A manifesto for the mass intelligentsia

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A few newsletters back, I talked about the idea of the ‘mass intelligentsia’, and posted an interview I did with Melvyn Bragg about the term (he used it in this programme on class and culture back in March). I’ve been digging into this idea a bit more since then, for an academic research project I’m doing on philosophy clubs. I’d like to unpack the idea some more, if that’s alright by you.

The main idea of the mass intelligentsia is that today, in the words of Bragg, "a very substantial minority is prepared to put time and effort into subjects that used to be the preserve of a very small minority". There's always been an intelligentsia, it's just become a lot bigger, and turned into a mass phenomenon in the last 30 to 40 years. As David Brooks put it in the New York Times back in 2008: "People in the 1950s used to earnestly debate the role of the intellectual in modern politics. But the Lionel Trilling authority-figure has been displaced by the mass class of blog-writing culture producers."

The chief driver behind the emergence of the mass intelligentsia, as Bragg told me, is the expansion of higher education since World War II. Back then, less than 5% of the population of OECD countries went to university. Now, the OECD average is around 35%. This expansion of higher education was part of the emergence of what Daniel Bell called ‘post-industrial capitalism’, or Peter Drucker termed ‘the knowledge economy’.

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The industrial sector of the economy shrank, as did the number of blue-collar jobs, while the services sector grew, along with the middle class. Higher education expanded to create what Bell called a ‘new intelligentsia’ to work in the services sector of the economy, in academia, scientific R&D; communications, computing and digital technology; in think-tanks and policy, and in the arts.

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The new intelligentsia has two wings - cultural and scientific - with quite different temperaments and attitudes. The scientific intelligentsia tends to be positivist, to believe (naturally enough) in the power of science and empirical measurement to arrive at truth and improve society. The cultural intelligentsia tends to believe in creativity and authenticity, it tends to be anti-positivistic, wary of the de-humanising potential of technological advances, and resentful of the spread of scientific metricisation into the arts and humanities. Sometimes they clash, sometimes they find compromises: Steve Jobs is a good example of someone who combined the scientific intelligentsia’s love of tech with the cultural intelligentsia’s ethos of personal freedom and authenticity.

The mass intelligentsia is characterised by the pursuit of lifelong learning. They are the creators of a new ‘learning society’. Some theorists of the learning society characterize it as a desperate attempt to keep up with rapid changes in the knowledge economy. That’s the wrong way to see it.  Instead, learning is pursued by people as a good in itself. Learning is pursued for pleasure, knowledge, community and enhanced experience - and jobs are another means to those goals, rather than the end which learning serves. People work for money, but they mainly work for new learning experiences.

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The transition from university to the marketplace is a continuation of the learning process, rather than the end of it. ‘Market-place’ is probably the wrong word for the modern work-space. It’s a ‘learning-space’. The best companies realise this, and adopt many of the features of a university.

Robert M. Hutchins, author of the 1968 book, The Learning Society, suggested a good model for the future society was ancient Athens, in which "education was not a segregated activity, conducted for certain hours, in certain places, at a certain time of life. It was the aim of the society. The city educated the man."

In the learning society, leisure-time is increasingly used for intellectual stimulation. The mass intelligentsia construct thousands of informal networks, online and offline, to learn, collaborate and expand their minds. Informal learning websites like the Khan Academy, TED, In Our Time, the RSA and Philosophy Bites feed the rising public demand for intellectual stimulation. There is also a craving for new forms of intellectual community. In the 1990s, book clubs mushroomed across Britain, and the book festival scene exploded: there are today over 300 book festivals in the UK. Social entrepreneurs create new informal schools for lifelong learners, like the School of Life, the General Assembly, the Faber Academy, Mumsnet Academy, or Jamie Oliver’s Recipease.

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Much of the innovation in learning is peer-led. The internet lowers the barrier for entry, and makes it much easier for small, grassroots clubs to organise themselves. The University of the Third Age is an example of what can be achieved - it started off as a top-down organisation for learning with the elderly in Australia, and then became a grassroots peer-led phenomenon here in the UK (the same thing happened with Skepticism, by the way, which was a top-down movement in the US and Australia, and then turned into a grassroots peer-led movement in the UK. It's now a good combination of top-down organisations and grassroots clubs)

Meetup.com, in particular, sparked a revolution in peer-led learning and mutual improvement. There are today 2,162 book club meetups, 1,799 art meetups, 1,009 environmental meetups, 811 philosophy meetups, 524 Skeptic meetups, 348 animal rights meetups, 260 history meetups, 230 ethics meetups, 124 feminist meetups, 110 astronomy meetups, and 610 meetups interested in ‘intellectual discussion’. You can find, on any given evening in London, art history in the pub, philosophy in the pub, psychology in the pub, even live therapy sessions.

British universities struggled, on the whole, to recognise the potential for the new adult learning market, with the exception of the Open University, which makes 22 of the top 100 courses on iTunes U, and is the only UK university to appear in that list. Many of the most influential British intellectuals now work outside of academia. Universities have, perhaps, been weighed down by their history and bureaucracy, and can be suspicious of innovation and entrepreneurialism. However, the rise of Ed-X heralds a period of rapid change for higher education, as it finally adapts to the lifelong learning needs of the mass intelligentsia. The university of tomorrow will follow the Open University model, and have multi-media production and adult learning at its centre, rather than at the margins.

What’s wrong with the mass intelligentsia?

The growth of the mass intelligentsia is often portrayed, by elitist intellectuals, as socially and morally undesirable. Modernist intellectuals criticised it in the 1920s as the rise of the ‘middlebrow’, and the end of avant garde. In a similar vein, some recent thinkers have criticised the growth of informal learning on the internet as the triumph of the ill-informed amateur and shallow thinking. It’s also easy to criticise the commercialism of informal learning entrepreneurs like Jamie Oliver, Alain de Botton or TED’s Chris Anderson. They are giving the people what they want, rather than what they supposedly ‘need’.

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The mass intelligentsia as a class are often depicted as selfish, narcissistic, obsessed with personal growth. The communitarian philosopher Charles Taylor, for example, warned in A Secular Agethat the individualistic ethos of 19th and early 20th century bohemians had become a ‘mass phenomenon’ in the 1960s: now we’re all selfish seekers after personal freedom and authenticity, and have recklessly rejected the traditional forms of church, family, corporation and political party. Robert Putnam also warned of the erosion of social capital and civic virtue, while labour sociologists like Richard Sennet and Jeremy Rifkin have suggested that the knowledge economy’s increased volatility has made us lonelier, more anxious, and less virtuous. This generally negative view of the mass intelligentsia was well-expressed by Michel Houellebecq’s Atomised, in which the two main characters, representatives of the cultural and scientific intelligentsia, are cut-off, selfish and morally lost.

I have some sympathy with this pessimistic narrative. It is easy to argue that the widening of education has come at the expense of a flattening. Where are the geniuses of the 19th and early 20th century, where the contemporary equivalents of Joyce, Marx, Freud, Mill, Picasso, Wittgenstein, Einstein? Where are the great plays and novels? Perhaps we are even in a period of intellectual stagnation. We have more and more media on which to communicate ideas, and ever-fewer things to say, with the result that the same ideas and case studies are endlessly recycled in books touted as the Next Big Idea.

Yet I choose to hold a more optimistic narrative. If the new intelligentsia has abandoned some of the old forms of community, it immediately set out to create new forms - like Esalen, the Californian commune so ably mocked by Houellebecq. Yes, many of these new communities turned out to be vapid, or commercial, or even cultish. But the rate of social innovation has been incredibly quick, and those forms of community that work have survived and spread. Witness, for example, the success of Alcoholics Anonymous, which is the best example of peer-to-peer learning we have.

There have been many elegies written for the end of the traditional working class, the end of socialism, the end of working men’s clubs and the worker education movement - see, for example, Jonathan Rose’s wonderful book The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, the last chapter of which delivers a tirade against the ‘weekend bohemianism’ of the new mass intelligentsia. But that critique seems misplaced. The rise of the mass intelligentsia is proof that the centuries-long drive for workers’ self-education succeeded. It’s just that it didn’t create a proletarian utopia, instead it created a hugely expanded middle class. The radical ethos of informal learning via mutual improvement clubs and corresponding societies didn’t disappear, as Jonathan argues: it went mainstream, and became the modus operandi for the learning society. (I'll send Jonathan this piece and see what he thinks).

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You can criticise the mass intelligentsia as selfish and self-obsessed, as Charles Taylor does, but I think that’s unfair. We may have a problem obeying traditional hierarchies - but is that so selfish, when you consider how the Catholic Church has behaved over the last 30 years? The search for personal well-being and authenticity, which Taylor seems to find so narcissistic, has in fact rapidly led the mass intelligentsia back to ancient sources of wisdom. We’re searching for the good life. And we’re learning, increasingly, that the good life is best practiced together. We’re trying to construct non-hierarchical forms of community to practice the good life. We’re building a society that I think Aristotle would have welcomed: in which everyone has the opportunity to learn, to collaborate on meaningful projects, and to expand their awareness. That’s a society worth striving for.

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Here are some interesting links I came across this week:

Yesterday I met Rob Symington, one of the founders of Escape the City, which is totally an example of what I'm talking about above: a platform, network and community to help people find learning experiences in the workplace. They have 100 meetups around the world, and have raised $600K in crowd-sourced funding on CrowdCube. Way to go!

There’s a great philosophy event next month: The Philosophical Society of England is celebrating its centenary with a weekend event, featuring Angie Hobbs talking about ‘ancient Greece and the future of philosophy’, Brenda Almond on ‘has applied philosophy lost its way?’, as well as Jonathan Ree on ‘philosophical societies and social change’. Jonathan is hopefully speaking at the London Philosophy Club in October.

Here’s a cool video on The Future of Philosophy, made by Leah Green, featuring Angie Hobbs and the London Philosophy Club.

Come to Interrogate, a festival at Dartington Hall in October, where I’ll be speaking, along with lots of other thinkers / practitioners on happiness and well-being. It will be brilliant.

Talking of happiness...I wrote this blog post celebrating English melancholy.

This account in last Saturday’s Guardian of RD Laing’s Kingsley Hall, and the orgies, LSD parties, black magic and naked wrestling that went on there, was extraordinary.

I have been doing a lot of research on Skepticism as a grassroots movement (an interesting part of the learning society). Thanks for everyone’s help with it. The community is clearly going through ‘growing pains’ as Massimo Pigliucci put it, or ‘a bit of a rough patch’, as Sid Rodrigues of Skeptics In the Pub said. Here’s one ex-Skeptic’s account of why he’s leaving the community, and here’s the founder of Atheism Plus’ account of misogyny in the Skeptic community has made her give up blogging. As a Skeptical theist (there, I said it!) I hope the community gets over this difficult patch.

At philosopher Brian Leiter’s blog, an old post that I came across and enjoyed: what are the 100 most influential philosophy books published since 2000? Above my pay grade... but I enjoyed Taylor’ Secular Age and Nussbaum’s Upheavals of Thought. And Sandel’s Justice - poppy, but good, and widely read.

Here’s a fascinating set of short articles by famous British philosophers in 1946, about why philosophy is in crisis and needs to connect with the wider population. Plus ca change...

Right, that’s your lot for this week. Let me know if you have any thoughts on my thesis above on the mass intelligentsia - I’m writing a report on it at the moment so would welcome any input and feedback.

Jules

PS Thank you for all the nice reviews on Amazon - 22 reviews on there now, 19 of them five-star. It’s looking hopeful for a sale to a US publisher - send me good luck in the next few days!