Another voice
Two intellectuals
Auberon Waugh
I do not know how many people listened to this year's Reith Lectures, given by Dr A. H. Halsey, director of social and administrative studies at Oxford. It may be a reflection on the academic discipline he represents, or possibly on the general intellectual inertia of our times, but when I read the first two lectures I was struck by the thought that perhaps the only surviving function of the intellectual in our society is to invent a new jargon for describing familiar truths. Here is Halsey on the social limits to economic growth: 'We can see these limits if we follow Hirsch and distinguish two economies: one is material goods, and the other is positional goods. Material goods, like tea or mugs, can be expanded in their supply practically without limit. But positional goods are in more or less fixed supply. If we have a monarchy, only one of us can be queen: only 49 per cent can enjoy superior amenities. There is a range of positional goods, such as old masters, suburban houses and the wardenship of Nuffield College, which are fixed or scarce in some socially imposed sense, or spoiled if more extensively used. The market for them is a zerosum game — if you win, I lose — or even a negative-sum game, in that people consume resources in mutually cancelling efforts to gain market advantage.'
But we have no need to follow Hirsch for this amazing insight. We do not even need to follow Dr Halsey through the thrills and spills of his zero-sum and negative-sum games. We can learn it perfectly well from W. S. Gilbert, whose Grand Inquisitor's Song in The Gondoliers (1889) describes a society where Lord Chancellors were cheap as sprats And Bishops in their shovel hats Were plentiful as tabby cats — In point of fact too many.
Gilbert describes the positional market exactly: When you have nothing else to wear . But cloth of gold and satins rare For cloth of gold you cease to care — Up goes the price of shoddy.
And this even rhymes with his final conclusion: 'When everyone is someboddee, then no one's anybody!'
Why does Dr Halsey bother to open his mouth if he can only think of things to say which were better said in a comic opera ninety years ago? Eliot makes the point in Notes towards the Definition of Culture (1948) that language 'peaks' quite early in its history — ours peaked with Shakespeare and the Authorised Version — and I think the same must be true of a society's capacity for original thought. All that remains for our intellectuals to do is to express old ideas less elegantly than they have been expressed already.
But one way out of this dilemma is suggested by Dr George Steiner in the first Bronowski Memorial Lecture which created even less stir than Dr Halsey's Reith lecture earlier this month. Perhaps this is explained by the fact that Steiner had said it all before, as part of his T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures, later published as In Bluebeard's Castle (1971). But in the Bronowski version, Dr Steiner adds a little tribute to Bronowski which refers to his 'elfin pleasure in mathematical difficulty, in the leap of the tensed intellect across the laziness of illusion or conventional "good sense": If one concentrates on the 'leap of the tensed intellect across . . . conventional good sense', this seems to offer an alternative to Halsey.
George Steiner first came to my attention as a member of the committee which awarded the 1972 Booker Prize for novels to John Berger's G, a strange album or commonplace book of fatuous, unconnected observations about life which seemed to encapsulate everything that was most precious, drivelling and bogus in the 'modern' novel. Steiner is now the only survivor of those three judges and according to Connolly, another judge, was Berger's champion at the time. He remains the chief exhibit — before Laing, before Berne or Marcuse, before even our own Thomas Szasz — in any literary study of the New Nonsense.
His argument in the Bronowski lecture is the familiar one that further advances in science may lead not only to devastation of the environment, to unthinkable weaponry, mind-destroying drugs and untold horrors of genetic engineering but also, far worse, to the discovery that blackamoors are less intelligent than white folk (or vice versa) which, he thinks, will overturn the whole basis of social and individual morality. Nevertheless, he feels science must advance because truth matters more than man.
This time, however, he approaches it differently. The search for abstract truth, he asserts, began between the seventh and fifth centuries BC in Ionia and the Greek colonies in southern Italy. At this point we may be prepared to tip our caps in deference to Dr Steiner's evidently superior knowledge. How many of us, for instaice, can be certain how much abstract speculation lay behind the paintings at Lascaux, the building of the Ziggurat at Ur, the pyramids, Stonehenge; how many can chart the explosion of curios ity prompted by the development of the wheel at the end of the fourth millennium BC in Sumer? Only Dr Steiner, it would appear. But when, on the basis of this assertion, he starts building models (dietary, climatic, cultural) for the type of society necessary for the pursuit of abstract truth — we might require the servitude of women and also of slaves — a few may grow uneasy.
An ability to distinguish between soluble and insoluble problems, he says, is 'as unique, as central to the genius of man, as is the invention of melody'. Well, few of us, I expect, have inquired as deeply as Dr Steiner into the thought processes of the wild rabbit, but has he never heard a nightingale? Possibly the self-same song that found a path through the sad heart of Ruth when, sick for home, she stood in tears amid the alien corn has never reached the garden of 32 Barrow Road, Cambridge.
But the truth is that Dr Steiner will say anything. He hops from genetics to linguistics to historical, archaeological or veterinary topics making preposterous assertions in each with the same bland insouciance. The argument in InIlluebeard's Castle is that the massacre of the Jews was bred in the ennui that overtook Europe between the events of 1789-1815 and the Great War. Never mind that he is discussing the most turbulent century — politically and intellectually — in the history of the world. These instincts of devastation were triggered off by noise and artificial lighting, he maintains. Gentiles were bitterly jealous because the three main focuses of Western idealism — monotheism, Christianity and messianic socialism — had all been invented by Jews. Anything else? Oh yes. Marx's vision 'may have had in it the germ of future tyranny. . . but the nobility of these errors is unquestionable'. If one asks how a philosopher can possibly find error noble, he will probably reply that this is not a fair question to ask a vet.
But the real key to the Steiner conundrum, I feel, is to be found in his linguistic studies. On page 116 of After Babel (1975), after describing how he is equally proficient in three languages, he makes this alarming admission: 'From the earliest of memories, I proceeded within the unexamined cognition that em Pferd, a horse, and un cheval were the same and/or very different, or at diverse points of a modulation which led from perfect equivalence to disparity.'
Translated into English, the sense of this is that he always supposed the three words to have the same meaning, or different ones, or something in between. Well done, George! But this translation ignores the nonsense element contained in that pre gnant conjunction 'and/or'. Young Steiner was also prepared to believe that the mean ings were simultaneously the same and very different. That was plainly the moment when his tensed intellect started leaping across the laziness of conventional good sense. Poor chap. The tragedy and the absurdity come when one sees other people trying to make the same leap after him.
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