Representations of the Intellectual

¶ There is no equivalent for the Reith Lectures in the United States, although several Americans, Robert Oppenheimer, John Kenneth Galbraith, John Searle, have delivered them since the series was inaugurated in 1948 by Bertrand Russell. I had heard some of them over the air – I particularly remember Toynbee’s series in 1950 – as a boy growing up in the Arab world, where the BBC was a very important part of our life; even today phrases like ‘London said this morning’ are a common refrain in the Middle East. They are always used with the assumption that ‘London’ tells the truth. Whether this view of the BBC is only a vestige of colonialism I cannot tell, yet it is also true that in England and abroad the BBC has a position in public life enjoyed neither by government agencies like the Voice of America nor by the American networks, including CNN. One reason is that programs like the Reith Lectures and the many discussion and documentary shows are presented by the BBC, not so much as officially sanctioned programs, but as occasions that offer listeners and viewers an impressive range of serious, often distinguished material.

I was therefore very honored to be offered the opportunity by Anne Winder of the BBC to give the 1993 Reith Lectures. Because of scheduling problems we agreed on a date in late June rather than the customary January time slot. But almost from the moment that the announcement of the lectures was made by the BBC in late 1992 there was a persistent, albeit relatively small chorus of criticism directed at it for having invited me in the first place. I was accused mainly of being active in the battle for Palestinian rights, and thus disqualified for any sober or respectable platform at all. This was only the first in a series of plainly anti-intellectual and antirational arguments, all of them ironically supporting the thesis of my lectures about the public role of the intellectual as outsider, ‘amateur’, and disturber of the status quo.

These criticisms do in fact reveal a great deal about British attitudes to the intellectual. Of course these are attitudes imputed to the British public by journalists, but the frequency of their repetition gives these notions some current social credibility. Commenting on the announced themes of my Reith Lectures – Representations of the
Intellectual – a sympathetic journalist states that it was a most ‘un-English’ thing to talk about. Associated with the word ‘intellectual’ was ‘ivory tower’ and ‘a sneer’. This depressing train of thought is underlined by the late Raymond Williams in Keywords. ‘Until the middle twentieth century unfavourable uses of intellectuals, intellectualism and intelligentsia were dominant in English’, he says, ‘and it is clear that such uses persist.’

One task of the intellectual is the effort to break down the stereotypes and reductive categories that are so limiting to human thought and communication. I had no idea of the limitations to which I was subject, before I gave the lectures. It was often said by complaining journalists and commentators that I was a Palestinian, and that, as every-
one knew, was synonymous with violence, fanaticism, the killing of Jews. Nothing by me was quoted: it was just supposed to be a matter of common knowledge. In addition, I was described in the sonorous tones of The Sunday Telegraph as anti-Western, and my writing focused on blaming the West for all the evils of the world, the Third World especially.

What seemed to have completely escaped notice was everything I had actually written in a whole series of books, including Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism. (My unforgivable sin in the latter is my argument that Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park – a novel I praise as much as I do all her work – also had something to do with slavery and British-owned sugar plantations in Antigua, both of which of course she mentions quite specifically. My point was that just as Austen talks about goings-on in Britain and in British overseas possessions, so too must her twentieth-century reader and critics, who have for too long focused on the former to the exclusion of the latter.) The construction of fictions like ‘East’ and ‘West’, to say nothing of racialist essences like subject races, Orientals, Aryans, Negroes and the like, were what my books attempted to combat. Far from encouraging a sense of aggrieved primal innocence in countries which had repeatedly suffered the ravages of colonialism, I stated over and over again that mythical abstractions such as these were lies, as were the various rhetorics of blame they gave rise to; cultures are too intermingled, their contents and histories too interdependent and hybrid, for surgical separation into large and mostly ideological oppositions like Orient and Occident.

Even well-meaning critics of my Reith Lectures – commentators who seemed to have a real acquaintance with what I said – assumed that my claims for the intellectual’s role in society contained a veiled autobiographical message. What about right-wing intellectuals like Wyndham Lewis or William Buckley, I was asked? Why, according to you, must every intellectual be a man or woman of the Left? What was not noticed was the fact that Julien Benda, whom I rely on (perhaps paradoxically) with some frequency, was very much of the Right. In fact the attempt in these lectures is rather to speak about intellectuals as precisely those figures whose public performances can neither be predicted nor compelled into some slogan, orthodox party line, or fixed dogma. What I was trying to suggest was that standards of truth about human misery and oppression were to be held to despite the individual intellectual’s party affiliation, national background, and primeval loyalties. Nothing disfigures the intellectual’s public performance as much as trimming, careful silence, patriotic bluster, and retrospective and self-dramatizing apostasy.

The attempt to hold to a universal and single standard as a theme plays an important role in my account of the intellectual. Or rather the interaction between universality and the local, the subjective, the here and now. John Carey’s interesting book The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia
1880–1939 appeared in America after I had written my lectures, but I found its on the whole dispiriting findings complementary to mine. According to Carey, British intellectuals like Gissing, Wells, and Wyndham Lewis detested the rise of modern mass societies, lamenting such things as ‘the common man’, suburbia, middle-class taste; instead they promoted a natural aristocracy, ‘better’ earlier times, high-class culture. For me the intellectual appeals to (rather than excoriates) as wide as possible a public, who is his or her natural constituency. The problem for the intellectual is not so much, as Carey discusses, mass society as a whole, but rather the insiders, experts, coteries, professionals who in the modes defined earlier this century by pundit Walter Lippmann mold public opinion, make it conformist, encourage a reliance on a superior little band of all-knowing men in power. Insiders promote special interests, but intellectuals should be the ones to question patriotic nationalism, corporate think- ing, and a sense of class, racial or gender privilege.

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