I found ‘The
Intellectuals and the Masses’ (as is
often my wont) whilst browsing in a bookstore, uncertain of what subject I was
interested in exploring further. Playing devil’s advocate with my own soul, I
interpreted it on a very personal, and confrontational level. Giving myself
more credit than I deserved, I felt I had reason to be offended by the premise
of an elite group who did not have
the noblest motives, in their desire for social and intellectual control of the
rest of the population. But there are times when I am not the most accurate barometer
of my own purposes. Rather, what this book did for me was to confirm my deepest
fears about the nature of intellectualism itself. As a result, I have opened my
eyes a little wider in order to observe that class-based societies are in and
of themselves, evil, and intellectuals (of all political beliefs) only exist in
order to create a consensus that permits nasty things to occur without a stir or
whimper from the rest of us. I grabbed onto this book for dear life, knowing
full-well that it explored a decadent period of history in a far away place
that I really didn’t have anything to do with. But the way it castigates these
so-called great minds, who were deluded into thinking they were superior to
everyone else, appealed to my Australian
sense of fairness, and I guess my own youthful sense of idealism.
Who else but D.H. Lawrence
‘The Intellectuals and the Masses’ is an excellent book which made me wonder
about my taste in reading, and whether it had turned me into an right-wing
intellectual snob, promoting the
benefits of eugenics and the advantages of having Adolf Hitler in power in
Germany. It seems that my literary
heroes such as T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats and H.G. Wells, in their attempts to pass
themselves off as big brains, were
essentially cold-blooded elitists who
didn’t give a damn about the public -- or the term which I prefer, originally
coined by Edmund Burke -- ‘the swinish multitudes’. Between 1880 and 1939, a
yawning gulf existed between the upper and lower echelons of society in Britain
as well as the rest of Europe and Prof.
Carey makes an entire book out of the fact.
A number of writers, despite a benign image of goodwill they fostered
toward the rest of humanity, were merely a grubby and insalubrious group of
elitist charlatans. They actively encouraged a vicious and reactionary mind-set
of perpetual and fatalistic class bias
in order to have their privileged place within society unquestioned into fruitful perpetuity. I had to investigate
further.
Professor Carey aims accusations against Yeats, Wells, Wyndham Lewis, Virginia Woolf
and D.H. Lawrence among others. These accusations mainly concern the writers’
shabby treatment of those ‘not in the know’. Who these people are, Carey cannot
ascertain, only that they are probably poor, living in the London suburbs, and
attempting to make a paltry living at anything that their betters claim is not ‘art’,
however their betters may define what ‘art’ is, exactly. This lumpen mass of proletarians, or whatever
you want to call them, read newspapers
and go to movies in an attempt to make sense of their limited lives. The fact
that their lives are limited does not
move the intellectuals to compassion. Instead, they react with outright
condemnation. They complain that there are too many people in the world and
believe that this creates a mass kind of culture that interferes with their
livelihood and their belief in themselves as an intellectual elite. To highbrows looking across the gulf, it
seemed that the masses were not merely degraded and threatening, but also not
fully alive. [1] p.10.
The ‘science’ of
eugenics was created as a means for writers such as Yeats, Bernard Shaw, Aldous
Huxley, and T.S. Eliot to bemoan the lack of an intellectual aristocracy of
which they could be part, in order to stem the rise of the mediocre, and those
they regarded as inferior and retarded. [2] p.13. Instead of supporting the concept of universal
education, the intellectuals did everything in their power to discourage and
undermine it, tantamount to deliberately making their writing so obscure and
irrational that it was almost impossible for anyone (presumably with or without
an education), to understand. [3] p.17. The self-proclaimed theorist of Modernism,
Spanish writer Ortega Y Gasset argued that modernist art acted like a social
agent which separated people into two different castes, for the purpose of
allowing the elite to distinguish themselves from the drab mass of society. [4]
ibid.
The rest of the book is a well-researched and written
argument that points to the elitism of a number of revered writers and how such a
mindset can be directly linked to the rise
of European totalitarianism and the persecution of the Jews. The final chapter entitled ‘Wyndham Lewis and
Hitler’ is a devastating critique on the similarities between Hitler’s ideas
about culture and those of the English intellectuals of the same period. The
Americans possessed cars, clothes and refrigerators, but the Third Reich
boasted 270 opera houses, giving it the right to look down on American
philistinism and crass materialism, an attitude shared by many English writers
and intellectuals. [5]p. 198-99.
Wyndham Lewis was also a painter
Needless to say,
these attitudes seem antiquated to us today, and I was shocked at the
pointedness of Carey’s attack on such writers as Lawrence and Yeats, who have
been canonised for years by the universities, and our WASP first world society at
large. I also had the same reaction when I once wrote an essay on the life of German composer
Richard Wagner. I was shocked to discover that he wrote anti-semitic pamphlets
in his own lifetime, and also that his second wife flew the Nazi flag at their
Bayreuth residence out of admiration and
support of Adolf Hitler, his rise to power which Wagner himself never lived to
witness.
I think that books
and investigations of this kind have the capacity to inherently change the way
we think about the people whom we view as having a talent that is somehow unique, and
superior to anything we would be capable of doing ourselves. I recall wading
through the letters of outrage published in the Age Monthly Review from readers
who were convinced that these accusations of Wagner being an unattractive
individual -- at the very least -- were not only superfluous when it came to
judging his music, but downright slanderous, that is, if Wagner had been alive
to answer to them. With time however, this new information becomes accepted as
part of the textual rendering of the person’s life. It becomes possible for any individual interested enough
to either accept this new information as fact, or deny it for their own
personal reasons. To accuse the investigator of being intolerant of the person
in question’s own beliefs or the times in which he lived, or attempting to
be too politically correct. cannot stand up if the information is well researched
and argued in a convincing way. I believe this is the case with Cary’s book.
‘The Intellectuals
and the Masses’ galvanised me in its own way, concerning the nature of social
elites, their purpose, and the people we inadvertently choose to rule over us.
My footnotes are taken from 'The Intellectuals and the Masses' by John Carey, London, Faber & Faber, 1992.
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