LONDON, 2 June 2003 — A formidably opinionated upper-class do-gooder (she co-founded the London School of Economics and the New Statesman), Beatrice Webb was not given to fretting about social engagements. But for the rare occasions when she did, she had an infallible remedy. This Victorian grande dame simply asked herself what reason she could have for feeling nervous: Was she not the “cleverest member of the cleverest family of the cleverest class of the cleverest nation in the world?”
As a British grandee of Olympian hauteur, Mrs. Webb, who lived from 1858 till 1943, was far from unique: She and her kind long took for granted their status as the human race’s finest exhibits. It was her Bloomsbury contemporary Lytton Strachey who gave definitive expression to this upper-crust superiority complex. Challenged by a lady during World War I as to why he was not fighting with his fellow Britons to save civilisation, Strachey retorted: “I am the civilization for which they are fighting.”
Today, this sublime patrician conceit seems beyond parody. Yet it was their sense of manifest destiny that — in the days when Britain’s imperial writ ran far and wide — made this country’s literati such a magisterial force. The fact is that the image of British culture once familiar to the rest of the world was chiefly formed by the patrician class, by high-minded British gentlemen who read and wrote books and who nursed a keen sense of themselves as mentors of mankind. From the example of supremely supercilious but fervently civic-minded mandarins like Mathew Arnold sprang the “civilized” Britain that crystallized during the first half of the twentieth century: The Britain epitomized by the BBC of Lord Reith and by the erstwhile New Statesman, as edited by that self-conscious beacon of light Kingsley Martin.
For intellectuals of a certain age, Britain’s cultural ancien regime now looms large as an object of nostalgia. Voluble among them at present are votaries of the right, such as V.S. Naipaul and the Tory critic John Gross. Naipaul’s furious denunciation of Blair’s Britain as a scene of plebeian brutishness was widely reported; Gross, meanwhile, has for some years been voicing his disaffection in the regular “Letter from London” that he contributes to the neoconservative US journal the New Criterion. Nothing if not bilious, he portrays Britain under New Labour as an emetic mixture of “politically correct” officiousness and mindless vulgarity.
What these one-eyed irreconcilables appear loath to acknowledge is that the vandalizing of the British culture actually took place in the 1980s and 90s — years during which they seemed content to turn a tribal blind eye to the condition of Britain’s intellectual and artistic life. For it was the Conservative governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major which put paid to the old cultural order; indeed, those governments could be said to have coarsened the entire fabric of Britain so systematically that they left little damage for New Labour to do.
Seldom if ever had British politicians made such a virtue of anti-intellectualism. Champions of acquisitiveness, both Thatcher and Major actively despised the “chattering classes” in general and exponents of old-style high-mindedness in particular. In their eyes, Britons with inquisitive minds and social consciences were enemies of enterprise, an altogether expendable breed. Consider the fate of that exemplar of old-style British high-mindedness, the patrician novelist and critic Angus Wilson. When Thatcher came to power in 1979, Wilson was quick to grasp the baleful import of her emergence for persons like himself. To him, “Thatcherism” portended the enthronement of money-grubbing and petit bourgeois censoriousness, of the nastiest elements in the national make-up. For years an esteemed contributor to public debate, Wilson decamped to France (there to fall on hard times) rather than submit to being ruled by a politician whose hostility toward writers and artists and free thinkers was palpable. His shrill outrage in the face of the whole Thatcher phenomenon was poignant — though given that subjection to official obloquy was an experience practically unknown to the genteel British literary world, his reaction was understandable. Accustomed to being on more or less clubbable terms with those who wield power, bookmen like him had naturally assumed that intellectual alienation in its grimmer forms was a misfortune to which their country was providentially immune.
It was perhaps because it had enjoyed such a pampered existence that Britain’s liberal intelligentsia managed scarcely more than token resistance to Mrs. Thatcher and her furious free market ideologues. True, there was — for what it was worth — the “Oxford vote”, the decision by a majority of Oxford dons to deny Mrs. Thatcher the honorary degree which British prime ministers normally receive as a matter of course. But this pantomime of defiance notwithstanding, the British academic community soon yielded meekly enough to what Thatcherism’s high priests dubbed the “discipline of the market.” And so, for that matter, did British cultural institutions in general — not least the BBC, which, with its vaunted public service ethic and dedication to diffusing the “finer values”, was soaked in the antediluvian patrician ethos.
What seems increasingly plain is that in many ways British culture in 1979 still bore the impress of the Victorian age. Not only, however, did Mrs. Thatcher’s hegemony spell the dissolution of the welfare state, of the so-called post-World War II “settlement”: It also boded ill for the survival of the nineteenth century humanist temper which extolled the value of public service and which made possible that historic achievement on the part of the 1945 Labour government. Despite her strident insistence on reviving Victorian values, Margaret Thatcher was in reality the scourge of much that was central to those values. Preening herself as having “seen off” the miners, not to mention the rest of her punch-drunk opponents, this champion of privatization could likewise have boasted that she had consigned to oblivion the Victorian gentleman, with his uplifting, if paternalistic, public purposes.
That the sages and social reformers who used to set the British cultural tone would be dismayed by what has become of Britain — especially of the country’s educational efforts — can scarcely be doubted. For what was the ultimate aim of their books and their journalism and their public lectures, if it was not to democratize the “best that has been thought and known,” to forge a common intellectual culture based on reading and reflection.
There was, to be sure, a season, in the aftermath of World War II, when the high-minded Victorian faith that Britain might ultimately emerge as a uniformly well-educated democracy, was widely felt to be bearing fruit: This was a time during which, with the Penguin paperback revolution at full throttle, the public appetite for intellectual stimulus seemed to be growing apace. Some were tempted to believe that what was once termed the “march of mind” was gathering fresh momentum — though George Orwell, busy committing to paper his vision of a cretinized dystopia, was hardly among them.
Not that, with all their civilizing zeal, Arnold and company had imagined unfaltering progress was guaranteed. Arnold himself feared that Britain’s Victorian vigor was going to give way to “dull, steady decay.” And after all, patrician thinking — shaped to a degree now hard to grasp by the study of Latin and Greek and ancient civilization — was steeped in the consciousness of history’s vicissitudes. But what the highbrow legislators of yore failed to anticipate was how vulnerable to criticism their quintessentially bookish attititudes and values were destined to become. That — against a much-altered national background — their characteristic contempt for trade and industry, science and technology, would one day be held to blame for Britain’s ills, barely entered their rarefied deliberations. Cossetted by the wealth of empire, they indulged in the pursuit of ideas for its own sake, as if to do so constituted the be-and-end-all of human existence.
In the populist, utilitarian atmosphere of post-imperial Britain, a backlash against such unashamedly impractical, not to say unwordly, intellectualism was perhaps inevitable. Yet the toppling of the old cultural order by Mrs. Thatcher and her profit-motivated acolytes arguably left British society both mentally and morally depleted. Certainly contemporary Britain is a country that has been effectively purged of high-mindedness, a place with few countervailing influences to pit against the prevailing materialism.
How improbable it has begun to seem that there was a time, not so long ago, when British public life featured a caste of dignitaries whose raison d’etre was to advertise the virtue of thinking and discussion and commitment to the commonweal.
The point about Beatrice Webb was that, in addition to being a self-intoxicated prig, she was public-spiritedness incarnate, a prominent figure who applied her genuinely brilliant intellect unstintingly to the cause of human progress. Now, in an era of junked traditions and rampaging commercialism, Britons like her seem as remote as the Pharaohs.
