British intellectual life today.

French intellectuals are often vain; German intellectuals are notoriously obscure; British intellectuals are merely embarrassed. But are they embarrassed to be British, or embarrassed to call themselves intellectuals? Unlike other Europeans or, for that matter, Americans, the British have traditionally tended to be self-deprecating about intelligence. The habit of nicknames reflects a society in which "highbrows" know their place, and that place is to be eccentric, or marginal to public life. Academics are faintly comical "dons" scientists are "boffins"; they live in "ivory towers" or are "cloistered," and all are "too clever by half." Unless, of course, they are foreigners, who are allowed, indeed expected, to be intellectuals. For the concept of "the intellectual" still sounds vaguely foreign, even suspect, to British ears. It was a suspicion that W. H. Auden ridiculed in a famous quatrain: "To the man-in-the-street who, I'm sorry to say,/ Is a keen observer of life,/ The word 'Intellectual' suggests right away/A man who's untrue to his wife."

Yet these suspicions were--and are--not wholly unwarranted. The word "intellectual" replaced "man of letters" in English parlance only a century ago, imported from France and popularized by Emile Zola at the time of the Dreyfus affair. Hitherto the British had made do with humbler words, such as "educated" "erudite" or "learned" to denote a person of higher culture. The ideal was to be "a scholar and a gentleman." An intellectual, by contrast, might or might not be a scholar, and he was quite likely to look down on gentlemen. "Man of letters" was descriptive; "intellectual" is aspirational. The former was a passive observer; the latter an activist, wielding power and prestige. One became a man or woman of letters by virtue of a way of life, whereas anybody could call himself an intellectual (even if few who did were likely to be genuine). Though an occasional gallant voice is still raised for the older ideal of literary life, and others have drawn attention to the hypocrisy of modern intellectuals, the latter have displaced the former as a type.

A little later the Russian "intelligentsia" entered the language. It originally denoted the educated class, but it came to mean those who considered themselves intellectuals. As in Soviet Russia, the word carried a connotation of privilege. Bulgakov mercilessly mocked the state-salaried Soviet intelligentsia in The Master and Margarita. Proust and Musil did the same for the French and Habsburg intellectual elites. Because the British intelligentsia have never been as thoroughly discredited as those of continental Europe, they have also escaped without a thorough debunking. George Orwell and Aldous Huxley rebuked them for their totalitarian tendencies, Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell for their social pretensions. But no British novelist of the generation now in its prime--that of Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, and Ian McEwan--has succeeded in writing a full-blown satire on the British, let alone the European, intelligentsia. Nor has a younger generation so far made good their deficiency.

It is so much easier, of course, to mock Middle England. For Middle England is still as solidly philistine as it was when Matthew Arnold wrote 150 years ago in Culture and Anarchy that "we have not the word because we have so much of the thing." And Middle England uses the word "intellectual" either as a noun or an adjective, only gingerly, as if picking up something the cat brought in. William Hazlitt, one of the first Englishmen whom one might identify as a modern intellectual, thought the French "a more sensible, reflecting, and better informed people than the English" and thought the intellectual superiority of female conversation in France proof of this. The French historian of England Hyppolite Taine disagreed: "The provision of facts carried in the head is three or four times as considerable in the case of a well-educated Englishman as in that of the equivalent Frenchman" A century and a half after Taine, a Briton may pass for an intellectual with as light a baggage of learning as any Frenchman. Nietzsche had a word for such halbgebildet ("half-educated") intellectuals: they were Bildungsphilister, "educated philistines." Today no uneducated person is as philistine as those who call themselves intellectuals. That is why no intellectual ever draws attention to the fact.

Lately, a refinement, the "public intellectual," has been imported from the United States. The phrase is now common enough, though some English satirists still think it very droll to make scatological mockery of the pretensions of this species as a "public convenience" (a euphemism for lavatory). A year ago, Prospect magazine ran a poll to find "Britain's top 100 public intellectuals" While the exercise was questionable, not only for its inclusions and exclusions, but also for its inherent vulgarity, the results mercilessly illuminate the advancing mediocrity of British intellectual life.

Top of the list was Richard Dawkins, the Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford. Not even his admirers would claim that Professor Dawkins is an eminent scientist; he was only elected to the Royal Society in 2001, presumably for ornamental reasons. As his title suggests, Dawkins is a popularizer, with a talent for anthropomorphism ("the selfish gene") rather than an original thinker. Nothing wrong with that, even if such a figure belongs in a television studio rather than an Oxford chair. The best popularizers of science have mostly been great scientists themselves: Einstein, Schroedinger, Feynman, Hawking are all examples. Though true scientists sometimes speculate about the metaphysical consequences of their theories, they rarely claim authority outside their own domain and are usually content to let science and theology coexist, side by side.

Professor Dawkins represents something quite different: the institutionalization of atheism. He is a professor of propaganda, who uses his prestige to promote a militantly secularist and scientistic agenda. His case for atheism boils down to the argument that God is simply bad logic: "The creationist, whether a naive Bible-thumper or an educated bishop, simply postulates an already existing being of prodigious intelligence and complexity" Dawkins imagines that God should be no less explicable than any other natural phenomenon. But it is he, not the Christian, who is guilty of a category mistake. God, by definition, cannot be explained according to the laws of nature, since He is the source of those laws. One cannot just reduce metaphysics to physics. In many ways, Dawkins is cruder than his Victorian equivalents, Thomas Huxley and Herbert Spencer. That Dawkins is enjoying some success in his endeavor to reverse fifteen centuries of Anglo-Saxon Christianity is demonstrated by the fact that St. Augustine's most recent successor as Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, came sixteenth in the Prospect poll. Dr. Williams used to be Professor of Divinity at Oxford; his chief contribution to scholarship was an apologia for Arius, the greatest heretic of antiquity. The success of Dawkins has been won by default. "For the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light."

Just below Professor Dawkins came two intellectual survivors: the feminist Germaine Greer and the historian Eric Hobsbawm. Just as Dr. Greer remains the angry author of The Female Eunuch long after feminism's raison d'etre disappeared, so Professor Hobsbawm remained a card-carrying Communist until the party dissolved itself. He now rejoices in his status as a Companion of Honour to a monarch whose family would, if the professor's comrades had ever come to power, almost certainly have shared the grisly fate of their Russian cousins at the hands of Lenin.

The otherwise inexplicable esteem in which the likes of Hobsbawm are still held becomes comprehensible in the light of a recent web poll, conducted by BBC Radio 4, to find Britain's favorite philosopher. The winner was Karl Marx, with more than twice as many votes as David Hume. Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Plato, and Kant were left far behind. In no country that has recently emerged from the long shadow of Marxism would such a vote be conceivable. But British intellectuals treat Marx as if he were harmless; his advocate, Francis Wheen, wrote a revisionist biography which depicts Marx as a jolly Dickensian character, rather than as the ruthless disseminator of the most destructive doctrine in history. Hume is the antithesis of Marx in every respect--metaphysics, morals, politics, economics--with one exception: religion. It is another sign of how far the secularization of British culture has progressed that of the nation's two favorite thinkers, one was an atheist, the other a deist, and both were notorious critics of Christianity.

How do we explain the choice of Marx over Hume, admittedly by a self-selecting sample of the British intelligentsia? After all, Hume was a rigorous thinker, who has influenced almost every philosopher since Kant, whereas Marx was scarcely a philosopher at all. Where Marx's works are the accumulated outpourings of a revolutionary ideologue, Hume's thought is empirical, sceptical, conservative: all qualities calculated to appeal to the British. As a historian or essayist, too, Hume is more readable and less dated than Marx, and his personality is incomparably more attractive. The one advantage Marx enjoys over Hume--and it was evidently decisive in the BBC poll--is that Marx's desire not merely to understand but to reorder the world according to a pseudo-scientific system makes him an archetypal modern intellectual, whereas Hume's more contemplative cast of mind belongs to an earlier age.

Intellectuals of Marx's type, who are the products of illiberal societies, are often illiberal themselves. In Continental societies lacking the freedom of the press, figures like Balzac and Zola, Heine and Ibsen, Herzen and Tolstoy performed a necessary function. But just as the Enlightenment savants from Voltaire and Rousseau onwards infused the French Revolution with its unprecedented extremism, culminating in the Terror, so the "revolution of the intellectuals" in 1848 spawned the ideology of socialism which, in its Marxist form, gave the entire twentieth century a totalitarian hue. The intellectual as secular missionary sees his own vocation in levelling the finger of accusation at his own society, economy, and culture. Despite the evidence of a century of grand revolutionary projects, every one of which has ended in catastrophe, this presumption of guilt is still ubiquitous among the self-appointed arbiters of European intellectual life. For them, the purpose of politics is to demolish the past, to rebuild the present from scratch and to mortgage the future, all for the sake of an unexamined and morally dubious premise: that the intellectuals know what is good for the rest and, moreover, how to bring it about.

By what Hegel called "the cunning of reason" (der List der Vernunft), the British, who had never suffered the exigencies of the police state, adopted the characteristic attitudes and assumptions of the European intellectual, who had abased himself before that police state wherever he could find it. There was no British Heidegger or Sartre, worshipping Hitler or Mao, but by the same token the British were not inoculated against these Dr. Caligaris. Just at the point when the intellectual was discredited on the Continent, he has been slavishly imitated, consciously or unconsciously, by the 1960s generation of Britons--a generation ignorant or contemptuous of the hard-won liberties that their ancestors had cultivated in splendid isolation. Belatedly, but with all the zeal of the convert, the British adopted the vices of continental culture, which usurped authority over the indigenous tradition of individualism and eccentricity and came to dominate British intellectual life.

This process may take a relatively benign form. Of my own contemporaries, those now in their forties, the only public intellectual who scored highly in the Prospect poll was Timothy Garton Ash. For two decades he performed the valuable role of interpreting the transformation of central and eastern Europe on both sides of the Atlantic. He knows and identifies with intellectual kings and kingmakers such as Vaclav Havel or Adam Michnik, and, though he has no political ambitions of his own, presidents and prime ministers from Margaret Thatcher to George W. Bush have solicited his advice. During his evolution from anti-Communist Spectator journalist to fashionable academic, Garton Ash has gravitated to the liberal end of the spectrum. Now based in Oxford and the Hoover Institution at Stanford, his main organs are the Guardian and The New York Review of Books. Yet he has never abandoned his original model, George Orwell--surely one of the last authentic English men of letters--and he has avoided the temptation to succumb to the new European religion of anti-Americanism.

But Garton Ash has preserved his intellectual status only by walking a transatlantic tightrope, suspended far above the quotidian level at which political decisions are made. It is enough for him to remind his readers that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in neoconservative philosophy. The fact that the pro-European liberal Garton Ash conforms to the British notion of a public intellectual, while nonconformist, conservative Euro-skeptics of the caliber of Roger Scruton or Noel Malcolm do not, is another indication that the legacy of the 1960S still weighs heavily on British intellectual life, especially in the universities.

Perhaps the most influential British academic literary critic of the past forty years has been Terry Eagleton. Yet another product of Oxford and Cambridge--though he has recently migrated to Manchester as Professor of Cultural Theory--he too figures prominently on the Prospect list of public intellectuals. In his study of Wuthering Heights and the Irish Famine of 1845-1847 (Heathcliff and the Great Hunger), he concludes that it was not so much the Anglo-Irish landlords or the British government who were to blame for the famine, as "the [capitalist] system they sustained." "Had that exploitative system been transformed--rent abolished, the graziers and strong farmers expropriated and their land equitably redistributed--a million men and women would surely not have perished" What Eagleton is advocating here is precisely the policy adopted by Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union, which led directly to the Ukrainian famine of 1932-1934 in which six to seven million died; by Mao Zedong in China during the "Great Leap Forward" of 1958-1961, in which up to forty-three million died, the worst famine in history; and by many other dictators since, including Robert Mugabe in present-day Zimbabwe. Unlike all these tyrants of the Left, who deliberately created famine as an instrument of policy, the Peel government did what it could to alleviate the Irish famine, with soup kitchens and other famine relief amounting to nearly 10 million [pounds sterling]: probably the first government aid program of its kind in history, but not enough to satisfy Eagleton, who complains that seven times as much was spent on the Crimean War. Needless to say, Wuthering Heights itself does not actually mention the Irish Famine, but this does not prevent Eagleton writing a whole book about their supposed connection.

It is with some relish that he remarks: "Ireland is the biological time-bomb which can be heard ticking softly away beneath the civilized superstructures of the Pall Mall clubs." As a diehard apologist for Irish republicanism throughout the terrorist campaigns in Northern Ireland and Britain from the 1970S to the 1990S, Eagleton knows very well that his metaphorical bombs became real ones in the hands of the Provisional IRA. Just as Hobsbawm stayed in the Communist Party to the bitter end, so Eagleton was loyal to the IRA until--having lost the battle for American and Irish public opinion after 9/11--the terrorists abruptly abandoned "the armed struggle" in July 2005.

Note, by the way, how that word "civilized" can now only be used ironically by a cutting-edge British academic like Eagleton, just as an essay on "Defending the Free World" can only be a sarcastic exercise in anti-Americanism. When he sneers at Christianity in the same breath, however--"I have resigned my membership of the Christian church, as there is clearly something theoretically dubious about the Good Samaritan"--he speaks more honestly than he pretends. Some forty years ago, before he acquired the airs and graces of a public intellectual, Eagleton was a "Vatican II Catholic" whose first book, The New Left Church, wrestled with the problem of reconciling his Catholicism with Marx and his other idol, the now discredited psychologist R. D. Laing, whose popular book The Divided Self taught that schizophrenia was a species of alienation, not so much a medical as a socio-political problem.

In those days, Eagleton thought he could be both a Christian and a Marxist; indeed, he thought that Marxism would help him to resolve the "paradox of destroying oneself and community in order to build community." "We [Christians] have to decide whether we are the kind of radical who is prepared to use almost any weapon to bring about justice." Over the past four decades Eagleton has indeed justified almost any enemy of Judeo-Christian civilization, but he draws the line at renouncing the "civilized superstructures" of Oxford and Cambridge, which kept him in thrall for some forty years after he arrived there. Still clinging to the faith of his fathers in 1966, he voiced the forlorn hope that "by trying to make our meanings intelligible to ourselves, we might find eventually that they have become intelligible to others." But, like the rest of the 1960s generation, he soon gave up trying and took refuge in esoteric lucubrations of "critical theory." What was once a "love-hate" relationship with Catholicism has evolved into an unambiguous hostility, which found expression in venomous diatribes against the late Pope John Paul II, whom he blamed for the deaths of "countless Catholics" and "one of the greatest disasters for the Christian church since Charles Darwin."

Not every British intellectual reasons like this. For a few thoughtful conservatives, such as the politician Oliver Letwin, the "sacred task of politics" is "the preservation of civilization." In the present intellectual climate of England, however, such highfalutin sentiments evoke only ridicule from Right and Left alike. The relics of that distinctively Anglo-Saxon civilization lie all around us, unconsidered trifles, soon to be forgotten, lest they remind an amnesiac nation whence they came and who they once were.

On the desk before me is one such melancholy reminder: a copy of the Opera Inedita of Roger Bacon, the thirteenth-century Franciscan friar, who four centuries before his more famous namesake Francis Bacon, pioneered the experimental method and thereby inaugurated the scientific tradition of the West. This volume of some 1400 pages was edited for the first time as part of the Rolls Series, so-called because in 1857 the Master of the Rolls, one of the most senior judges in England, instituted the publication of all the most important medieval chronicles and memorials, at the expense of the Treasury. Bacon's Opera Inedita was among the first few dozen volumes to appear; it is a monument to Victorian scholarship, containing three important treatises, all still, 150 years later, standard texts.

What caught my eye was the fact that this book, no doubt like hundreds of others like it, had belonged until recently to Brighton Public Library, but had evidently been discarded. All over Britain, thousands of public libraries are disposing of millions of books now deemed to be superfluous. In universities old books are still studied, but there the Eagletons hold sway. Foreign languages, ancient and modern, are vanishing from our schools, because they are no longer needed in an Anglophone world. The British are returning to the state in which Bacon found himself more than seven centuries ago when, as he exclaimed, "there are not five men in Latin Christendom who are acquainted with the Hebrew, Greek, and Arabic grammar" while scholars "neglect and condemn the sciences of which they are ignorant." A new dark age threatens, in which knowledge of all kinds is instantly accessible, but the majority even of the educated are incurious about anything beyond their immediate purview, and those who are cultivated enough to put knowledge to good use are fast dying out.

Where, though, are the protests? When, some eighteen years ago now, Allan Bloom hurled the incendiary torch that was The Closing of the American Mind into the gathering gloom of academic mediocrity, few expected it to catch fire as it did. But Bloom knew how to raise the stakes, and his parting shot is even more on target today than it was when he wrote it: "This is the American moment in world history, the moment for which we shall forever be judged. Just as in politics the responsibility for the fate of freedom in the world has devolved upon our regime, so the fate of philosophy in the world has devolved upon our universities, and the two are related as they have never been before." Having shuffled off this sense of responsibility onto American shoulders at the outset of the Cold War, the British did not take the dangers illuminated by Bloom seriously, though their universities suffered from all the same vices.

No British writer of the stature of Saul Bellow stood up to defend Bloom, nor is it likely that this could happen today, in the unlikely event of such a critique of British intellectual life emerging. Now that Bloom's disciples are in government in the United States, and the defence of Western civilization has taken on a new, deadly serious meaning since 9/11, the Atlantic pond has widened to become an ocean again.

For over in Britain, there is no sign of such a return to sanity, nor even an accurate diagnosis. Indeed, the patient's case seems almost hopeless. Politicians, churches, the press, the BBC, the universities: all are complicit in the denigration of the West. The age-old, more or less harmless philistinism of the British has been filtered through the intelligentsia, to re-emerge in a new, all-encompassing betrayal of the very civilization that made it possible to lead the intellectual life. The overweening arrogance of the overeducated invited healthy skepticism; but the new trahison des clercs is driven by pathological self-hatred. Intellectuals seize on any anti-Western ideology, however threadbare, to justify this masochism of the mind. Even Islamism, repulsive as it ought to be to any true-born Englishman (and especially Englishwoman), is a useful stick with which to beat the West in general and Britain in particular. In a recent poll, 10 percent answered "No" to the question "Do you believe Britain has been, on balance, a force for good in the world?"

That 10 percent is the intelligentsia, or a large section of it, who disdain such achievements as the spread of parliamentary democracy, freedom of speech, the rule of law, and religious toleration across the world; the defeat of Napoleon and Hitler; the scientific, agricultural and industrial revolutions of the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries; the abolition of the slave trade; many of the world's favorite sports. All this, and much more, is outweighed by post-colonial guilt, larded with snobbish contempt for the invented traditions and quaint trappings of British nationhood.

And so we return to our point of departure. Despite his public mockery of British hostility towards intellectuals like himself, Auden privately endorsed the gut instinct of the man in the street, who (as he remarked in a letter written in the same period as the poem) "is not altogether wrong in thinking that intellectuals are usually immoral for few of them seem able to take experimentation beyond the destructive stage." The British are still suspicious of their intellectuals--but with good reason, because the intellectuals are far more hostile to the rest of their compatriots. Their pathological self-flagellation is nothing to do with traditional British self-deprecation.

The intellectuals' critique of British anti-intellectualism, by contrast with the continent, is largely nonsense, anyway. According to Charles Murray, from 1400 to 1950 the British produced more creative individuals than France, Germany, or Italy, their nearest European rivals. In science, only the United States has produced more Nobel laureates than Britain. Incorrigibly suspicious of public intellectuals, yes; inhospitable to genius, no. The shadows that fell across British culture some four decades ago were long and deep, but the luminosity of the remoter past is only in eclipse.

Now that the power of intellectuals as a quasi-sacerdotal caste has been exposed as a sham by their failure to prevail upon the British to repeat the calamity of the 1930s by abandoning America, there are signs that a younger generation may be adopting a less stridently anti-Western tone. If British culture is ever to recover its universality--dare I say its catholicity?--then it must regain its equilibrium by avoiding both narcissism and masochism, by paying due respect not only to its physical but also to its metaphysical inheritance.

We must listen to the voices still among us who draw strength from the Judeo-Christian core of British culture. We must listen once more to our poets, chief among them Geoffrey Hill. It is no accident that the greatest living English poet has sought refuge in New England, fleeing the old country and "her quiet ways of betrayal." Yet Hill's fealty to another England, inviolate and inviolable, is a reminder that no one generation of charlatans can eradicate such a history. "Again, bring/recollection forward, weeping with rage./ Debit the lot to our chequered country,/ crediting even so her haunted music." The intellectual life of a great nation transcends the lives of its intellectuals.