ANDREW MOTION
They read good books, and quote, but never learn
A language other than the scream of rocket-burn.
Our straighter talk is drowned but ironclad:
Elections, money, empire, oil and Dad.
KENAN MALIK The Poet Laureate Andrew Motion,
with his controversial poem about the war on Iraq.
ANDREW MOTION I've never written anything since
I was appointed Laureate which has had such an effect as that. It's been translated
into about 30 different languages, it's whizzed around the world, I've had
literally hundreds of emails from people out of the blue about it.
KENAN MALIK As writer, critic, academic, campaigner
on many social issues from homelessness to war, as well as bard to the Queen,
Andrew Motion has as good a claim as any to the title of 'public intellectual'.
But is that how he sees himself?
ANDREW MOTION Some of the anxiety that I have
about categorising myself as an intellectual is to do with that very word
intellectual seems to create some sort of barrier between the person being
it and the audience that the're reaching. It implies a certain degree of superiority.
I would see myself purely and simply as a poet who has a rather peculiar public
office to perform.
KENAN MALIK There might be an element of false
modesty here, but Andrew Motion's doubts also reveal the uncertainty that
intellectuals now feel about their own role in society. It's an uncertainty
that Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at the University of Kent, and author
of a forthcoming book on the public intellectual, both acknowledges and regrets.
FRANK FUREDI It seems to me what intellectuals
have done is that they've brought to the surface important problems that face
society, that are on the subconscious of culture, of society. They've provided
societies with insights, with concepts, with perspectives that allowed people
and communities to make sense of the world.
KENAN MALIK How do you think that the role of
the public intellectuals has changed in recent years?
FRANK FUREDI We don't really have a cultural
terrain that is hospitable to difficult, complicated, challenging ideas. I
think these days we are more in a policy-oriented, a much more technically
oriented regime where intellectuals only have a marginal character.
KENAN MALIK Do you think thats a change unique
to Britain?
FRANK FUREDI I think over the last 10 or 15
years we've seen a gradual trend whereby all Western societies seem to be
subject to very similar patterns. Of course there are national variations
and in places like France, there is still, at least outwardly greater, respect
being given to the intellectual and a greater role, but when you actually
scratch the surface the role of the intellectual has diminished in just about
every society I can think of. Whether it's in Britain or in Germany, or in
France, Italy, it's a very similar sad process.
KENAN MALIK But are intellectuals really an
endangered species? After all, you can barely open your paper or switch on
the TV or radio without yet another celebrity don imposing upon you - such
as, perhaps, those in this very programme. So what really has changed in recent
years? Here's Geoff Mulgan, director of the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit,
a kind of think tank inside government.
GEOFF MULGAN Thirty or forty years ago many
of the ideas coming into politics and government came from universities, often
from the big universities, the LSE, Oxford, Harvard and so on. For a number
of reasons their influence has changed and to some extent declined. I think
the whole intellectual ecology, if you like, in the UK and some other countries,
notably the US, have changed in the last 30 or 40 years. In part that's a
change in the character of university life where universities have become
somewhat more inward looking, funding is more determined by peer pressures
and peer review. Funding councils tend to be somewhat more enclosed within
their disciplines than was the case 30 or 40 years ago. There's also been
a rise of think tanks for sure. There's been a rise of informed comment in
the media and all of that has meant much more competition, if you like, around
the promotion of ideas. So the role which some public intellectuals played
in the 50s and 60s has been, to some extent, dissipated. Those roles are more
likely now to be placed by journalists and leading commentators in the media
have filled the space which a generation or two ago would have been filled
by professors in universities.
KENAN MALIK Political and social life evolves
and intellectuals will have to adapt or die. So what? It's just opening up
the marketplace of ideas to greater competition, suggests Stefan Collini,
professor of intellectual history and English literature at Cambridge University.
STEFAN COLLINI Certainly in the first two-thirds
of the 20th century, intellectuals profited in some way from a wider social
deference. There was a sense that these were people who made up a very small
proportion of society with a particular cultural background and particular
level of education which was not at all widely diffused. One of the things
that's happening I think is that with the decline of that kind of deference,
a much wider range of types of people are looked to for comment and guidance.
And I think it's shaken the really rather authoritative and elevated role
that people might have ascribed to some of the leading intellectuals a couple
of generations ago, and now one would think of these intellectuals figures
as quite often being in competition with other kinds of actors in say the
celebrity culture or other kinds of actors in the political world. It seems
to me that the greater plurality of types of figure who are called upon these
days must be a gain.
KENAN MALIK It's true, for example, that there's
a greater diversity in the backgrounds of the cast list and even presenters
of a programme such as Analysis than would have been the case in the past.
But let's not exaggerate. It was never was the case that all intellectuals
were once the products of Eton and Oxbridge. From Thomas Paine in eighteenth
century to CLR James in the twentieth, there was been a long and healthy tradition
of working class or self-taught intellectuals.
In any case, as anyone who uses the Internet knows, a plurality of sources
is not necessarily a gain. Rumour and fact, truths and falsehoods jostle with
each other for our attention, and one needs good judgment to discriminate
between them. But good judgement is precisely what the so-called democratisation
of culture seems to have undermined. Pluralism has helped create an 'anything
goes' attitude where every idea is thrown into the pot. The focus group, for
instance, which lies at the heart of the modern political process, is rooted
in the belief everyone's view is of equal worth. Might this not blunt our
ability to distinguish between good and bad ideas, great insights and commonplace
idiocies? Here's the philosopher Onora O'Neill, principal of Newnham College,
Cambridge.
ONORA O'NEILL A lot of people would say democracy
and populism aren't the same thing and that if we're serious about democracy,
which I am, you have to think about giving people ways of taking part in and
reflecting on public affairs which, as it were, support their abilities to
judge well, rather than encouraging them to take sides or to identify with
celebrities or against hate figures and this sort of thing. I think it's a
very difficult thing to see how one can conduct public debate in ways that
are genuinely democratic, rather than wearing a populist sheen.
KENAN MALIK Democracy views all people as being
of equal worth. But not all ideas. Hence Baroness O'Neill's ambivalence about
the democratisation of culture. And she's not alone. Mary-Kay Wilmers is editor
of the London Review of Books, a magazine that might appear wilfully
old-fashioned. Does she see the magazine as swimming against the tide of contemporary
culture?
MARY-KAY WILMERS Yes, I see it as an area where
difficult subjects and current subjects are discussed by people who, well
they do discuss them in other papers too, but they discuss them at greater
length. They have mostly more freedom to argue but I mean we're not very much
in favour of opinion, we're in favour of reflection and argument and building
an argument. If there isn't the same attitude of deference to toffs who are
intellectuals, then everybody's going to have more sense of their own entitlement
and they don't want to read it at great length, they want to sound bite and
in a way that's fine, if that's what they want. It's not what we want.
KENAN MALIK Such a stand against soundbite culture
may sound virtuous. But ideas must have a wider audience if they are to flourish.
In last year's Reith lectures on Radio 4, entitled 'A Question of Trust',
Onora O'Neill made a case for a fundamental transformation of public life,
a case that has only benefited from the higher public profile she now enjoys
as a result of those lectures.
ONORA O'NEILL Since I gave those lectures I
have had innumerable invitations. I try to manage about two public occasions
a week, which is actually quite a sweat, talking to, on the whole, public
sector groups, professional groups, charity groups, big professional associations,
large audiences on some occasion.
KENAN MALIK Professor O'Neill is someone who
wears many hats - a philosopher, a broadcaster, the principal of Newnham College,
a cross-bencher in the House of Lords, a member of several parliamentary committees.
So does she consider herself to be a public intellectual?
ONORA O'NEILL I think to my slight surprise
I probably do now. But I have to tell you a lot of what I do intellectually
is not public at all because when I practice my trade, I sit with one graduate
student or drive across on a Saturday to talk to a small seminar run by the
Graduate Philosophy Society of another university and I wouldn't feel myself,
as it were, true to the calling if I deserted that sort of activity in favour
of the big audiences and the public arena. To be a public intellectual, I
think you've got to be an intellectual. We're rather like weeds, we spring
up. It takes quite a long time to become such a person because you've got
to have a certain dedication to the intellectual side of it and then, as it
were, you may or may not go public in certain respects.
KENAN MALIK For Onora O'Neill the Reith Lectures
provided a springboard to help launch her ideas into a more public forum.
For Andrew Motion, the office of Poet Laureate affords the same advantage.
ANDREW MOTION Being Poet Laureate undoubtedly
makes it easier for me to speak in public. In terms of the platform it provides
me to speak from. The role that I see for myself as a Poet Laureate is essentially
to do with breaking down walls. I mean previous to my appointment I could
have shouted myself blue in the face and a few people might have paid attention,
I might have got an article in the paper, but now it more or less happens
as a matter of course that if I do feel strongly and want to say something
then there is a space in which to say it. Now this is a terrific privilege
and I feel it very sharply, and I feel very blessed in it. It also means that
I must be careful not to waste the opportunity that it gives or to dilute
the authority of the position by firing off about things that I don't particularly
care about. In other words, I have to make sure that when I do battle on about
something or other that it's something that I'm absolutely clear that I think
about and deeply about and value highly.
KENAN MALIK There are many things you have battled
on about, you've written about apartheid, about homelessness, about national
identity, many social and political themes. What drives you to write about
these things?
ANDREW MOTION I have written about many of these
things. The traditional expectation is of course that the Laureate will just
write about certain events in the Royal calendar. That's the long and short
of the public remit. Or that has been the long and short of the public remit.
I have written a few of those poems and I mean to go on respecting that as
and when I can. But at the same time it seems to me very important to put
those poems, to make them part of a much bigger picture, to write poems about
matters of national interest.
KENAN MALIK Andrew Motion's view seems like
a throwback to an old-fashioned, and almost romantic, vision of the intellectual
as a dissenter. But is there a price to pay these days for taking such a stand?
Here's Mary-Kay Wilmers, editor of the London Review of Books.
MARY-KAY WILMERS I think it's the role of the
intellectual not to be cowed by received wisdom. One thing I do dislike now
quite a lot is the epithets that are directed at us. I don't like the phrase
'the chattering classes'. I don't like the way, if you express an opinion
that's contrary to the mainstream it's knee-jerk or opportunistic or cynical,
or if it's on the left, it's the Prada Meinhof. And I think we've had a lot
of that directed at us. By people who, I don't know, wish us ill or want a
bigger audience. But we don't want that audience.
KENAN MALIK But an intellectual who has no audience
is no intellectual - just some cleverclogs talking to himself. It makes no
difference how good or right your argument is if it convinces no one but those
already convinced. An intellectual has to be accountable to his or her ideas
by engaging with the public.
But what happens when the winning of an audience becomes more important than
the message you wish to convey? It's a cliché to suggest that we live
in a celebrity culture, but the observation is no less true for that. Here’s
the Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion.
ANDREW MOTION Anybody who appears regularly
in public, pontificating about one thing or another, however good they are,
however shrewd they are, as soon as they do this, they achieve a kind of celebrity
status which in itself is problematic for the message they are trying to get
across. The problem to do with celebrity is to to do with the difficulty of
the people who have become celebrities by one means or another, the difficulty
they have in defending their intellectual life and the pronouncements which
arise from it against the personality-driven curiousity about themselves,
the way they live and in particular their private lives . Personally I think
it is important not to get drawn off into the kind of 'do I or do I not re-flock
my wallpaper' kind of argument.
KENAN MALIK So do you think that the rise of
celebrity culture has in a sense trivialised intellectual debate?
ANDREW MOTION I think there is something inherently
trivialising about celebrity culture. And I suppose really what I’m
trying to say is that celebrity culture is the problem. There is no problem
as such with celebrities if they’ve earnt it and they’re saying
sensible things.
KENAN MALIK There have always been celebrity
intellectuals - think of the media status that TS Elliot, or AJP Taylor, or
Isaiah Berlin possessed. But, sociologist Frank Furedi argues, today's celebrity
culture has helped transform the way that ideas are presented to the public.
FRANK FUREDI I think the problem comes when
in certain cases there are very strong pressures on the intellectual not to
be an intellectual but to be an entertainer and not to promote ideals and
to challenge people with important ideals and ideas, but to titillate people
with fairly insubstantial entertainment formats.
KENAN MALIK So are you put off from having your
own radio or TV show because of that?
FRANK FUREDI No, I would love to have my own
TV show. And on a good day maybe I could play a role of an intellectual through
TV.
KENAN MALIK And perhaps through radio too. Though
whether presenting Analysis makes one an intellectual or an entertainer,
I'm not quite sure.
The intellectual as entertainer is one major change in the cultural landscape.
The intellectual as technocrat is another. It's a transformation revealed
in the rise of the think tank and in the changing relationship between governments
and academics. Here's Geoff Mulgan of the No10 Strategy Unit.
GEOFF MULGAN Government employs far more economists,
far more social scientists than it did twenty or thirty years ago. Far more
of the day-to-day business of policy making around say welfare-to-work policies,
criminal justice, education is informed by detailed empirical research advised
by academics, than was the case in the past. So that sort of normal science,
if you like, has become much more important to the business, both of universities
and of government.
The shift of government and politics to greater pragmatism, a less ideological
context, more emphasis on what works, has certainly rescued the influence
of a certain kind of intellectual, that is to say purely ideological, very
theoretically driven intellectuals don't have as much influence as they might
have had before. But it has actually opened up in other respects much greater
influence for intellectuals. In a way it's perhaps a revitalisation of quite
a healthy British tradition of social science empiricism, which is always
perhaps compared to some of the traditions of Germany or France, being much
more concerned with the concrete and understanding the general through the
concrete rather than the other way round.
KENAN MALIK Working with the concrete. It makes
intellectuals sound like engineers. And in a sense that's just what many have
become: sober professionals dealing with minutiae of policy-making, rather
than open-ended explorers of ideas. For Geoff Mulgan such old-fashioned British
empiricism is a good thing. For Frank Furedi, on the other hand, it undermines
the very essence of what it is to be an intellectual.
FRANK FUREDI I often think of the person working
for a think tank, and making up ideas on the back of an envelope as very much
the personification of how we treat ideas. If you look at the way that think
tanks and people involved in policy making in public affairs promiscuously
go from one idea to the next, what is the big idea of January is easily forgotten
by May, that's very much the way we seem to be treating ideas. And I think
as a result of that we simply do not have time for ideas that take a long
time to evolve, we don't cultivate people to think in a long termist, experimental
sense, we want ideas with quick results, ideas that are unambiguous, ideas
that are fairly black and white.
LEE EDWARDS That's true that politicians tend
to want solutions for problems that they're facing today, or perhaps tomorrow
or maybe even next week. And so you do have this question, is that going to
be the best solution for a particular policy question or should you sort of
step back and take a longer look at it?
KENAN MALIK Lee Edwards, Distinguished Fellow
in Conservative Thought at the Heritage Foundation, President Bush's favourite
Washington think tank.
LEE EDWARDS It seems to me what the Heritage
Foundation does is to do both. When there is a particular bill or legislative
item which is before the Congress we'll provide analysis on that. But at the
same time will look at bigger issues, you might say more controversial issues,
such as social security, missile defence, both of which we’ve been writing
and talking about for several decades.
KENAN MALIK Many critics of think tanks suggest
that you're not really public intellectuals, but simply experts who are very
narrow in your way of thinking.
LEE EDWARDS I don't like to sort of, you know,
get into a battle of curriculum vitae, but I know, for example, speaking for
myself, I have written thirteen books, I had them published in a number of
publications which I think are rather substantial including the Washington
Post, and as a matter of fact I also am an Adjunct Professor of Politics
at the Catholic University of America. And I don't think that I'm atypical.
KENAN MALIK But a long cv does not always an
intellectual make. Here, as elsewhere in life, size is not everything. In
any case, as Lee Edwards happily acknowledges, the power of think tanks like
the Heritage Foundation resides more in their political clout than in their
intellectual acumen.
LEE EDWARDS What's remarkable, it seems to me,
is that if one looks around Washington DC today, and looks at the various
executive departments, that there are a number of think-tank people who have
positions of responsibility. For example, in the State Department there are,
and I counted this up the other day, about four under-secretaries who all
come from think-tanks. For example, over across the river at the Pentagon
in the Defence Department, the Deputy Secretary of Defence, Mr Wolfowitz,
is a graduate, if you will, of a think-tank here in Washington DC. But what
Lee Edwards sees as the strength of think tanks may in fact be their weakness.
Institutions such as the Heritage Foundation have become an adjunct of government,
a means by which intellectuals have transformed themselves from outsiders,
often challenging received wisdom, to consummate insiders, at ease in the
corridors of power. And once on the inside, critical thinking often becomes
subordinate to the needs of the political process.
KENAN MALIK But how new is all this criticism?
Our culture has dumbed down. Intellectuals are not as good as they were. They're
cleverer in other countries. Haven't we heard all this before? Haven't the
doom-mongers always been with us? Professor Stefan Collini of Cambridge University
certainly thinks so.
STEFAN COLLINI The language of the decline of
the intellectual is something which is repeated in different forms in each
generation. The real intellectual is always assumed to be elsewhere - in the
past, hence the whole theory of decline, or in other societies. In that traditional
British view those intellectuals are always presumed to be in France. It's
not at all so obvious that there are any intellectual figures who are more
gigantic in France at the moment than in Britain or anywhere else actually.
There is a certain glory or grandeur which attaches to those who were in previous
generations, those who are now dead. Those we see around us, we see too much
of the comings and goings. We see too much of the stops and starts, in this
case of their thinking and their writing, perhaps to put them on the pedestal.
So that always produces this optical illusion it seems to me that really great
names are in the past.
KENAN MALIK It's true that every generation
tends to look back to a previous generation as a golden age. And yet, what
is happening today is not simply a replay of the past. Think of the intellectual
cast list from, say, the 1940s and 50s - Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre,
TS Eliot, John Maynard Keynes, Karl Popper, George Orwell, JBS Haldane, Claude
Levi-Strauss, Frantz Fanon, Simone de Beauvoir, and so on. The intellectual
depth of this line-up, compared to a similar cast list from today, is surely
more than just an optical illusion. As is the importance many of these figures
placed on being not just intellectuals, but intellectuals involved in political
movements and public debate.
It's as great a myth to believe that nothing has changed as to believe that
everything has changed. Celebrity culture, think thank philosophy, the democratisation
of culture - each has helped recast the role of the public intellectual in
our society, transforming both the 'public' and the 'intellectual' side of
the equation - and not necessarily for the better.
In the end, though, the question is this: why should we listen to intellectuals
at all, however brilliant they may be? Here's Andrew Motion.
ANDREW MOTION I think there can be something
embarrassing or worse about writers just as there is about any other group
of people who are in some sense giving their opinion without taking responsibility
for it. There is a kind of suspicion that free-floating, free-standing intellectuals
might, have separated themselves from society so why should we take it from
them especially if their pronouncements are not surrounded by practical actions.
In other worlds especially if they don't seem to be taking responsibility
in some way for their words. They're not getting involved in practical support
for what it is that they might be saying. There must be deeds, protests going
on, marches, you name it, along with the simple fact of saying a thing. They
may well turn around to us and say: the words themselves are the responsibility
you fool, but I think that nevertheless there is something rather repellent
about people who stand outside the flow of daily events and tell what we should
think and so on about things.
But what's important is that writing in general and poetry in particularly
moves at a different speed and takes longer perspectives. So a good poem about
whatever event it is or whatever circumstance it is that's being spoken about,
might not make its mark immediately. But it might well turn out to be the
thing which survives almost everything else
.
KENAN MALIK And as with poetry in particular,
so with ideas in general. But at their best, the ideas of intellectuals help
provide depth and vision to public debate, clarify moral and social issues,
and possess long-term significance. That's why we should worry about a culture
that encourages intellectuals to become entertainers and in which long-term
thinking often seems subordinate to short-term policy needs.