The concept of the intellectual (though not the word) is new to the English language. In the past we were in the habit of distinguishing the educated from the uneducated person. And during the nineteenth century there were many educated people among our leaders – for example Disraeli and Gladstone, who between them did much to create the new style of politics, in which parties bargain for votes by promising goods that do not belong to them. But the concept of the intellectual – as a creature whose social role is shaped by his critical posture outside society – was foreign to English life. Coleridge had marked out an important role for the ‘clerisy’; but he saw this class as a conservative force, maintained by church, university and the professions. The Romantic poet, the ‘man of feeling’, and the hermit had all been extolled and ridiculed, with Jane Austen and Thomas Love Peacock effectively putting the lid on their pretensions. Thereafter, thinking and feeling re-assumed their old functions in social life: they were useful, provided you did not notice them. The very idea that someone should draw attention to his intellect and emotions, and regard them as a qualification for overthrowing the established civil order, was anathema to the ordinary English person.
But it was at this very moment that the Russian concept of the ‘intelligentsia’ was first emerging: the concept of a class of people, distinguished by their habit of reflection, and entitled thereby to a greater say in human affairs than had been granted hitherto. The peculiarity of this class is that its members are entirely self-appointed. Nothing is demanded of the intelligentsia other than that they identify themselves as such. Having done that, they have qualified themselves for government. A few obstacles might lie in their way: but they are obstacles created by unthinking people, by the ‘bourgeoisie’, and can be blasted away without compunction.
That attitude led in Russia to a calamity the effects of which will be always with us. And it is worth raising the question why such a view of the intellectual life should have emerged in Russia, and why it should have had an impact there quite out of proportion to its impact in the West. Part of the answer is to be found in the nature of the Russian Orthodox Church, and the ‘exit’ from society which it has provided to men who are that way inclined. Those who turn their back on day-to-day life could acquire an enhanced social status as priest or monk, with an authority passed down to them from God himself. Every society needs those people – usually men – who wish to exchange the burden of reproduction for the grace of spiritual leadership; and one function of the priesthood is to impose upon them the discipline necessary to their task, and to ensure that, having made this choice, they contribute to social stability, rather than undermining it. The Russian Orthodox Church abounds in escape routes for men, and with honours and privileges which will reward their loyalty. Take away faith, however, and those privileges are no longer consoling. It is then that the dreamer becomes dangerous. Unable to enter society, and without the vision of another world that would prompt him to accept the imperfections of this one, he nurses an unstaunchable wound of resentment. His ‘right divine to govern wrong’ goes unrecognised, by a world that gives more credit to material than intellectual power. At the same time, he instinctively identifies with the poor, the oppressed, the misfits – those at the bottom of society, who are the living proof of its injustice. He turns against religion with the rage of a disappointed lover, and refuses to recognise the virtue of any earthly compromise. There arises the peculiar frame of mind of the exalted nihilist – a posture brilliantly described by Turgenev and Conrad, and exemplified in virtually all the characters who instigated the Bolshevik coup d’état.
Nihilism is not peculiar to the Russian Orthodox tradition, nor did it occur for the first time in nineteenth-century Russia. The Jacobins were pioneers of nihilism, and in the person of Saint-Just is concentrated all the senseless venom of the modern revolutionary.43 Nevertheless, the Orthodox tradition paved the way for the intelligentsia, by offering ‘exit’ signs on the periphery of ordinary society, and inviting the thoughtful, the sad and the disaffected to pass through them to a higher social status. Once faith had vanished, this higher status could be achieved only by threatening the foundations of society, and seizing real temporal power from those who had supposedly usurped it.
Russians always complain about the imitative nature of their culture, about their inability to come up with any ideas of their own, and their slavish adherence to Western fashions, which arrive in Moscow only when their absurdity has already been perceived in the West. In fact the current of influence has for a hundred years run in the opposite direction. The French intellectual in our time is not a direct descendent of the Revolutionaries of 1789, for all his proximity to them in outlook. He is a product of the French Communist Party, itself an import from Russia. The German intellectual lives his life in reaction to the Nazi Party, itself a perverted outgrowth of the Russian Revolution. Despite his intellectual mediocrity, Lenin has been a more decisive influence on social and political ideas in Western Europe than any other modern thinker, since it was his conception of the party which offered to intellectuals their clearest vision of their social role. The Leninist party is the new ‘exit’ sign. All and only intellectuals can pass through its golden gates into the social stratosphere. And in doing so they are released from earthly ties and obligations and given absolute sovereignty over the world and its goods. They rediscover their priestly role, and with it the gift of prophecy.44 The Parisian soixante-huitards pretended that they had placed Gramsci on Lenin’s throne. But Gramsci appealed to them only because he was a sanitised version of Lenin, offering the same vision of the Party as an exclusive club of the intellectuals, a new form of membership, above and beyond bourgeois society, and standing in judgement upon it.
The role of the intellectuals in the post-modern world is illustrated by those who emerged in glory after 1968 – that annus mirabilis in which the revolutionary spirit, dead in Europe for half a century, suddenly re-awakened in the midst of prosperity and leisure. These were the figures who had judged the moment correctly, who were in tune with the Zeitgeist, and who had reaped their reward. Some of them were survivors from the inter-bellum – Herbert Marcuse and Wilhelm Reich, for example. Others, like Sartre, were shaped by the Second World War. Others still, like Theodor Roszak in America and Michel Foucault in France, were post-war baby-boomers, brought up during the Cold War, but without the experience of danger. All of them shared a ruling passion, which was hatred of the bourgeoisie, and of the political compromise whereby the bourgeoisie is always, so it seems, in power.
The gurus of the sixties are of great intellectual and spiritual interest.45 But none more than Michel Foucault, who re-created the agenda of the intellectual, and up-dated the Marxist critique of the ‘bourgeois’ order so as to make it serviceable to the children of the bourgeoisie as they manned their toy barricades. Foucault’s philosophy is conceived as an assault on ‘power’, and a proof that power is monopolised by the bourgeoisie. All social ‘discourse’, for Foucault, is the voice of power. The discourse of the opponent of power, of the one who has glimpsed the secret ways of freedom, is therefore silenced or confined: it is the unspoken and unspeakable language of those incarcerated in the prison and the clinic. Bourgeois domination is inscribed in the tissue of society, like a genetic code; and this fact justifies every variety of rebellion, while defining a singular role for the intellectual, as the anatomist of power and the priest of liberation.
If the essence of the bourgeois reality is power, and if institutions, laws, codes and cultures have all grown from a hidden agenda of domination, then it becomes impossible to accept the ruling conceptions of legitimacy. The very claim to legitimacy -whether political, moral or aesthetic – becomes the object of a corrosive suspicion. To make the claim is to stand accused of hiding something: it is a claim made on behalf of power, by means of a concept that power itself has forced on us. Thus arises the ‘ethic of suspicion’ – the duty to put in question all institutions and traditions that claim authority over the individual, and to repudiate the entire culture, in both senses of the term, which brought them into being.
It is impossible to confront this rooted anti-bourgeois sentiment (itself the product of the haut bourgeois culture of Paris) without coming clean about the fundamental, but unspoken, question: what are the possibilities for our civilisation in the modern era? What is so very wrong about the bourgeois compromise (for that it is a compromise is not in doubt), and what are we to put in its place? In short, why all this hatred?
Return for a moment to the argument of earlier chapters. The ethical life, I argued, is maintained in being by a common culture, which also upholds the togetherness of society. Local attachments feed and are fed by this culture, which is an instrument of social cohesion in both peace and war. Unlike the modern youth culture, a common culture sanctifies the adult state, to which it offers rites of passage. It therefore promises membership, as a distinct social status to which all young people can proceed; for at bottom, the ethical life is what society requires, if one generation is to care for the next.
Although a culture, understood in this sense, is vigilant towards the activities and loyalties of neighbours, it need not be xenophobic or benighted in its relations to the outer world. Indeed, our own common culture, which grew within the cosmopolitan order of the Roman Empire, under the inspired leadership of St Paul – an uprooted Jew who was also a Roman citizen – is expressly outward-going, a culture of merchants, adventurers and tradesmen, of seafarers and city-builders, for whom life among strangers is the norm. St Paul defines the Christian idea of membership by borrowing the concept of corporate personality from Roman Law: we are ‘members in Christ’. The church is the Bride of Christ, and has defined itself from the outset as katholike – universal. In brief, Christianity offers a membership which is available to all, which promises a new life, and which is not bound by the laws of ancestors. In this, of course, it is like other cults of ancient trading and seafaring people, with many of which (notably the cult of Mithras) Christianity was in conflict during its early years.
Notwithstanding its universal claims, the Christian religion distinguishes the member from the outsider, and defines the rites of passage which safeguard social reproduction. But it differs from most religions in an important, and historically decisive, respect. The Christian religion permits and encourages legal organisation which is purely secular, and which lays claim to no divine authority. Whatever the historical cause of this – whether it be the glosses on Christ’s parable of the Tribute Money, or St Paul’s astute use of the Roman Law to claim protection for his new religion – the respect for secular law has made Christianity more hospitable than other faiths to the idea of secular government. The Enlightenment view of politics is already implicit in the faith which Enlightenment put in question.
Kant’s description of Enlightenment, as the end of man’s minority, is true; not because man grew up, but because the distinction between the adolescent and the adult state began, with Enlightenment, to fade. For two hundred years, in the midst of unprecedented social and economic change, people tried to hold on to the idea of marriage, to the rites of passage that impress upon youth the knowledge of its imperfection, and to the sexual and social discipline that would guarantee moral and political order in the face of deepening scepticism and romantic transgression. And it is those centuries of noble resistance that we mean, or ought to mean, by ‘bourgeois’ society. Thanks to the bourgeoisie, the show went on. Marriage, the family and high culture preserved the ethical life, in the midst of a political emancipation which – by promising the impossible – threatened the normal forms of social order.
Bourgeois society contains features which are or ought to be the envy of the world: a rule of law, which stands sovereign over the actions of the state; rights and freedoms which are defended by the state against all-comers, including itself; the right of private property, which enables me not only to close a door on enemies, but also to open a door to friends; the monogamous marriage and property-owning family, by which the material and cultural capital of one generation can be passed without trouble to the next; a system of universal education, formed by the aesthetic and scientific vision of the Enlightenment; and – last but ‘not least – the prosperity and security provided by science and the market, the two inevitable by-products of individual freedom.
Some of these things were produced by the Enlightenment, some of them produced it. Without venturing an overview of European history, we can agree that these social features are what we mean or ought to mean by bourgeois civilisation. They are also what the soixante-huitards found most hateful. For the goods that I have mentioned can be obtained only at a price – the price of loneliness, doubt and alienation. It is a price worth paying, and which would be seen to be worth paying by anyone who had studied the alternatives. Those who propose alternatives, however, never study them. They are led by hatred of the present to a blind faith in the benefits that will come from destroying it.
Bourgeois society is not the outcome of design; still less the product of a ‘dominant’ class or the instrument of class oppression. It arose by an ‘invisible hand’ from the gift of human freedom: a freedom exerted simultaneously in the economic, the social and the religious spheres. This freedom involved an emancipation from the traditional culture, and from the Christian religion which had asserted its control over personal life. But it generated the high culture which is the most reliable cure for the resulting loneliness. Bourgeois civilisation frees us from the bonds of common culture, and offers the consolation prize of art.
And that is why it is so important to Western civilisation that the old experiences of sanctity and redemption should be kept alive. For they were the price paid for our bourgeois freedoms -the way of ensuring social continuity, by withholding the most important things, the things of enduring value, from the market. The freedom extolled by Foucault is an unreal freedom, a fantasy which is at war with serious moral choice. Hence his need to desacralise bourgeois culture, and to dismiss as an illusion the real but tempered freedom which bourgeois society has achieved. Bourgeois freedom is the outcome of historical compromise. In place of this compromise Foucault invokes a ‘liberation’ which will be absolute, since the Other plays no part in offering and securing it.
Foucault said to one of his sycophants: ‘I believe that anything can be deduced from the general phenomenon of the domination of the bourgeois class.’46 It would be truer to say that he believed that the general thesis of the domination of the bourgeois class could be deduced from anything. For having decided, on the authority of the Communist Manifesto, that the bourgeois class has been dominant since the summer of 1789, Foucault deduced that all power subsequently embodied in the social order has been exercised by that class and in its interests. Hence there is nothing sacred or inviolable in the existing order, nothing that justifies our veneration or stands beyond the reach of the ubiquitous salesman.
It is worth referring to Eliot’s definition of heresy, in After Strange Gods. For Eliot the heretic is the one who takes hold of a truth, and makes it into the supreme truth: he is the one who presses on a truth so hard that it transforms itself to falsehood. This is the process that we see in Foucault, for whom domination became so vivid a reality, as to eclipse every other aspect of the human world. It became impossible for Foucault to accept that power is sometimes decent and benign, like the power of a loving parent, conferred by the object of love. The social world, subject to Foucault’s searing condemnation, was cleared of everything that redeems its ordinariness. Indeed, the heretic is the one for whom ordinariness is crime.
The ‘heresy of domination’, as it might be called, entered the collective conscience of the French intelligentsia, and conditioned everything that was written in the wake of 1968. Power relations, it was assumed, are also relations of oppression, and should therefore be overturned in the name of liberation. The old revolutionary call sounded again in a new voice, directed against the entire social order. The power of the law, of the father, of the teacher: all were construed as part of the ‘capillary’ power which flows through the channels of society. Since the very category of legitimacy belongs to ‘bourgeois ideology’, the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate power evaporates. In the face of power, there seems to be no honest course save transgression. The intellectuals of 1968 hunted through the social world for the marks of power, in order to declare their rebellion against it. Every gathering, every institution, every fragment of the old civilisation wore, for them, the badge of enmity. It was the sign of a power detached from that supreme diagnostic understanding of which they alone were guardians – a power which, because it was unaware of itself as such, involved the enslavement of those who submitted to its edict. The task of the intellectual was to unmask this power, to open the eyes of the victims and so, by banishing the false consciousness that leads us to accept our slavery, to open the way to liberation.
This ‘unmasking’ of power through critical analysis went hand in hand with a particular conception of power. Foucault’s ‘capillary’ form of power moves in mysterious ways, and almost emancipates itself, in Foucault’s more lyrical pages, from the pursuit of any goal. But the Nietzschean elegy to power did not appeal to Foucault’s principal disciples, who saw the bourgeois polis as locked in the grip of a purely instrumental power: the domination of one thing over another, the power to achieve one’s goals by the use of another’s energy. Such power is linked to strength, strategy, cunning and calculation. Its principal instance is the power of the master to compel his slave – and there is working in the intellectual background that wonderful philosophical parable of Hegel’s, which shows instrumental power as a necessary (though in time superseded) moment in every human relationship.47
The soixante-huitards believed that all power is of this kind. But that is not so. There are powers which cannot be used to further our goals, but which on the contrary provide our goals and limit them: such are the powers contained in a genuine culture – the redemptive powers of love and judgement. To be subject to these powers is not to be enslaved, but on the contrary to realise a part of human freedom. It is to rise above the realm of means, into the kingdom of ends – into the ideal world which is made actual by our aspiration. Perhaps the most interesting of all the tasks undertaken by the soixante-huitards was the attempt to show that these powers too belong to the strategy of domination. If the only end is power, then ends become means: the Kantian ‘end-in-itself’ is nothing but a more subtle means to domination. Hence the attack on bourgeois society cannot stop short of an attack on aesthetic value, and on the high culture which, by giving aesthetic form to our anxieties, also reconciles us to them.48
You could put the point in another way, in terms that recall Herder’s original distinction between culture and civilisation. Bourgeois civilisation has gradually emptied itself of its Judaeo-Christian culture. At the heart of its institutions, therefore, is a void where the old and believing community should be. The unbelieving priest cannot tolerate this void, and rebels at last against the high culture which serves to disguise it.
Thus arises what we might call ‘the culture of repudiation’ – the systematic examination of the high culture of bourgeois society, with a view to exposing and rejecting its assumptions. This anti-culture has grown within the very institutions that the traditional high culture created, and is a last-ditch attempt to hold on to that high culture, in just the way that rebellious adolescents hold on to their parents, by acting always with a view to offending them. The culture of repudiation involves a routinisation of Baudelaire’s Satanism: not in order to revive the experience of sacred things, but in order to expose the experience as a sham. Hence the targets of the anti-culture are the holy things, the things marked by rites of passage, which challenge us to enter the adult world and assume its burdens.
The culture of repudiation is sometimes referred to (usually dismissively) as ‘political correctness’ – the assumption being that university gurus are involved in a kind of brain-washing exercise, to ensure that no political views will be transmitted or accepted on the campus save those of a liberal-egalitarian kind. But, interesting though this assumption is, I doubt that it has any real bearing on the cultural phenomenon. The feminists, gay activists, new historicists, crypto-Marxists, Foucauldians and deconstructionists who thrive in humanities departments do not, as a rule, have much interest in the political views of their students. Nor are they united in their opinions; nor are they very much attached to the liberal-egalitarian worldview. They are united not by their political beliefs but by a common project, and this project must be understood in spiritual terms.
The blasphemer is not the one who disbelieves in God, but the one who is angry at himself for believing too much – the one who seeks to free himself from the divinity, and who shouts and snarls in his helplessness. The god who is a real presence at the Christian altar, is also an imaginary presence in Christian culture. Many who never take communion in fact, take communion in imagination. Such is the fate of almost every intelligent person who is brought into the ambit of Western art. Those whose task it is to teach the aesthetic legacy of Christian belief will inevitably feel drawn, not merely to its artistic achievements, but to the common culture which speaks through them, and which is no longer ours. Attachment to these things is painful, since the world no longer endorses them. And surely people are right to sense a conflict between the vision of human life that is contained in our high culture, and the liberationist philosophies of post-modern times. However widely the imagination of Shakespeare may have roamed, and however little he gave explicit endorsement to the Christian religion, his is a world in which the old common culture marks out the course of human life. It is a world of class and degree, of deference and nobility, of priesthood and kingship; a world in which women are esteemed for their fidelity and men for their prowess. It is not that Shakespeare spells out those moral ideas. They form the background to his dramas, which provide an imaginative elaboration of what they really amount to. It is inevitable that someone whose aim in life is to be ‘liberated from the structures’ should be in deep conflict with these sublime works of art. Their very aesthetic power lends persuasive force, and in the face of this compelling image of the lost common culture the sensitive dissident must marshal whatever weapons lie to hand, in order to cast off and neutralise its spell. The feminist, deconstructionist and Marxian ‘readings’ of traditional texts are therefore tributes to their power.
Moreover, since no-one really knows what liberation means, or whether life according to the new social agenda could ever be the day-to-day routine of ordinary people, the assault on the old values is the only proof we have that the new ones are viable. The high culture which enshrines the old normality is of inestimable value, since its defences are entirely contained within itself. By disenchanting its enchanted world, you score a victory which could never be achieved in the forum of everyday life, where a thousand forces conspire to sustain the status quo.
And here we see a connection between the culture of repudiation and the culture explored in the last three chapters – the culture of pop, corn and popcorn. Both are attempts to live without the rite of passage. The Foucauldian intellectual abhors nothing so much as the bourgeois family – the institution of social reproduction, which involves a voluntary surrender to loyalties that bind you for life, and bind you most of all when you try to discard them. Only sacred rites of passage can sustain such institutions; and the old common culture, by founding and nurturing these rites, placed social power above individual waywardness. The culture of repudiation involves a systematic, almost paranoid attempt to examine the charming images of that former life, and to cast them one by one into the pit. What is left, and what is offered to the student, is exactly what the student will have found in any case – a world devoid of sacred and sacrificial moments, in which the effort of social reproduction is no longer made.