, situating these individuals in time and space. To truly understand the political influence of an idea we have to do the kind of work Quentin Skinner does on Machiavelli and Hobbes; or Hume did on the leading players of Stuart Britain. The link between social field and philosophy is not as straightforward as Gellner’s sociology supposes. Then there’s the degradation of the idea when used in public life.68 Hume knew this. Chomsky, following in Hume’s path, has spent over fifty years showing the gap between the reality of power and its ideological rhetoric.

Gellner was a thorough going thinker. I watch him discussing Kant as he hitches up his pyjamas, ridiculing Žižek while brushing his teeth. How fare this man on the stump? Broken by a single word: egghead.69 Politics is close to the ordinary self, those casual thoughts and sloppy speech, its sentimental nonsense, our soul’s candy floss. The politician touches these instinctive biases, which have no time for the reflective pause. We decide the greatest questions on superstition and passion. And are no different from the Tudors or the Nuer; only the idols and rituals have changed. Living in abstract times the Idea has become God (Descartes was prophetic); while celebrities, cults and football teams serve up today’s folk religions.70 Still an enchanted lot. To fully appreciate Gellner we have to grasp that he belongs to an unusual group: those who live off concepts and theories as others meat and veg. Such characters rare, in any age.71

I am arguing that Gellner was different in kind from your ordinary academic,72 who corrals their intellectual concerns within the confines of their discipline.73 Such isolation reduces the tension between life and ideas; this tension the heat generating original thoughts. Thought as epiphany.74 Great thinkers great artists, their mental energy concentrated on the borderline between the concept and the quotidian; which produces friction, kindling the emotions. An alchemical relationship that spawns the conceptual magic.75 Yet a typical academic is apt to displace emotion with ideas (one reason much art criticism is awful).76 Then the artist has a peculiar way of looking at their place; the work bringing out the unique qualities of this relation.77 Academics so keen on the general pattern are apt lose the sense of self. Bang goes meaning!78 Also why succumb to fashionable wisdom, which rinses out the feelings.79 Most universities conformist places, where profs more interested in their place in the profession than their position in the cosmos. Campus a safe space, where one’s ideas unlikely to come under severe attack. A comfortable place. A cosy place, where you can be radical without cost; such radicalism wholly detached from its consequences. Just ideas.80 It is here, amongst the rituals of an academic department, that we find Hume’s habits and customs, a unity of atmosphere that occludes and heals the separation of idea and lifestyle. No angst. No existential crisis; everything resolved on reason’s plane.

In a room full of crazies, it is the sane man who is mad....

Few academics are intellectuals.81 It is the intellectuals who dislike disenchantment; for ideas should satisfy their feelings, intimate with meaning. Unlike academics, insulated in their artificial environment, intellectuals belong to the normal flow of life; where instincts, ideas and ethics merge. The modern world an unhappy place for such characters; for the population would rather go to the cinema than church, watch Eastenders than listen to a lecture.82 For the intellectual, concepts are super important! Through them they define an identity. Yet most people avoid these kooks. This their crisis; driving them on, generating that moral anger, the oppositional diatribes. Ideas the rack on which to torture the rest of us. Living inside their concepts the intellectuals want us to live there too. That said, their actual lives rarely correspond to their ideals; thus the aura of the charlatan that surrounds them.83

There is another type: the bohemian. These loafers also live in a world of ideas, but do not concern themselves with the hard work of reading, writing, preaching, doing. Instead the dream is of some miraculous transformation, when society a new Eden they’ll be rich and famous. Two character studies are Bal and Clarissa in Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s A Backward Place.84 For Bal the idea is an escape route into fantasy, while justifying a good time.85 With Clarissa it is more complicated: the idea both creates the fairy tale and hides her mediocre gifts: a dilettante who thinks she is an artist.

Close to the bohemians is the café society of ersatz radicals; who waste their time in endless talk of politics, as they bemoan their fate and dream of power. The great study Juan Pablo in Benito Pérez Galdós’s Fortunata and Jacinta.

Gellner is an original thinker; so doesn't fit into any of these categories. How best describe him? I turn to Schloss, who lends me a phrase: an artist of the idea.86

                                                                  You, I fear, 

Will find you bought humanity too dear

At the price of some light leaves, if you begin

To find your handling of them growing thin,

Insensitive, brittle. For the common touch,

Though it warms, coarsens. Never care so much

For leaves or people, but you care for stone

A little more. The medium is its own

Thing, and not all a medium, but the stuff

Of mountains; cruel, obdurate, and rough.87

To work with concepts as a sculptor stone: the ‘medium is its own thing’. The intellectual, having that ‘common touch’, takes the idea as a given. The thinker plays with the idea, moulding it in any kind of conceptual shape.

Richard, I suggest, inhabits that shadow-world where intellectuals mingle with Bohemians and radicals. A place where ideas are taken very seriously, but are also toyed with as trinkets, or worn as masks.88 It gives a slightly odd, a somewhat outré feel not only to one’s ideas, but to our relations to the mainstream, especially its institutions. Neither lifestyle nor ideas quite fit. Too serious or too flippant with the pieties of others. I think of Richard’s liking for Stewart Home, who I once signed up for a short-life co-op in Bethnal Green.

Home’s view of the world has always seemed a bit too easy for me. Educating myself on the classics, with their subtleties of description, analysis and form, I find such rebels hollow and obvious: a caricature of literature rather than the real thing; it is to prefer the poster to the portrait. Am I being unfair...one of Home’s characters takes me down a back alley and puts the boot in.

Another difference between us: when I stumbled across Alan’s website it was to find a recognisable landmark. During their long conversation Alan gives Richard a new vision; where humans play the starring role in a sociological drama which thinks of them as extras. No! Yes! Every society reflects the human animal with its superstitions and magic; with us they take their own odd forms: from sports to games, to English nonsense to fairy tales.89 The peculiarity is the fragmented nature of our rituals, how they don’t add up to one religious totality, where health, belief, work, family, society and survival all come together in a meaningful whole.

We have an odd relationship to work. For most of us work, though compulsive - it is the ritual of habit - is not enchanted, although we want it to be.

Surely significant that Alan’s about-face, his re-enchantment, occurs in retirement; now to think outside the usual categories, and educate himself beyond his formal education.90 However, Alan was never your typical don. How he bashes Durkheim! the patron saint of British anthropology. Something in Alan is attuned to the mystery of the human animal.91 The scientist rolls down the window blinds of his lab. The philosopher closes the curtains of her study. Playing field or street is of no interest to these bods; it takes a Ruth Finnegan to think Milton Keynes worthy of anthropological investigation. No surprise Alan an inspiration.92 Gellner, in contrast, musing on Weber, refining old Hume, is oblivious to the mad goings on the local council estate. It’s why Dave and Maxine of 25 Acacia Drive, shorn of their particularity, are subsumed within the category Modern Man, a replica of himself.93 People treated as categories of knowledge rather than organic life. An occupational hazard of the academic, whose discipline empties out the individual - abstract patterns are the concern - and whose self is defined by the profession, not the personality. Why so many talk as if self does not exist.

An artist is a persona. What should you know to be a poet? 

at least one kind of traditional magic

divination, astrology, the book of changes, the tarot94

Spekulation: Richard has lived the divided life. On one side, the academic training and the professional philosophical milieu of those interviews. On t’other, the day-job in school, where learning, alas, is losing out to bureaucracy: Kafka having left the syllabus now runs the place. Could Richard have made tenure, given the chance? There are signs, too subtle to enumerate, that suggest campus isn’t the space for him.95 This man belongs to the coffee-houses of 18th-century London, the cafés of Paris, the underground of post-war New York.96 A friend mocks me with a thick German accent.... Ja Ja, I will keep to the facts. Richard’s approach inside his profession the strongest proof of his outsiderdom: teaching a vocation not just a job. This hero wanted to bring Keats and Coleridge to comprehensive kids.97 Hurrah!98 This at a time when even poets don’t read poetry.... A typical evangelist?99 If St Francis of Assisi alive I’m sure I’d find him with a copy of The Naked Lunch. Those with a message instinctively recognise each other.100 Nonconformists to their hair shirt.

Identifying too much with Richard? My German nods his head. I shake mine.... Never comfortable inside the institution, with its clichés and coercion, my ideas insist on being heard. An executive droning out the platitudes, Alexander Herzen enters the room; afterwards I ask Edward Lear to contribute to the minutes. The search...not search, that’s too calculated; more a visitation; ideas to pop up out of a manhole, peek around a postbox; almost as if...waiting for me. Mugged by meaning! Which takes one out of the usual run; producing eccentricities that cause unease in others. The perennial problem of those outside their ideal milieu. Now my turn to nod to my German friend. Of course there are differences between us. Long an exile inside the institutions I, after long labours, created a world out of myself.

For years I paid the price of my education; yearning for something out of reach that only the few can achieve.101 Easy to think this a universal phenomenon.

In his interview with Bryan Magee Gellner defined modern philosophy as a commentary on modern man’s predicament of which the philosophers themselves are unaware. Can we say the same for Richard (and for myself, a long time ago)? The feeling that nothing quite hangs together, a sense of something is missing, reflects the sociology of a peculiar life, where meaning suffuses one’s dreams, but is largely absent from our waking hours, with its meaning-lite work. Albeit we experience enough of the familiar to give us ballast, keep us afloat.

I was once part of the flow, never thinking of myself as a presence. Then I looked in the mirror and decided to be free. All that my freedom has brought me is the knowledge that I have a face and have a body, that I must feed this body and clothe this body for a certain number of years. Then it will be over.102

The reason why intellectuals are so dangerous is that they encourage such disorientation; for they seek the freedom of the idea, which necessarily sets us apart. Yet, and here is the illusion - and the falsity - the intellectual is at home in this world of concepts; it is the poor sods, like Naipaul’s narrator, who must suffer the existential crisis of exile, which rends the body as much as the mind. And the rest? Part of the flow; for whom meaning is discarded like crisp packets. Only a catastrophe to disturb their equanimity; a crisis to thrust meaning centre-stage; the idea a jealous hand on the heroine’s throat.... Meaning rarely saves the soul, is more likely to wreck it; as the gap between idea and life expands exponentially, and we destroy ourselves trying to bring them close. Few schoolteachers read Naipaul or Dostoevsky. And if they did? Most likely give up the profession, for how handle a torture rack with pleasure. Pulled out of our locale, we are stretched towards some concept, which is supposed to free us. As if freedom a good thing.

Here Kant was acute: freedom is self-fulfilment through creating one’s own thought-world. This far harder than he knew (he was a genius). Most of us, when given our liberty, are like Naipaul’s victim: lost in an archipelago of ideas which won’t fit into a coherent geography. The clever seek an artificial replacement for that lost stability in the intellectual cult, where magic formulas provide total explanations (uncertainty is the great mental disease, magical thinking the best way of dispelling it). An organic whole, with the proper balance between body and idea, is replaced by an over-reliance on a limited range of concepts, which structure thought and behaviour.103 Marx, Freud and Richard Dawkins, each with their own tarot packs. Kant’s freedom, a child in the mind’s playground, is only for the odd few.

I’m not suggesting that the extremely clever are exempt from anomie. The lucky ones find their niche almost from the day they are born: school a perfect environment; the Oxford and Cambridge that follows their natural habitat.104 The unlucky ones are exiled amongst those who find them alien and unsettling.105 Stupid people make you stupid; or least make you feel stupid; a disorientating experience; a true loss of the self, with this too common consequence: mad isolation and failure. Even the lucky ones, ensconced in college, may turn out unlucky, if their gifts lose their way. Divorced from the feelings the intellect is apt to become an out-of-control machine; David Parfitt the stellar example.106

Education is a tricky business. Yet most think it a day on the beach.

I keep goin’ on about this meaning; you ask what I mean. What! You want a definition? But I don’t like definitions, I avoid them.... You push some more. I bow my head, and mumble, ‘The intellect fused with feeling; thinking that’s also a mood; the mind’s atmosphere; best evoked by music and poetry. Epiphany. When all makes sense and is just out of reach. We see what is invisible. A feeling of clarity when thought is blinding light and joyful pleasure. Thought as emotion.’107 I get there at last.

The emotion is drained out of much of academic work, whose excitements tend wholly towards the intellect: it is the satisfaction of solving puzzles. And although there is a gap between this activity and one’s domestic life it isn’t large; the same rituals of cognition, the same temperament, are exercised in study and at home.

The artist is always on the job. François Truffaut had a lovely paradox about this: the artist is lazy, the reason he works the hardest.108 An artist without meaning is no artist at all; albeit it’s meaning of a very special sort: form. Form is everywhere.

Meaning suffuses adolescence. Wild feelings, on the threshold of a new identity, as we move from family into the world, seek out an idea to encapsulate them. With such heat some ideas fuse with feelings, to create a faith. At this age Marx, Freud, the current genderism, are not treated as objects of knowledge but used for identity formation, as we embody a dogma within the self. It is to sacrifice the body to a concept. All societies have such baptisms. The modern age puts the onus on choice; yet the choices are limited to what is fashionable; for the young, already battered into bureaucratic shape by education, are encouraged to accept what’s up-to-date; so made ready for anything the corporations throw at them. An endless source of existential confusion, for the true value of these ideas for the institutional society is their instrumental consequences - to open us to suggestion - whereas for adolescents (gloopy gluey) meaning is paramount. However, school can't entirely separate the ritualism of ideas - creating a frame of mind - from their content; for the undereducated are less likely to divide notion from emotion,109 the conceptual substance to overflow the utilitarian purpose.110 Little damage to most of us; ideas just like those crisp packets - eat enough to pass the exams, then throw them away. School an interlude where we learn the ethos and practice of the institutions; after which ideas are confined to the background, usually ignored.

In the upper classes it is a more complicated tale. Brought up to rule they are educated to believe in a meaningful world. Public and private life a seamless continuum; where the society’s ideas are to be taken seriously; for how else give orders, sustain their authority? Such views, the ideas they contain, are part of Naipaul’s ‘flow’; these are people at home in this world.111 I think of a middle class dinner party where the views of the day are shared around like pâté. Accidents of course. The write-offs. Those nutters taking ideas too seriously; creating a fissure in their lives, separating them from job, family and the respectables who wear concepts like clothes.112 But real concepts are heavy things to carry around. Soon the ideational load too heavy, their lives become lopsided; alienation, anomie, a terrible hopelessness, that debilitating sense that nothing fits true, follows. Dropping out of the success race, they are exiled from country, class, the contemporary culture.113 These the deracinated who have changed the world. Or ended in the asylum.

The most valuable thing about college life is the infection of ideas which takes place. It is like a rapid series of inoculations. People who have not been to college catch ideas late in life, and are made ill by them.114

It is an unusual feature of universities, rarely commented on: they take the spirit out of education. This why universities a dangerous place for thinkers and intellectuals. And a confusing space for many others...a complex game is played on campus of which most students are unaware. How many carry that confusion late into their lives?

The break with family can be hard. Richard’s mother didn’t want him to go to university. An old story of working class life, where mothers are (rightly) suspicious of school. Mam knows a child-catcher when she sees one. A rich literature in Wales and Scotland tells of such thefts.115 Those terrible pedagogues to turn her son into a stranger, as he acquires the language and manners of another culture. A foreigner in the family. An anthropologist, studying change in traditional communities, immediately sees the parallels; the richer material life no compensation for a spiritual emptiness; that weakening of the psychic structure, as a unity of mind, body and environment disintegrates.116 I’m driving recklessly down the road...Richard’s background is more complicated than mine: a bourgeois atoll in a proletarian ocean, he belongs to a different class, where different pressures operate. The conservatism of the miners to have its effect, but this weaker than the liberal tendencies of his own family, with its lookout on the future: aka The Career.117 Such a mix to produce odd effects in an intelligent boy; like Socialism with its religion of progress.118 Miners had a complicated relationship with education: a way out of a nasty occupation; but group pressure bred a dislike of its preference for the upstart and offbeat.119 This conflict resolved in individual families, often with father taking the educational lead. But let us not forget mam. There is she on the doorstep, watching teacher take her son away.

Less complicated with the middle classes; already familiar with the nature and possibilities of education, and the radically different lifestyles it offers (for Richard’s father the imperial official in India; for Richard the bohemian atmosphere of his academic aunt). Although ‘radical’ is the wrong word here: such lifestyles conform to rules set by the larger society, to which they expect to belong.120 Most accept such coercion willingly; even today when the rules are ever more explicit. Hardly a street without its dozen signs....

Living in a coalfield won’t make you a typical middle class child. In addition to that familial rift strange things start happening at school: no longer a simple pathway to social success it is also a trial of social relations, as we feel the distance from contemporaries. Some subjects are not just tasks. Then Richard’s intellectual life; as from his early teens it parts company with the classroom, when Penguin Classics and arthouse films invade his leisure time. Can I suggest - on poor evidence - that the real rift with his parents wasn’t over school but with this education; which makes him odd to both family and teachers?121

A feature of Bildung literature is the artist finding a mentor, who leads them to the artist’s promised land. Richard was lucky, he found his guru at a young and absorbent age. Lucky too that this guru wasn’t a teacher but a peer, making this intellectual world extra-relevant to his life. Yet there are dangers in finding such a figure early on: we spend the rest of our lives looking for substitutes.

Every jigsaw puzzle has a piece missing.

I wasn’t so fortunate. It didn’t start my trip down Conrad’s Congo until my early twenties. Then the numerous stops at those rivers stations: Anthony Burgess, Truffaut, Chomsky, Gellner; Edgar Reisz, Herzog, Dickens, George Eliot.... There are advantages of never meeting your guru face to face: after the first impact, you mould them to your own needs. Though it was not all books. But that is another story, isn’t it Mr B? Unlike Marlowe, I didn’t need to find my Mr Kurtz. This my fortune. Approaching this stuff at a mature age, I could absorb the emotional effects as well as play with its intellectual ones. Not just words.

Similar yet different; our trajectories even more so (then add the character contrasts). But another word about class. Richard’s father was a mining engineer. Three generations of my family worked at the coal face. A huge gulf here, even if both fathers had been down the same pit. This may explain why Richard discovered in his teens what I had to wait until my twenties to find. But then I was lucky in the times; I had a university in the living-room: BBC2; and its weekend showings of ‘difficult’ films. Although education had already done its corrosive work, I was still recognisably human; but now the Beeb and the books turned this Dr Jekyll into Mr Hyde.122 Ideas to become an essential part of life. My early twenties when the damage is done. I should have been in a job. Instead, I was on the dole, devouring books, desperate to make up lost time.

A saving grace: no green cords and a velvet jacket.

Education creates a few radicals forever out of step with the status quo; their lives never to match the paradise projected onto the Hollywood screen of their minds. The false promise of ideas for those who take them too seriously. And the ironies can be cruel. It is these radicals who are the conformists, squeezing themselves into some sheath-like concept. Remember Camden in the 1980s; all those revolutionaries in their blacks togs and Lenin caps...(are they all architects now?). Then the absurdity. Most are hopeless cases who believe Society should listen to them. Haven’t enough cash for a train fare, but they know how to run the Treasury! Their education stopped in early adulthood, they repeat the same old formulas until pension and grave. Poor dabs! Thinking to fix the time of misrule, their rite of passage, as a permanent condition, they mistake teenage tantrums for insight. More ironies follow. Such characters grow old before their time; for as with most addictions - books and heroin appear an exception - the conceptual junkie ages quickly.123 These radicals incapable of learning the supreme lesson that the best way to grasp an idea is to distant it from the self.

She liked [Henry] Massey’s humour, his insistence that one should relax, have a late breakfast, come to the studio and see the work afresh. Students should not worry if things go wrong; ‘You can only learn by experiment, by experience.’ They should be self-critical, which was easy to do if you pretended the work was not yours but someone else’s: ‘Imagine that it is mine if you like - that will make you very critical and also give you a chance of getting a little of your own back.’124

The secret to eternal youth: play with ideas don’t submit to them.

In truth we are all radicals. School doing its job, when it persuades us to reject family, tradition, and the day before yesterday. Capitalism is permanent revolution. That’s right! Schools leave us dependent on the institution and its abstractions, the lifeblood of the capitalist bureaucrat. Rules, process, a cool indifference to life as lived, reduces concern about the intrinsic or what’s special about special; allowing the corporates to turn all values into profit.125 It why ‘radicals’ (I speak of those in Lenin caps and Trotsky glasses) are the Corporation’s vanguard, deluding the young into the belief of their own rebellion. Progress: the best way yet found of doing the human in. And the idea: the easiest means of evacuating the unique.126 Yippee for mass production!

Mr Capitalismo sees a teacher in the street. Crossing the road he asks to shake her hand. She tentatively offers four fingers. With a huge smile and a dainty grip he thanks Margot for her services. Then confuses her with an offer of a cigar....

Gellner saw ideas as cogs and pulleys in society’s machine. Education both trains employees and maintains a public sphere where abstract relations are supposed to trump emotional relationships (organisational process, the ‘laws' of the Market, the rules of the realm should be superior to family, clan, tribe).127 A wrenching experience for those not brought up in the culture.128 What reaction to expect? Rickshaws of guilt, as sentiment surrenders to reason turning humans into objects; the original sin of modern capitalism.129 The better the education, the more natural this activity appears; and the easier to slough off that guilt. Though those troublesome teenage years can be tricky, when the brightest, taking ideas too literally, diss their own privileges. Most quickly learn their lesson; which is to drain an idea of its emotional substance, leaving but its intellectual form. It is why, except for a brief period in early adulthood (went too far on a demo?) there is no cost to these ideas, which when mature the middle classes treat like fashion and food.130 Then, as they ascend the professional escalator, ideas float on the surface of life or are turned into currency, and traded for power and wealth. Trained to take the public realm very seriously indeed, in fact few are ever serious - when was the last time you read a parliamentary report? - we prefer to sit back and enjoy the spectacle.131

How many, watching the play within a play that is our post-modern TV culture, are sophisticated enough to realise what’s going on?132

Educated to participate at least in the lower levels of public life, we are schooled to live significant parts of our day on stage. An unnatural way to be.133 The higher up the hierarchy the more artificial this life becomes; it is why the best girls and boys need such a prolonged rite of passage;134 and why a religion - a Christianity shorn of its sacralisation of the individual - is essential to remove both that sense of unreality and the guilt. My German friend shakes his head, gives me the cuckoo sign. I point out academia’s stress on cause and necessity, its determination to remove an individual’s will and choice; reducing us to passive victims of Nature and History. Useful, no, for a corporate exec when she fires a thousand?135 My German sulks his face. Religion provides the substance of an idea, which is used for therapeutic effect. To believe in an idea - creative destruction, class or sex war - salves the conscience by giving it good reasons for one’s actions.136 The religion takes various forms, and changes over the decades, though all are varieties of a Secularism underwritten by science.137 With such a faith it is easy to transform people, animals, every bit of organic life, into things.

A word about managers in our managerial society. It always surprises me how few feel shame. Yet to exercise power over another person is about the worse thing imaginable; as Kant knew when he wrote that we should be ends not means. How many learn that line at Harvard or Yale, yet whose consciences now roost on the tops of the Manhattan skyline? Tells us something, surely, of the connection between lives and ideas, and what really goes in the universities.

I stop the tape.

The last twenty years have seen a remarkable transformation, as the tidal wave of the Sixties finally swamps the culture; and the educated class, finding it hard to live with the moral burden of their task, looks to lessen it. Thus the Left turn of our institutions. What’s called Woke the means by which an educated elite cast off the guilt of their privileges, through believing in the Good Idea: Equality, The Victim, The Environment....138 Although ideas have little real impact on a person’s actual conduct, the substance of an idea can still trouble the conscience, even into middle age, if too clear a conflict with one’s lifestyle.139 A problem since the 1960s, when the Left became less a political position than an absolute moral good (it is Christianity’s replacement). To be Left now is to belong to the company of saints.140 Yet in no society does the elite think themselves evil. So, to conquer the ruling class, the Left had to change, accommodating itself to the realities of the rulers.141 And what changes there have been! Today you can acquire power with a clean conscience, once advertise your radical credentials.142 Believe the population sinners and heretics and even a tyrant convinces herself of her beneficence. The ultimate value of an idea: it inoculates you against your own iniquity. The concept a moral compass, drawing a circle around the good; although this line drawn less by the idea than the mood of the times,143 itself formed by the elite, who find ways of both whipping and absolving themselves at the same time.144 The beauty of an idea: believe in it and all things are forgiven. And it gets better: ideas unleash power, which you can exercise in good faith.145 It’s why we are not surprised to find Doña Lupe a liberal; the easiest way to discipline the unruly.

‘...she’s a savage and needs to be tamed and domesticated.’ The will to learn shown by Fortunata pleased her very much, and she felt that stirring within her, and in great need of being exercised, were all her gifts as a teacher, adviser, protector and head of the family. Doña Lupe had the aptitude and vanity of an educator, and for her there was no greater glory than to have someone over whom she could exercise authority. Maxi and Papitos were at the same time children and pupils, for the señora always made herself love the inferior beings she was educating. Jáuregui himself, so people said, had also been as much a pupil as a husband.146

The Left is the respectable wing of Capitalist radicalism; the Left’s function - to speak in Gellnerian terms - to reconcile the young to its global conquests. For in testing a parent’s prejudices we are learning, despite the rhetoric and self-image, to remove resistance to Capitalism’s depredations, as it reconstructs us in its artificial image.147 The rite of passage an assault on the person, detaching mind and body from their familial surroundings.148 This can be hard in luxurious times; the Left today less about welcoming this transition - once proclaimed a revolution - as easing that painful adjustment, as we accommodate the self to the institutions. It starts early. Schools less centres of learning as sites of therapy, as society seeks to reduce the psychic tensions of what was once a brutal transformation.149 Nevertheless, something of the old Left’s moral critique remains, which attracts those who cannot easily accept their subjection to corporate life. For the majority it is a phase of readjustment; while the society absorbs the wild ideas to transform then into the next wave of product, material and ideological. Even defeat is salutary. Sitting comfortably in the City, we can blame our moral timidity on The System.150 The Left. It teaches us how to conform. Doña Lupe again.

Real nobility never delights in humiliating inferiors. Doña Lupe felt so strongly protective towards Fortunata, that she could not keep account of all the good advice she gave her and the rules of conduct she would be able to devise for her. The fact is, she was longing to protect, direct, advise and have someone to dominate...151

How to ‘improve’ people without compunction.152 Careerists with a good conscience. Never take the Left at is own estimation. It talks of truth, but it is a strange kind of truth, one that encourages the bullets to fly.

Restart the tape!

It’s not just this tension between the technics of education and the substance of ideas; there are also tensions within the leading ideas, which are becoming harder to reconcile. In the old days it was a given that we should sacrifice a part of the self to the public realm. The 1960s changed this.153 Authenticity the key concept, the roles of public life became suspect (or was it the other way round?).154 Anyway, it became the individual against the institutions; as radicalism turned pop (inauthentic, unreal - the ironies of ideas when enter the social field). Other effects are more profound. With the collapse of Christianity,155 the sacralisation of the individual moved from the metaphysical to the social sphere, and we demanded that public space meet our psychic needs. The result: the ‘individualistic’ society in the most organised civilisation there’s ever been;156 a tension extreme in Britain and America where the collectivist realities bash up against this ‘nonconformist’ belief.

The only conceivable government for men who are capable of possessing rights, even if the ruler is benevolent, is not a paternal but a patriotic government.... A patriotic attitude is one where everyone in the state, not excepting its head, regards the commonwealth as a maternal womb, or the land as the paternal ground from which he himself sprang and which he must leave to his descendants as a treasured pledge. Each regards himself as authorised to protect the rights of the commonwealth by laws of the general will, but not to submit it to his personal use at his own absolute pleasure. This right of freedom belongs to each member of the commonwealth as a human being, in so far as each is a being capable of possessing rights.157

It wasn’t just Christianity that collapsed in the 1960s. A certain idea of the public realm also crashed down.158 Almost as if the burden of public duty had become too much for those - the bourgeoisie - who managed it.159 Kant had lost out to Hegel, thanks to his rebellious disciple, Karl Marx. What am I saying? The problem of Kant’s moral metaphysics is that it puts an enormous strain on the mental muscles that must keep both body and thought under an athlete’s discipline. At least with God in the background, we had a helping hand: an enormous power, that could call on those those great furnaces of Hell. But shut down the coal mines, close the steel mills....160

For those afraid of the mirror there is an uncomfortable ‘elitism’ in Kant’s formula - rights are not given (by Nature) but are earned by talent and endeavour. While for those who take a starry-eyed view of the Enlightenment it is difficult to equate its greatest champion with nationalism. Nevertheless, Kant points to a truth: the public realm depends on the exertions of individuals to keep it in good shape. This had become harder by the 1960s. The reasons are obvious: the consumer culture, the miracles of technology and medicine, the fading of the war atmosphere, increased leisure...all to make the ‘moral’ muscles flabby. Then that vast expansion of the welfare state; an enormous moral burden, and one that, incredibly, was carried well into the 1990s, since when it has weakened considerably, as institutions succumb to the Neo-liberal ethos, where the institution is used instrumentally for personal profit. Easier to retreat to the comforts of the self.161

I PACE along, the rain-shafts riddling me,

Mile after mile out by the moorland way,

And up the hill, and through the ewe-leaze gray

Into the lane, and round the corner tree;

Where, as my clothing clams me, mire-bestarred,

And the enfeebled light dies out of day,

Leaving the liquid shades to reign, I say,

“This is a hardship to be calendared!”

Yet sires of mine now perished and forgot,

When worse beset, ere roads were shapen here,

And night and storm were foes indeed to fear,

Times numberless have trudged across this spot

In sturdy muteness on their strenuous lot,

And taking all such toils as trifles mere.162

The past offers too many truths; which have to be ignored to sustain the illusions of this age, the most comfortable there has ever been.

To belong to the past is today a moral crime.163 It is why Richard can call the sexual division of labour ‘sexist’: only the boys allowed to help their father build his Norman wall. Yet traditional societies divide the sexes around the central tasks of life; production, reproduction and war. If Richard is taken literally all carry a moral taint. This to fuse a division of labour with morality; while tacitly accepting the capitalist premise that cash-work is an unalloyed good; Feminism simply claiming a woman’s capitalist rights. I’m with Virginia Woolf: there’s no progress if women enter the professions and act like men.164 Yet this is precisely the tale modern feminists want told; thus the emphasis on the public realm, as domesticity is either demoted or erased.165 A particular character type,166 taking its model from the patriarchal public space, has set itself up as the ideal for all women; so voiding the value of domestic work (cooking and cleaning are far more important than building a comedy wall; so why not sexist to exclude Richard from the kitchen?).

So eager to take up new ideas we rarely subject them to critical analysis.167 Radicals often have the most prejudices; because we the most likely to follow the fashionable wisdom; an ideological bulldozer crushing the sensibility, subtle, amorphous, vague.

Ideas in the raw: crude, coarse, dull, loud.

Working class women have always done large amounts of manual work - cleaning, washing, fire-making, cooking and bringing up babies (add to this list how you please). These occur in the home; the division of labour also a division in space. A moral issue? Or the most efficient way of securing resources? Men and women belonged to the working classes; the men paid by the mining companies, the women given the gift of their men’s pay packets; and the gift, as we know, having read our Marcel Mauss, creates obligations far weightier than any cash payment, for they invest the relationship with the burdens and binds of conscience and feeling.168 Feminism took away a woman’s power....169 Oh dear! What am I saying? That the Feminist revolution of the 20th-century has been against Woman?170 A controversial tale! Best left for other times.

Oh no! too late. Two bouncers run out of Tainted Love and grab me.....

Our Modern rite of passage does not reconcile the young to adult life but generates the belief that they can transcend it; this the vast difference separating us from older cultures. For a traditional community the initiation rite, with its few days or weeks of misrule, is a rejection of childhood and an entry into the adult world, strange, horrifying, also intoxicating.171 A second birth. The first from the mother’s womb; this second out of a gendered space, the ritual itself, which imparts the secret knowledge that sustains the community’s identity against the decay of time.172 The anarchy a disruption, breaking down the organic identity, allowing it to be moulded into its social form. With us the rite lasts longer, and is full of tensions that hardly exist in the older rites; as the ends of our ritual - to accustom ourselves to modern social control - is at odds with the ideas it uses. Such tensions can tear us apart, when believing in the idea we separate both from family and society, and are left only with ourselves. A burden almost impossible to endure.

...it was with a feeling of release that I watched and heard the city burn that afternoon and watched it burn that night. I watched it burn again and again on television; and I watched it burn in the morning. It burned like a famous city and I didn’t want it to stop burning. I wanted the fire to spread and spread and I wanted everything in the city, even the apartment block, even this apartment, even myself, to be destroyed and consumed. I wanted escape to be impossible; I wanted the very idea of escape to become absurd. At every sign that the burning was going to stop I felt disappointed and let down.173

For these unlucky ones radicalism is an escape route into a different kind of conformity; as through a radical scepticism - in politics, aesthetics, social theory - we create an ideational identity. Alas, constructing a self in this way requires much of it to come from without. Never fully ourselves. An instability increased by the social flux that produces a series of ideological makeshifts which nag away at our sense of being, its wholeness, its authenticity. The more the exile relies on the idea the greater the angst against the society from which the idea comes...a shadow is trying to punch its own figure. This tension especially acute among artists, who, dependent on a contemporary audience, need at the same time to grow from within; a conflict that may take decades to resolve.174 But what about those poor things who rely totally on the culture to define them - the intellectuals, the radicals, the poseurs -: a commedia dell'arte, where cartoons rail against their own image.

Arguments could be divisive in our man’s house.175 This pain was offset by a clever father and a cornucopia of interesting relatives, each with an alternative lifestyle: the farming eccentrics; the gambling lawyer; and Kathleen Cronk, the socialist, professor, spinster; the role model for young Richard.

I was lucky. My mother had no interest in the public sphere, my intellectual life a foreign country of which only I speak the language. Exile an emotional and psychological issue, as isolation took its toll. My twenties a hard time.176 But over the long trek: a bucketful of gold. Brought up in a world where ideas are not important I could reject my education and grow a self from within. And once those roots were established: easy to avoid those usual middle class excesses: the TV binges in the evening, the hair-of-the-dog newspapers at the breakfast table.

Among the upper classes the rite of passage rarely throws a life off course; for the separation between idea and existence already established, there is no cultural break with the parents, only the emotional and intellectual friction of different sensibilities, quickly removed when the children settle into adulthood.177 It’s trickier for those low down, who are used to living in a milieu where ideas don’t float free of bed and board; thus the tendency to be too literal with concepts. For the majority of us ‘down-and-outs’ the solution is simple: don’t take ideas seriously, concentrate on the credentials.178 We are right to do so. And it is the natural thing to do; for, despite the bassoon blasts from educators announcing the coming of concepts, most people are conceptual agnostics; ideas but the background to their lives. Although it is an oddity of today’s universities that it’s just such characters who run them;179 adding to the sense of unreality, the corruption of intellectual life.

A few fall into the Concept-Catcher’s net. Here literalism to play its mean trick: ideas, rather than stimulating our thoughts, shape the life; forcing us to live inside a concept.180

This to produce all sorts of psychological difficulties, which we project across the public arena.181 Never trust a radical, there’s always some psychosis underneath. I go too far. Never trust the radical who wants to burn the city down; such individuals, incapable of carving out identities independent of the world, need it to be an exact copy of themselves; this impossibility driving the destructive urge. To smash up society to remake it around the lineaments of one’s own mind. The 20th-century paid a heavy price for this lunacy.

Left/Right? No! Inside v outside; individual versus group; exiles against the stay-at-homes; idealists beating up the corporate types. It is these relationships that produce fruitful tensions if held in reasonable check. Gellner a perfect example. Words and Things the outsider’s attack on an in-group; although the ironies drop like heavy rain: he was closer to Wittgenstein, ethnically, intellectually, emotionally, than his Oxford disciples, who treated this charismatic as text not human being. Gellner, unlike these dons, could not live with the mere forms of his subject; to tether his concepts to the existential reality, he grounded his philosophy on his sociological theories (Gellner’s reality ideas not spanners or shovels). Gellner’s epistemology his way of fitting himself in the world.

I suspect Richard, like myself for many years, has been reading his own history wrong; situating himself at the centre of modernity, rather than on its fringes. The exile a marginal figure, massively overvalued in the culture who uses it as a symbol of its own authenticity, the validation of its revolutionary practices, the breaking up of so many lives.

Don’t identify too closely with this man! The discovery of the mind didn't happen until my early twenties, and was a solitary business, following years of indolence in the classroom; my stupid rebellion. Here Richard had the luck: Kathleen Cronk; a teenage mate with a brother at university; and the grammar school, green-housing the precocious to intellectual ripeness. Yet he missed that fated academic post; despite that degree from Nottingham and a Masters from the LSE. One possible reason: his own interests worked against the curriculum, which lacked the freedom of his intellectual adventures. But I wonder how much is to do with the family, its ambivalence towards education. My relative failure at school due to my febrile emotions; an inability to adopt the cool distance that allows one to learn easily, even mechanically at this young age.

Even in my schooldays, though, I had a sense of everyone working on their careers; that was something that struck me. I had few friends and hated the school, sometimes so passionately. I imagined going there are at night when it was empty and setting it on fire. There is such a thing as academic intelligence, and I didn’t have it. Intelligence is always a bundle of several qualities: logical thought, articulacy, originality, memory, musicality, sensitivity, speed of association, organisational capacity, and so on and so forth; but in my case, the bundle seemed to be differently composed.182

An academic has just the right mix, which has little to do with straight intellectual ability; Werner Herzog smarter than most.183 Surely no accident that I should catch Richard reading this great maverick, though it’s telling that our opinions differ about the memoir.184 Every Man For Himself and God Against All. Ha! What a title. How I remember Kaspar Hauser....185 Like this eponymous hero Richard has problems with the institution of education;186 though it doesn’t stop him becoming a headmaster. No wonder his life feels like a puzzle without a solution. Ideas and beliefs to rub up against their actualisations in difficult and irritating ways. The problem of the intellectual who can’t quite fit into his profession, where ideas have but instrumental value. Inevitably, Richard considers himself an outsider, is attracted to the underground.

I recognise the traits, having lived with this existential tension for decades. On discovering the arts I delved into the avant-garde; aestheticism’s radical politics.187 It’s a way of coping with their complexity, by rejecting what’s not felt nor understood. It took years to educate myself out of this mindset. To grasp a subject we have to absorb it.188 All true intellectual work a baptism: complete immersion! So much has to be taken on trust; years travelling strange rivers, where frequently lost we are often terrified...it is to go with Marlowe all the way to Kurtz’s camp. The danger: we stop early, stay at the first safe station, trapping ourselves inside that timid, rancorous self.189 Marlowe knew what he was about; live with uncertainty, recognise our ignorance, our natural stupidity; then we will grow aesthetically, emotionally, intellectually; which requires an openness to whatever comes our way, shifting it carefully for those gems that enrich us. So hard! Always the risk we’ll end up a disciple of Kurtz, when we must be his most acute critic. It’s here I had the greatest fortune: starting on this journey late, my emotions had already matured, strengthening the judgement, allowing me to take my own homegrown line. To absorb what challenges and changes us while staying true to our soul; the conjuring trick of all true intellectual or artistic work. To surrender to the subject while not losing one’s identity.190 Most academics will not take that risk. Inevitably such weakness is camouflaged. Thus the ‘critical’ nincompoopery which closes the portals to art and literature. To get the most out of the humanities we must believe in them. Give up the self and hope for the best.

....standing at his appointed place, the trunk of the tree, he does nothing other than gather and pass on what comes to him from the depths. He neither serves nor rules—he transmits.

His position is humble. And the beauty at the crown is not his own. He is merely a channel.191

Art is prayer, it is worship.

Should I thank the nonconformist chapels I attended as a child? Religion sets you free. Giving the self up to the spirit the best training for those Conradian adventures through A Clockwork Orange, Death on Credit, Blue Velvet, The King of Marvin Gardens, Lost Highway, How to Murder a Man....

Too late for a career on campus, but laden with treasures from Kurtz’s camp, I am forced to work in places which have no interest in ideas. Massive discombobulation! In my forties it gets stranger still: I find a world where people are paid to pretend an interest in the arts; even of ‘artists’ who have no artistic ability.192 Excluded from a world that should be simpatico. The problem of the part-time intellectual forced to make money in uncongenial environments: they are an outsider to all cultures. It is to live the split life.193 With its attendant friction and conflict, whose emotional storms I must ignore to be productive. So easy to enjoy the intoxications of self-righteousness, when reacting to obtuse individuals, provoking events, those dull institutions.194 We lose our equanimity, are cast out of the zone, that all important inner space, which the artist must protect at all costs. Yet the radical thrives on conflict, the great escape from the self.

I am a marginal figure, inside both the institution and the arts. Yet the compensations are immense. And when I read Herzog, I see I am not alone.

Maybe Richard had it worse than me. At school Richard was both an intellectual and a rugger-bugger, with its heavy drinking and machismo. A little aesthete hiding in a kitbag. It is the training of an English elite, of the gentleman with the iron will. Dangers here. A strong character, hardly able to bend, won’t find it easy to curl up inside a Matisse.

Gellner, in his supersonic plane, flying over those mountain ranges - Hume, Kant, Weber, Durkheim - could explain why the parts didn’t fit together. Richard had to wait until retirement to find someone closer to the ground: Alan Macfarlane.

I pause the tape.

I want chuck this stone into the speculative sea: Richard was ripe for revelation. Not just cast free from the institution, but his falling out with 3:00am.

I press play....

Why Alan? I suggest its Alan’s fusion of history and anthropology, where not only two disciplines but two different ways of looking at knowledge are merged in peculiar ways. The spectacular result was the anthropological investigation of an historic village, which produced his paradigmatic revolution of the 1970s. Then his gift for friendship. Plus an openness lacking in Gellner, who had unshakeable ideas about the nature of knowledge. Ideas are wonderfully plastic in Alan’s hands. Why? It is his intuitive sense of their intimacy with life, our emotions and their actions. Alan’s interviews an insight into his thought-world, where he is concerned to trace the links between person and work; these not separated out in great thinkers. It puts him outside the academic mainstream; but with that academic training to organise his insights in compelling ways. When Alan speaks it has the ring of truth, for it touches the spirit...attractive to someone who is far more artist than apparatchik.

Artists and thinkers are gossamer-thin and granite-hard. A vignette.

The Schloss once went to a meeting to set up a new Christian sect (he gave a member a lift). Three of the attendees had doubts, and the evening was persuade them to join. To convince these ‘sceptics’, three women (all the disciples were female) described their religious epiphanies. Fascinating. Schloss added his penn'orth, which produced a lively discussion. After the main event he had an hour of animated conversation with the lay-pastor; who, at evening’s end, asked was he a believer. This man didn’t know; despite Schloss’s secular interpretations of those religious experiences and his Biblical examples. He then said: ‘I have never come across anyone whose ideas are so part their person.’ A personal epiphany: the Schloss’s ideas and being are one. No separation here.

Why recall this? Earlier I mentioned Gellner’s interview with Bryan Magee, when he said philosophy is sociology by other means. With such thinkers, ideas and mode of life are bound so closely together, that ideas are both an expression of their being and a transcendence of it; this combination producing the profundities. Yet such characters are rarely self-reflective. Gellner’s genius is that although he followed type - no navel gazing for Ernest - he saw beneath the ideas to their sociological base, which he elucidated with great originality. With such complex characters we are apt to miss the coherence; for in noticing the unusual in their personalities we miss what is overwhelmingly normal for the milieu. Philosophers at home in a world their ideas say is impossible. The concentration on the universal - the very nature of an idea, the substance of philosophical discussion, tends towards the general195 - blinds both us and them to the fact that although a philosopher speaks about the cosmos, they always occupy a particular place. Staring at the stars while walking along a village street.

Retired now the tensions should relax. The moment to burn the old bird and be reborn as the new. Alan came at just the right time. The fully integrated persona awaits. As surely it must. This man always thinking for himself. No wonder he looks so young! Alan asks Richard what he’s going to do with his long retirement. Create a whole new world, I should imagine. Plenty of time, my son, plenty of time.

Interview: Richard Marshall 


________________

Notes

1 A left-field suggestion. Time and background separate Alan, Richard and myself. Yet we all are either Capricorns or very close to it: the most significant psychological connection?

2 This milieu is wonderfully described in Benito Pérez Galdós, Fortunata and Jacinta.

3 For extended discussion on the differences between academic and artist: my Bolshy. There is also my series, Aesthetic Maladies, by now an extremely long meditation on the nature of the artist. 

4 Bolshy.

5 Turgenev, Céline, Thomas Bernard.... Even in the classics of English fiction we can find the same tensions: Dr Lydgate in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Pip in Dickens’s Great Expectations. Yet in British literature the alienation from the society has been a minor theme.

6 Dostoevsky captured this character best. His world populated by those who believe in ideas they cannot act out.

7 Marc Chagall, My Life, p.45. Typically this comment is associated with school.

8 Noel Annan: The Dons: Mentors, Eccentrics and Geniuses.

9 Contrast with the two monsters in Alan Bullock’s Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives.

10 John A. Hall, Ernest Gellner.

11 For an inside view of the corporation at this time: Willard H. Whyte: Organization Man. Whyte makes a distinction between the personalities of CEOs who run these corporations and the rest. This distinction, with suitable amendments, can be carried over to other fields, like academia.

12 The best book on this character: Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road. The corporation was flexible: it allowed you to be serious or not.

13 This is the feeling behind Gellner’s Words and Things: these philosophers weren’t serious enough. Noel Annan’s Our Age: The Generation That Made Post-war Britain, captures the mentalité of this generation.

14 There were problems at the LSE: Ernest Gellner. Also Alan’s interview with Michael Mann. 15 The Philosophical Writings of Descartes Volume I, translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, p.5.

16 Perry Anderson’s criticism in English Questions. Although for contrast Stefan Collini, uncomfortable with Gellner’s sociologising of ideas: Common Writing: Essays on Literary Culture and Public Debate.

17 Leviathan. The way out for Hobbes: science.

18 The contemporary responses are revealing: The Philosophical Writings of Descartes Volume III: The Correspondence.

19 He pre-dates Durkheim by nearly three centuries.

20 For these distinctions within the artificial person of the State: Quentin Skinner, The Vision of Politics: Hobbes.

21 This is not the argument of Quentin Skinner’s Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes. In politics reason is useless on its own.

22 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, edited by Ernest C. Mossner, p.70.

23 Though Gellner could be critical of science’s naive acolytes. See the criticism of Popper in Legitimation of Belief. Popper tried to ground science on doubt; yet its massive advances are far more institutional than epistemological: it grows because founded on a secure ground of knowledge, preserved in books, filing cabinets and now the Internet. The foundation of science is the tradition of scientific work within first a community of scholars, later the universities, and now corporate research labs.

24 For criticism: W.G. Runciman, Social Science and Political Theory.

25 Though a critic of Lévi-Strauss, surely his influence rubbed off.

26 The great difference between Alan and probably all historians: he has actually lived in a ‘medieval’ village. For him existence and ideas are coterminous; but this only came years later, when he returned to Nepal, and the Gurungs became less a study than a part of his life.

27 Mary Beard, John North and Simon Price, Religions of Rome: Volume 1 - A History.

28 Words and Things. See also Veda Mehta’s portrait in The Fly and the Fly Bottle.

29 A telling fault?

30 We see it even in someone like Karl Popper. For just how intolerant he could be: Bryan Magee, Confessions of a Philosopher: A Journey Through Western Philosophy.

31 There were connoisseurs of the sermon: Ruskin and his father. Tim Hilton, Ruskin: The Early Years.

32 The Philosophical Writings of Descartes Volume I, p.5.

33 The work of Kant is extraordinary in this regard...

The old empirical (and statutory) forms, which serve only to effect the subjection of the people, should accordingly resolve themselves into the original (rational) form which alone makes freedom the principle and indeed the condition of all coercion. For coercion is required for a just political constitution in the truest sense, and this will eventually be realised in the letter as well as in spirit. Kant’s Political Writings, edited and introduced by Hans Reiss, p.163.

Freedom equals coercion if we live in a rational polity. Note the emphasis on the letter...it is the core weakness of Kant’s politics and social morality: true political freedom requires far less explicit rules. This is nicely caught by Richard Davenport-Hines, when he describes the culture of the British institutions in the early 20th-century: the men in charge believed in influence not power. Enemies Within: Communists, The Cambridge Spies and the Making of Modern Britain, p.76. This created a culture of trust. I suggest that the kind of law-based freedom that Kant recommends increases distrust, as individual conduct is measured against an abstract standard few can match. For some confirmation of this idea, see Davenport-Hines’s comments on the corrosive effects of rational choice theory: p.xxvii.

34 For the psychological nature of this judgement, which is more sentiment than intellect: A Treatise of Human Nature, p.146.

35 A contrast is the writer Marina Warner; a very typical liberal, who simply accepts all conventional ideas on their own terms. Forms of Enchantment: Writings on Art & Artists. The result is a certain insouciance about truth, and almost no analysis of the concepts themselves, their relations to reality or even to the tradition to which they belong. For such characters ideas are little more than ingredients in a recipe. No problem for the artist who will use anything as material to get at some artistic truth; but it causes problems in art criticism and the higher journalism that trades in more prosaic truths.

36 Judgement, whether intellectual or moral, is primarily emotional. For the Roman acceptance of this idea, at least for ethical argument: Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes.

37 Think of how Gellner uses a Marx or Wittgenstein.

38 Obvious in Language and Solitude: Wittgenstein, Malinowski and the Habsburg Dilemma.

39 Follow Juan Pablo in Fortunata and Jacinta.

40 Kant the great theorist of this division. He gives a succinct definition in Kant’s Political Writings: science quantitive and a posteriori; moral qualitative and a priori.

41 Stuart Hampshire thinks this inevitable and a good thing: Spinoza: An Introduction to his Philosophical Thought. But that is to believe we are not moral animals. To replace morals with science is to replace our instincts with artificial substitutes; such as drugs or therapy. For the dangers of this substitution: Who Shares the Blame for the Mental Health Epidemic? where Will Self discusses doctor created illnesses.

42 This somewhat cryptic sentence is explained at length in my book Cartoons and Their Concepts (as yet unpublished).

43 From R.S. Thomas, Experiments in Collected Poems 1945-1990.

44 For why we should: my Cuddle This Reason.

45 Clearly brought out in his correspondence with Hobbes: The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volume III.

46 Evident in the dogmatism of Descartes’s responses to criticism. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volume III.

47 Peter Gay, The Enlightenment (two volumes).

48 A Treatise of Human Nature, p.153. This is not so different from Descartes’s own view on the nature of ‘clear and distinct’ ideas. There is something forceful, epiphanic about them. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volumes I and II.

49 For Scotland’s moral sense school: Stephen Buckle: Natural Law and the Theory of Property: From Grotius to Hume.

50 Duncan Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics.

51 For his stress on ‘moderation’: Hume’s Philosophical Politics.

52 Kant’s Political Writings.

53 Fiona MacCarthy: Edward Burne-Jones: The Last Pre-Raphaelite.

54 Contrast the English cleric with his geological interests, in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, against the conflicts between priest and pharmacist in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Giovanni Verga’s I Malavoglia: The House by the Medlar Tree.

55 Olivier Roy, Is Europe Christian?

56 Explored at much length in Cartoons and Their Concepts.

57 How much due to a mixing of the Czech and English character?

58 The error in his marvellous book on Freud: The Psychoanalytic Movement. The influence of the analyst resides less in his ideas than in the emotional relationship with the analysand.

59 Another key weakness; and perhaps a reason for his antipathy to Wittgenstein, for whom philosophy was poetry (of an odd kind). For fascinating discussion of ethics as a form of beauty: the chapter on Ferguson in Natural Law.

60 The great study of exile: V.S. Naipaul’s In a Free State.

61 Discussed in Cartoons and Their Concepts. Other thinkers crushed by academia: Max Weber and Nietzsche.

62 Fortunata and Jacinta, p.542.

63 In the John Locke lectures he famously added an extra lecture solely to deal with politics. 64 Ernest Gellner. I hope to post a piece on this dispute one day.

65 Hume’s Philosophical Politics, p.264.

66 Cartoons and Their Concepts.

67 V.S.Naipaul, The Mimic Men, p.200.

68 The theme of Cartoons and Their Concepts.

69 See Stefan Collini’s review of Michael Ignatieff in Common Writing: Essays on Literary Culture and Public Debate. It is the ineffectiveness of mere rational argument in political debate that caused Hobbes to return to rhetoric in Leviathan (he had previously dismissed it as unnecessary): Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes.

70 Typically Gellner has interesting things to say about the varieties of Islam: Muslim Society.

71 Clearly recognised in previous societies: Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes. The abstract use of language free of emotion is a rare quality.

72 One way to contrast Gellner with an ordinary academic is the distinction Tim Hilton draws between a mere drawing master (Harding) and a master artist (Turner) in The Young Ruskin.

73 The post-war period was a time this changed. However, since the 1980s the campus has returned to its isolation. For interesting discussion: David Bromwich, Politics by Other Means: Higher Education and Group Thinking.

74 For with links with religion: Rowan Williams’s elegy for John Zizioulas.

75 Celia Paul’s Self-Portrait for insight into the psyche of an artist.

76 Exhibit A: Thomas Dilworth’s biography of David Jones: Engraver, Soldier, Painter, Poet.

77 Elegy for John Zizioulas. Note the stress on uniqueness.

78 This changed somewhat with Brexit: how angry many academics became! Which led to a terrible coarsening of their ideas. Reduced to direct expression of their emotions, these ideas became little more than prejudices.

79 For a historian who mistakes this trend for the Truth: Richard J. Evans, In Defence of History.

80 Contrast the fate of true radicals: Noam Chomsky in the 1970s, 80s and 90s; Norman Finkelstein throughout his career; and on the other side of the political fighting line: Roger Scruton. All three have had work suppressed. Compare the remarks at the beginning of the Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left, where he recalls the repression of the original edition, with the preface to the first volume of Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, The Political Economy of Human Rights: The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, where the original work was pulped.

81 A point strongly made by Richard Sennett. SIAH: Public Life with Richard Sennett.

82 Or if they do go to church they prefer the sermons of scientists to the preaching of the intellectuals, modernity’s clergy. Though it is not so easy to make this distinction. Capitalism has plenty of preachers, while in characters like Richard Dawkins science is turned into ‘Science’, a faith. There is a long discussion in Cartoons and Their Concepts. Here I simplify and exaggerate for effect. In truth the human animal suffers many psychic ailments for which religion offers a remedy. Today Big Pharma is our Catholic Church...how much better is its prescriptions?

83 The great book on this type is Aileen Kelly’s Mikhail Bakunin: A Study in the Psychology and Politics of Utopianism. For the contrast between an authentic and an inauthentic intellectual: Feijoo and Juan Pablo in Fortunata and Jacinta. For Juan ideas express a mood. Feijoo, in contrast, tries to tie his ideas down to reality; beautifully captured in the scene when he forces himself to tell Fortunata the truth: if you can't be moral pretend to be so; this is all that society requires.

84 Contrast the intellectual Jaykar, who persuades Sudhir to work in the countryside for illiterate peasants, with the Hochstadts, who transform their experiences into innocuous ideas; which become a vaccination against reality.

85 For similarities to the ne’er-do-well: compare with ‘Ntoni ‘Ntoni in I Malavoglia.

86 One of the odd things about modern art: many of those called artists are actually intellectuals. Examples aplenty in Forms of Enchantment.

87 From Donald Davie, To a Brother in the Mystery: Circa 1290 in Collected Poems. The poem is about two different sculptors working in the same room.

88 Brilliantly caught both in Performance and Keiron Pim’s Jumpin’ Jack Flash: David Litvinoff and the Rock n’ Roll Underground.

89 The interviews are collected in Understandings of the Modern World.

90 A History of My Mind and King’s, Cambridge and the World: An Academic Life.

91 Was it his teenage years as a Christian?

92 Alan interview.

93 The nature of an abstract concept and its fundamental weakness. For all general ideas are particular ideas, filed under a general term: David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, p.69.

94 Gary Snyder, What You Should Know To Be A Poet in Regarding Wave.

95 His recent stand on a censorship issue an obvious example of why he wouldn’t fit in.

96 The former wonderfully described in Jumpin’ Jack Flash: David Litvinoff and the Rock n’ Roll Underground.

97 For a musical equivalent: Simon Rattle on the Record 1988. 98 Compare with my Working Class Highbrow.

99 Again I explore this at length in Cartoons and Their Concepts. Education itself is a religion.

100 See David Kaiser’s interview with Glenn Loury. It is not just that intellectuals can be found anywhere in society; there is something about the bureaucratic nature of the university that turns off the creative thinker: SIAH: Public Life with Richard Sennett.

101 Powerfully captured in Self-Portrait. Love and family threatens self-realisation.

102 V.S. Naipaul, In a Free State.

103 The exemplary case: Arthur Koestler.

104 There are plenty examples amongst Alan’s interviewees.

105 I give various reasons for this in Bolshy. There is an odd novel that explores just this kind of personality: Penelope Gilliatt, The Cutting Edge.

106 See the Simon Blackburn and Johnny Lyon reviews of David Edmonds’s biography.

107 Powerfully expressed in Self-Portrait. The problem of much contemporary art: it doesn't express feelings but ideas. Many examples in Forms of Enchantment. The result: art and the writing about art become almost interchangeable intellectual activities. All is text.

108 François Truffaut: Letters, translated by Gilbert Adair.

109 Here is the source of superstition. See Arnold Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage.

110 A somewhat different but related scenario is given by Blair Worden, The English Civil Wars 1640-1660, p.15.

111 This changed with Brexit and Trump. Suddenly they became adolescents again. There is extensive discussion in Cartoons and Their Concepts.

112 See the early chapters in Jenny Uglow’s Sybil and Cyril: Cutting Through Time.

113 For a wonderful account of the latter type and the kind of milieu they inhabit: Marius Kociejowski, A Factotum of the Book Trade.

114 Kenneth Clark, quoted in Enemies Within: Communists, The Cambridge Spies and the Making of Modern Britain, p.197.

115 My Working Class Highbrow.

116 Naipaul is brilliant on this. See especially The Mimic Men and In a Free State.

117 Peter Jenkins, Mrs Thatcher's Revolution: The Ending of the Socialist Era.

118 Though again I have to be careful. There was once a strong branch of socialism that believed in reclaiming the past: Fiona MacCarthy, The Simple Life: C.R. Ashbee in the Cotswolds.

119 Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class. Teachers in working class schools tend to favour the brighter pupils. Although for a counter example: Iain Crichton-Smith, In the Classroom in The Red Door: The Complete English Stories 1946-77.

120 To freely follow the rules; this is Kant’s ideal society. His political philosophy is that of Thomas Hobbes, but where the totalitarian idea replaces the authoritarian despot (monarch or parliament) as the legitimating authority. Kant’s Political Writings.

121 Education is understood as a means to professional qualification and a good job. It is not supposed to produce the drop-out. This dangerous side to university - well-known to the upper bourgeoise who can tolerate the bohemian - was once unthinkable to parents in the lower classes.

122 If you think I exaggerate read Self-Portrait.

123 In a book full of classic types, here is another one: Maximiliano in Fortunata and Jacinta.

124 Sybil and Cyril, p.58. See also Christopher Neve’s essay on Titian in Immortal Thoughts: Late Style in a Time of Plague.

125 I hear Hume whispering in my ear: ‘So little are men governed by reason in their sentiments and opinions, that they always judge more of objects by comparison than from their intrinsic worth and value. A Treatise of Human Nature, p.420. Don’t confuse capitalism with human nature Mr Schloss!

126 For the nature of ideas: Cartoons and Their Concepts.

127 Within the last twenty years this is changing, as the public realm loses legitimacy. There are many reasons for this, not least the consumer culture of modern capitalism. But a key cause is the proliferation of politics into all aspects of life, as the idea of democracy becomes the legitimating concept for the distribution of all resources, material and intellectual. The parallels with Renaissance Italy, with its effects on England’s political culture in the 17th century, are summarised in Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes.

The Roman rhetoricians and their Renaissance followers had emphasised the public duties of citizens to such a degree as to encourage an almost philistine rejection of the values associated with the scholarly and contemplative life. (p.291)

Rowan Williams has many interesting things to say about how a representative democracy needs undemocratic elements to keep it politically healthy: Ethics, law and the future of democracy. While I agree with most of what he says (although he elides how much the post-Brexit chaos was due to the hardcore Remainers), I think he gets the nature of representative democracy wrong. It is actually a means - the reason so popular with modern elites - to limit the population’s influence on the central issues of power and wealth. Since the 1960s, however, as the idea of democracy has to disguise a decreasing amount of real democratic input into the core economic concerns, the rhetoric of democracy has risen exponentially and is swamping our actual political arrangements, which are those of an elected aristocratic republic. Cartoons and Their Concepts has a detailed discussion. As Hobbes knew, the values of an aristocrat are very different from those of a democrat, and these differences spill out across all of civilised life.

128 I Malavoglia is an interesting study of a traditional society just beginning to experience the impact of the nation state and international trade.

129 The older capitalism was quite different: Iris Origo: The Merchant of Prato. Weber, of course, was interested precisely in this shift to a rational, bureaucratic capitalism.

130 A classic instance is Marina Warner. It would be interesting to chart her life and see just how closely her ideas track the conventional wisdom. For a start, compare how she appears in Iain Sinclair’s Hackney, The Red Rose Empire with her essays in Forms of Enchantment.

131 For all its problems, and my Cartoons and Their Concepts list many, Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle is a key late 20th-century text.

132 Nick Davies, Flat Earth News.

133 Something of this is captured in that strange novel by John Fowles, The Magus. The first great writer to explore this world of artifice, created by the newspapers and cinema: Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies. The characters no longer recognise the borderline between fact and fiction. All things to surrender to the imagination and a good time.

134 The evidence is in Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap. Although the author doesn't realise that meritocracy has changed its meaning.

135 For an extreme contrast between the actual facts - individuals choosing to kill millions - and the belief system: Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar.

136 Bolshy.

137 For a lively discussion: David F. Noble The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention.

138 Bolshy.

139 For a luminous account of the education of the elite in Tudor times: Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes. Trained to rule a hierarchical monarchy, whose models were Roman republicans. No wonder Hobbes and Hume were so alive to its effects!

140 For the psychology of the saint, my The Tyranny of the Concept.

141 It happened to Christianity when it became an imperial religion. Peter Brown, The Cult of Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity and Through the Eye of the Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD.

142 For the origins of elite radicalism: Our Age.

143 The reason for this is brilliantly described by Hobbes in Leviathan: morality arises out of the public realm; and this realm is defined by the sovereign body (king or council). For the complexities of the sovereign, who is both a representative and the embodiment of the commonwealth, A Vision of Politics: Hobbes. Leaving aside these complexities, the Leviathan itself - the body politic - is a moral absolute, which cannot be challenged; albeit the governing idea of that body changes over time: the Crown, Parliament, Great Britain, the nation, the People.

144 There is a much longer analysis in Bolshy and Cartoons and Their Concepts.

145 The great character study is Guillermina in Fortunata and Jacinta. Working for the poor this upper class lady is the most imperious person in Madrid. A telling characteristic: she finds the burden of telling lies too heavy.

146 Fortunata and Jacinta, p.444.

147 Acutely caught by Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power.

148 The violence of the initiation rites of the Iatmul in Gregory Bateson’s Naven. Our’s are less physically violent, but may do more damage mentally and emotionally. What fascinates about the book is how Bateson's scientific theories prevent him from understanding the society he studies.

149 Especially for an elite. See the public school chapter in Our Age.

150 Although not the message of David Graeber’s Bullsh*t Jobs it is what he actually describes. Graeber was a clever man but a superficial thinker. 151 Fortunata and Jacinta, p.443.

152 Kant makes the interesting point that we can improve people only in their behaviour. Progress is creating a social environment were each treats each with ever great respect for their freedom. What Kant doesn’t consider is the tension this creates between social control and spontaneous emotion. The assumption appears to be that we will all become like professors, where the intellect subdues the desires. Kant’s Political Writings. For the negative effects of such sensual coolness: Effie Ruskin in The Young Ruskin.

Kant has too narrow an idea of social freedom - to freely follow rules to which we have freely given our assent - which can easily be conflated with freedom of the mind (a quite different and more expansive quality). The paradox of a rule-based freedom is that we end up with less liberty not more, because we must submit the body to the mind, itself limited by the ideas of the public arena. As Hobbes knew: politics is restriction. One of our contemporary ironies is that social movements that talk about respecting the individual are very keen on suppressing thought, which they re-define as social action. Such tactics are implicit in Kant. Hume was sharper: freedom of thought has little connection with the political nature of a country: The History of Great Britain: The Reigns of James I and Charles I.

153 Of course there is a pre-history, covered in Our Age.

154 The classic work: Lionel Trilling, Authenticity and Sincerity.

155 Is Europe Christian? Richard Davenport-Hines argues that this happened in the 1920s in Britain. Enemies Within. Maybe with the belief. But the moral economy of Christianity, together with many of its rituals, were still in place in the 1950s. The forms to collapse only long after the belief has been hollowed out.

156 See Caroline Humphrey’s cutting comment on our ‘individualism’ in her interview with Alan. ‘Individualism’ in the contemporary West is like ‘democracy’ in Soviet Europe: a fancy label on an empty tin.

157 Kant’s Political Writings, p.74.

158 David Marquand, Decline of the Public.

159 Diagnosing the same problem Davenport-Hines gives a different explanation: communist/ populist subversion. Enemies Within.

160 For the difficulties of trying to morally manage a community even with the help of the divine, see the extraordinary convent chapters in Fortunata and Jacinta. God only does the reformatory business for those religiously inclined, and even then it can have paradoxical effects: the drunken madness of Mauricia who has visions of the Holy Mary.

161 Unless you are a member of the elite, in which case you work really hard to retain your wealth and power: The Meritocracy Trap. The best book on this split between a hard working, ideologically committed elite and a flaccid majority is Rex Warner’s The Aerodrome. This book the centrepiece of Cartoons and Their Concepts.

162 Thomas Hardy, A Wet Night in Collected Poems.

163 One of the odd things about the 20th-century is just how much work has gone into trying to prove that our childhood Eden was in fact a Hell; from Freud to misery kitsch we are told of the nightmare that is our early years. Yet how rarely in life do we come across people with such traumatic childhoods. This borne out by Alan’s interviews. Strangely, the worst childhood was the one spent in progressive schools.

164 Three Guineas. Not the division of labour but the relations between individuals is what should concern us.

165 For just how important are the domestic tasks to both identity and self-worth: Fortunata and Jacinta. The identity of women opening up in mid-century, this caused difficulties for those whose need is to be a wife and mother: Francis King, The Widow; a beautifully subtle novel.

166 Guillermina in Fortunata and Jacinta. An acute study suggests that by the 1950s this outlet for the more publicly inclined middle class woman - charity work - was becoming more difficult: Angus Wilson, The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot. Contrast the breakdown of this eponymous heroine with the impregnable Guillermina.

167 Progressives usually have to wait a generation for their ideas to come under radical attack. Thus the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 70s has become the target of this ‘rebellious’ age.

168 Marcel Mauss: The Gift. There is interesting discussion in Avner Offer, The Challenge of Affluence: Self-Control and Well-Being in the United States and Britain Since 1950.

169 Kant, who believed an absolute moral duty could be instilled into our minds, nevertheless writes something that sounds odd to modern ears: women’s grace. Kant's Political Writings, p.77. Such grace gives a woman power. The great study: Stendhal, The Charterhouse of Parma.

170 For a different idea of feminism, one stressing specifically female characteristics, see the portrait of Countess Franziska zu Reventlow and the erotic movement in Joachim Radkau, Weber: A Biography, pp.380-7.

171 A description of an initiation ritual from the inside: Stephen Hugh-Jones interview with Alan. 172 In theory. In practice the ritual changes, as its rules are not written down. Raymond Firth, The Work of Gods in Tikopia and Alan’s interview with Stephen Hugh-Jones.

173 V.S. Naipaul, In a Free State. The narrator’s state is extreme because his transition is extreme.

174 To give an example...the early to mid work of Paula Rego is too public, too external, bordering on pastiche: the faces of Miró, Ernst, Dubuffet, Art Brut, Pop, and Francis Bacon peer out of her canvases. Then the artist slowly returns to her own self, before bang! the masterpieces begin. Paul McEwen, Paula Rego. This is not the story he tells, but the story we see....

175 It would be interesting to know if his parents were Conservatives. My family, like many mining families, were socially conservative but nevertheless voted Labour. This diffuses the tensions somewhat.

176 It seems the lot of most artists; ESOP Artist Talk Timothy Hyman 2020.

177 The one exception the 1960s, where there really does appear to have been a generation war;

not unconnected to the collapse of Christianity, when two moral systems went into battle.
178 Stefan Collini: the vast majority of such students take vocational courses. On not “justifying” the humanities.

179 Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-administrative University and Why It Matters.

180 There is a longer discussion in Bolshy.

181 For both the unreality and adamantine self-confidence of evangelicals: John Ruskin, The Early Years, p.267. However, there are evangelicals - there are many in this book - who have plenty of humanity, self-reflection, culture and intelligence. The Schloss puts his thumbs up.

182 Every Man For Himself and God Against All, p.94.

183 In Fortunata and Jacinta the high intelligence of the Mother Superior is contrasted with the weaker mind of the convent’s scholar, whose intellect is marred by her naivety. It points to a wider problem of academic life: its over-reliance on trust, which feeds into callow views about ideas abstracted from their real world effects. When Mauricia has her vision, Sister Facunda is inclined to believe it. The Mother Superior seeks more mundane reasons; her intelligence measured not by an ability to understand and articulate ideas but to relate these ideas to the facts of life; a far harder task.

184 A Walk to Hobbycraft.

185 My Befuddling the Bourgeoisie.

186 Other difficult students: Fortunata, Papitos, Mauricia La Dura in Fortunata and Jacinta.

187 Robert Wyatt says something similar: he started with the avant-garde and had to learn his way into the classics; though being Robert Wyatt, his idea of the classics is very different from most. Robert Wyatt Documentary (Little Red Robin Hood 1998).

188 Andrew Robinson, Sudden Genius? The Gradual Path to Creative Breakthroughs. 189 Think of that other Conrad story, An Outpost of Progress in Tales of Unrest.

190 The best discussion, Joyce Cary, Art and Reality.

191 Paul Klee, On Modern Art, p.15.

192 My Train Them Good.

193 See the early years of Grace Hartigan. Cathy Curtis, Restless Ambition: Grace Hartigan, Painter.

194 Margot and Rudolf Wittkower, Born Under Saturn: The Character and Conduct of Artists. One way to read this book is to think of the artist’s relation to society...as the artist became more involved in the social field so the relations became more tense; some able to cope, others not at all. The rise in the artist's prestige had set him on a collision course with the manners and constraints of respectable society; the great problem of how these tensions handled. After their first entry into elite circles the idea of the artist slowly changes - to that of the gentleman, a civilised member of the academies. I suggest much of the Romantic rebellion was against this artistic conformity. This led to the great stretch of bohemia that came to an end in the 1990s.

195 Cartoons and Their Cartoons is both a disquisition and an attack on this trait. 

Richard Marshall: Untitled