Nothing To Lose But Our Chins!
It should be noted that there is now no intelligentsia that is
not in some sense "Left". Perhaps the last right wing intellectual was
T.E.Lawrence. Since about 1930 everyone describable as an
"intellectual" has lived in a state of chronic discontent with the
existing order. Necessarily so, because society as it was constituted
had no room for him. In an Empire that was simply stagnant, neither
being developed nor falling to pieces, and in an England ruled by people
who chief asset was their stupidity, to be 'clever' was to be suspect.
If you had the kind of brain that could understand the poems of
T.S.Eliot or the theories of Karl Marx, the higher-ups would see to it
that you were kept out of any important job. The intellectuals could
find a function for themselves only in the literary reviews and the
left-wing political parties.
The mentality of the English
left-wing intelligentsia can be studied in half a dozen weekly and
monthly papers. The immediately striking thing about all these papers
is their generally negative, querulous attitude, their complete lack at
all times of any constructive suggestion. There is little in them
except the irresponsible carping of people who have never been and never
expect to be in a position of power. Another marked characteristic is
the emotional shallowness of people who live in a world of ideas and
have little contact with physical reality. Many intellectuals of the
left were flabbily pacifist up to 1935, shrieked for war against Germany
in the years 1935-9, and then promptly cooled off when the war
started. It is broadly though not precisely true that the people who
were most "anti-Fascist" during the Spanish civil war are the most
defeatist now. And underlying this is the really important fact about
so many of the English intelligentsia-their severance from the common
culture of the country.
Happy May Day!
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