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RADIO 4
CURRENT AFFAIRS

ANALYSIS
THINKING IN PUBLIC
TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED
DOCUMENTARY
Presenter: Kenan Malik
Producer: Ingrid Hassler
Editor: Nicola Meyrick
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Broadcast Date:
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10.04.03
13.04.03
TLN314\03VT1014
2721

Taking part in order of appearance:

Prof Andrew Motion, FRSL
Poet Laureate
Frank Furedi
Professor of Sociology, University of Kent
Dr Geoff Mulgan
Director, Prime Ministers Strategy Unit, Cabinet
Office
Stefan Collini
Professor of Intellectual History and English
Literature, University of Cambridge
The Rt Hon Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve, CBE, FBA,
Principal, Newnham College, University of Cambridge
Dr Mary-Kay Wilmers
Editor, The London Review of Books
Dr Lee Edwards

Distinguished Fellow in Conservative Thought, The

Heritage Foundation, Washington DC

MOTION: They read good books, and quote, but never learn
a language other than the scream of rocket -burn.
Our straighter talk is drowned, but iron-clad:
elections, money, empire, oil and Dad.
MALIK: The Poet Laureate Andrew
Motion, with his controversial poem about the war in Iraq.
MOTION:
Ive never written anything since I
was appointed Laureate which has had such an effect as that. Its
been translated into about you know thirty different languages, its
whizzed around the world. Ive had literally hundreds of e-mails
from people out of the blue about it.
MALIK: As writer, critic, academic,
campaigner on many social issues from homelessness to war, as
well as bard to the Queen, Andrew Motion has as good a claim as
any to the title of public intellectual. But is that how he sees
himself?
MOTION:
Some of the anxiety that I would
have about categorising myself as an intellectual is to do with the
way in which that very word intellectual seems to create some sort
of barrier between the person being it and the audience that theyre
reaching. It implies a certain degree of superiority. And it is a
difficult line to walk this, so what do you do? Well, you try not to
turn yourself into a pundit who has an opinion about everything. I
think I would see myself more or less purely and simply as a poet
who has a rather peculiar public office to perform.
MALIK: There might be an element of
false modesty here, but Andrew Motions doubts also reveal the
uncertainty that intellectuals now feel about their own role in society.
Its an uncertainty that Frank Furedi, Professor of Sociology at the
University of Kent, and author of a forthcoming book on the public
intellectual, both acknowledges and regrets.
FUREDI:
It seems to me that what
intellectuals have done is they have kind of brought to the surface
important problems that face society, that are on the subconscious

of culture and society, and they have provided society with insight,
with concepts, with perspectives that allow people and communities
to make sense of the world.
MALIK: How do you think that the role of
the public intellectual has changed in recent years?
FUREDI:
We dont really have a cultural
terrain that is hospitable to difficult, complicated, challenging ideals.
These days were very much in a more policy-oriented, much more
kind of technically-oriented kind of regime where intellectuals only
have a marginal character.
MALIK: Do you think thats a change that
is unique to Britain?
FUREDI:
I think over the last ten or fifteen
years, weve seen a gradual trend whereby all Western societies
seem to be subject to very similar patterns. Of course there are
national variations and in places like France, there is still at least
outwardly greater respect being given to the intellectual and its
offered them a greater role. But when you actually scratch the
surface the role of the intellectual has diminished in just about every
society I can think of, whether its in Britain or in Germany or in
France, Italy. Its a very similar sad process.
MALIK: But are intellectuals really an
endangered species? After all, you can barely open your paper or
switch on the TV or radio without yet another celebrity don imposing
upon you - such as, perhaps, those in this very programme. So
what really has changed in recent years?
Heres Geoff Mulgan, Director of the Prime Ministers Strategy Unit,
a kind of think tank inside government.
MULGAN:
Thirty or forty years ago many of
the ideas coming into politics and government came from
universities, often from the big universities the LSE, Oxford,
Harvard and so on. For a number of reasons their influence has
changed and, to some extent, declined. I think the whole
intellectual ecology, if you like, in the UK and some other countries
notably the US - has changed in the last thirty or forty years. In
part, thats a change in the character of university life where
universities have become somewhat more inward-looking. Funding
is more determined by peer pressures and peer review; Funding
Councils tend to be somewhat more enclosed within their disciplines
than was the case thirty or forty years ago; theres also been a rise
of think tanks, for sure; theres been a rise of informed comment in
the media and all of that has meant much more competition, if you
like, around the promotion of ideas. So the role which some public
intellectuals played in the 50s and 60s has been to some extent
dissipated. Those roles are more likely now to be played by
journalists, and leading commentators in the media have filled the
space which a generation or two ago would have been filled by
professors in universities.
MALIK: Political and social life evolves and
intellectuals will have to adapt or die. So what? Its just opening up
the marketplace of ideas to greater competition, suggests Stefan
Collini, Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature at
Cambridge University.

COLLINI:
In the, lets say certainly the first
two thirds of the twentieth century, intellectuals profited in some way
from a wider social deference. There was a sense that these were
people who made up a very small proportion of society with a
particular cultural background and a particular level of education,
which was not at all widely diffused. And one of the things thats
happening, I think, is that with the decline of that kind of deference,
a much wider range of types of people are looked to for comment
and guidance. I think its shaken the really rather authoritative and
elevated role that people might have ascribed to some of the
leading intellectuals a couple of generations ago, and now one
would think of these intellectual figures as quite often being in
competition with other kinds of actors in, say, the celebrity culture or
other kinds of actors in the political world. It seems to me that the
greater plurality of types of figure who are called upon these days
must be a gain. After all, why would we want intellectuals to benefit
from what was in the past largely an accidental or contingent social
fact of their background or their association with a particular social
class?
MALIK: Its true, for example, that theres
a greater diversity in the backgrounds of the cast list and even
presenters of a programme such as Analysis than would have been
the case in the past. But lets not exaggerate. It never was the
case that all intellectuals were once the products of Eton and
Oxbridge. From Thomas Paine in the eighteenth century to CLR
James in the twentieth, theres been a long and healthy tradition of
working class or self-taught intellectuals.
In any case, as anyone who uses the Internet knows, a plurality of
sources is not necessarily a gain. Rumour and fact, truths and
falsehoods jostle with each other for our attention, and one needs
good judgement to discriminate between them.
But good judgement is precisely what the so-called democratisation
of culture seems to have undermined. Pluralism has helped create
an anything goes attitude where every idea is thrown into the pot.
The focus group, for instance, which lies at the heart of the modern
political process, is rooted in the belief that everyones view is of
equal worth. Might this not blunt our ability to distinguish between
good and bad ideas, great insights and commonplace idiocies?
Heres the philosopher Onora ONeill, Principal of Newnham
College, Cambridge.
ONEILL:
A lot of people would say
democracy and populism arent the same thing and that if were
serious about democracy which I am you have to think about
giving people ways of taking part in and reflecting on public affairs
which, as it were, support their abilities to judge well rather than
encouraging them to take sides or to identify with celebrities or
against hate figures and this sort of thing. I think its a very difficult
thing to see how one can conduct public debate in ways that are
genuinely democratic rather than wearing a populist sheen.
MALIK: Democracy views all people as
being of equal worth. But not all ideas. Hence Baroness ONeills
ambivalence about the democratisation of culture. And shes not
alone.
Mary-Kay Wilmers is the Editor of the London Review of Books, a
publication that might appear wilfully old-fashioned. Does she see

the magazine as swimming against the tide of contemporary

culture?
WILMERS:
Yes, I see it as an area where
difficult subjects and current subjects are discussed by people who
well they do discuss them in other papers too but they discuss
them at greater length. They have mostly more freedom to argue. I
mean were not very much in favour of opinion; were in favour of
reflection and argument and building an argument. And if there isnt
the same attitude of deference to toffs who are intellectuals, then
everybodys going to have more sense of their own entitlement and
they dont want to read it at great length. They want you know
they want a sound bite, and in a way thats fine if thats what they
want. Its not what we want. And I think thats whats distinctive
about the London Review of Books in the British context.
MALIK: Such a stand against soundbite
culture may sound virtuous. But ideas must have a wider audience if
they are to flourish.
In last years Reith lectures on Radio 4, entitled A Question of
Trust, Onora ONeill made a case for a fundamental transformation
of public life, a case that has only benefited from the higher public
profile she now enjoys as a result of those lectures.
ONEILL:
Since I gave those lectures, I have
had innumerable invitations. I try to manage about two public
occasions a week, which is actually quite a sweat, talking to, on the
whole , public sector groups, professional groups, charity groups,
big professional associations, large audiences on some occasion.
MALIK: Professor ONeill is someone who
wears many hats - a philosopher, a broadcaster, the Principal of
Newnham College, a cross-bencher in the House of Lords, a
member of several parliamentary committees. So does she
consider herself to be a public intellectual?
ONEILL:
I think, to my slight surprise, I
probably do now. But I have to tell you a lot of what I do
intellectually is not public at all because when I practice my trade Ill
sit with one graduate student or drive across on a Saturday to talk to
a small seminar run by the graduate philosophy society of another
university, and I wouldnt feel myself as it were true to the calling if I
deserted that sort of activity in favour of the big audiences and the
public arena. To be a public intellectual, I think youve got to be an
intellectual.
You know were rather like weeds: we spring up. It takes quite a
long time to become such a person because youve got to have a
certain dedication to the intellectual side of it and then, as it were,
you may or may not go public in certain respects.
MALIK: For Onora ONeill the Reith
Lectures provided a springboard to help launch her ideas into a
more public forum. For Andrew Motion, the office of Poet Laureate
affords the same advantage.
MOTION:
Being Poet Laureate undoubtedly
makes it easier for me to speak in public in terms of the kind of
platform that it provides me to speak from. The role that I see for
myself as Poet Laureate is essentially to do with breaking down
walls. I could previously I mean previous to my appointment
have shouted myself blue in the face and a few people might have

paid attention, I might have got an article in the paper, but now it
more or less happens as a matter of course that if I do feel strongly
and want to say something then there is a space in which to say it.
Now this is a terrific privilege and I feel it very sharply and I feel very
blessed in it. It also means that I must be careful not to waste the
opportunity that it gives or to dilute the authority of the position by
firing off about things that I dont particularly care about. In other
words, I have to kind of make sure that when I do battle on about
something or other that its something that is absolutely that Im
absolutely clear that I think about, deeply about and value highly.
MALIK: There are many things you have
battled on about: youve written about apartheid, about
homelessness, about national identity, many social and political
themes. What drives you to write about these things?
MOTION:
I have written about all these
things. The traditional expectation, of course, is the Laureate will
just write about certain events in the Royal Calendar. I have written
a few of those poems and I mean to go on respecting that as and
when I can. But at the same time, it seems to me very important to
put those poems in make them part of a much bigger picture of
poems about matters of national interest.
MALIK: Andrew Motions view seems like
a throwback to an old-fashioned, and almost romantic, vision of the
intellectual as a dissenter. But is there a price to pay these days for
taking such a stand? Mary-Kay Wilmers, Editor of the London
Review of Books.
WILMERS:
I think its the role of the
intellectual not to be cowed by received wisdom. The one thing I do
dislike now quite a lot is the epithets that are directed at us. I dont
like the phrase the chattering classes, I dont like the way if you
express an opinion thats contrary to the mainstream, its knee-jerk
or opportunistic or cynical, or if its on the Left its the Prada
Meinhoff. I dont like all of that, the automatic response, and I think
weve had quite a lot of that directed at us by people who, I dont
know, wish us ill or want a bigger audience. But we dont want that
audience.
MALIK: But an intellectual who has no
audience is no intellectual - just some cleverclogs talking to himself.
It makes no difference how good or right your argument is if it
convinces no one but those already convinced. Surely an
intellectual has to be accountable to his or her ideas by engaging
with the public.
But what happens when the winning of an audience becomes more
important than the message you wish to convey? Its a clich to
suggest that we live in a celebrity culture, but the observation is no
less true for that. The Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion.
MOTION:
Anybody who appears regularly in
public pontificating about one thing or another, however good they
are, however shrewd they are, as soon as they do this they achieve
a kind of celebrity status which in itself is problematic for the
message they are trying to get across.
What I see as the problem to do with celebrity is to do with the

difficulty that people who are who have become celebrities by

one means or another, the difficulty they have in defending their
intellectual life and the pronouncements which arise from it against
the kind of personality-driven curiosity about themselves the way
they live and, in particular, their private lives. Personally, I think it is
important not to get drawn off into the kind of do I or do I not reflock
my wallpaper kind of argument or expose.
MALIK: So do you think that the rise of
celebrity culture has in a sense trivialized intellectual debate?
MOTION:
I think there is something
inherently trivializing about celebrity culture. And I suppose really
what Im trying to say is that celebrity culture is the problem. There
is no problem as such with celebrities if theyve earned it and theyre
saying sensible things.
MALIK: There have always been celebrity
intellectuals - think of the media status that TS Elliot, or AJP Taylor,
or Isaiah Berlin possessed.
But, as sociologist Frank Furedi argues, todays celebrity culture
has helped transform the way their ideas are presented to the
public.
FUREDI:
The problem comes when in
certain cases there are very strong pressures on the intellectual not
to be an intellectual but to be an entertainer and not to promote
ideals or to challenge people with important ideals and ideas but to
titillate people with fairly insubstantial entertainment formats, and I
think that Id make a very clear distinction.
MALIK: So are you put off from having
your own radio show or TV show because of that?
FUREDI:
No, I mean I would love to have
my own TV show and on a good day maybe I could you know play a
role of an intellectual through television.
MALIK: And perhaps through radio too.
Though whether presenting Analysis makes one an intellectual or
an entertainer, Im not quite sure.
The intellectual as entertainer is one major change in the cultural
landscape. The intellectual as technocrat is another. Its a
transformation revealed in the rise of the think tank and in the
changing relationship between governments and academics. Geoff
Mulgan of the No 10 Strategy Unit.
MULGAN:
Government employs far more
economists, far more social scientists than it did twenty or thirty
years ago. Far more of the day-to-day business of policy-making
around, say, welfare to work policies, criminal justice, education is
informed by detailed, empirical research advised by academics than
was the case in the past. So that sort of normal science, if you like,
has become much more important to the business both of
universities and of government.
The shift of government and politics to greater pragmatism, less
ideological context, more emphasis on what works has certainly
reduced the influence of a certain kind of intellectual. That is to say

purely ideological, very theoretically driven intellectuals dont have

as much influence as they might have had before. But it has
actually opened up in other respects much greater influence for
intellectuals and in a way its perhaps a revitalisation of quite a
healthy British tradition of social science empiricism which has
always, perhaps compared to some of the traditions of Germany
and France, been much more concerned with the concrete and
understanding the general through the concrete rather than the
other way round.
MALIK: Working with the concrete. It
makes intellectuals sound like engineers. And in a sense thats just
what many have become: sober professionals dealing with the
minutiae of policy-making, rather than open-ended explorers of
ideas. For Geoff Mulgan such old-fashioned British empiricism is a
good thing. For Frank Furedi, on the other hand, it undermines the
very essence of what it is to be an intellectual.
FUREDI:
I often think of the person working
for a think tank and making up ideas on the back of an envelope as
very much the personification of how we treat ideas. If you look at
the way that think tanks and people involved in policy-making in
public affairs kind of promiscuously go from one idea to the next
and you know what is the big idea of January is easily forgotten by
May, thats very much the way we kind of seem to be treating ideas.
And I think as a result of that, we just simply do not have time for
ideas that take a long time to evolve. We dont cultivate people to
think in a more kind of long-termist, experimental sense. We want
ideas with quick results, ideas that are unambiguous, ideas that are
fairly kind of black and white.
EDWARDS:
Thats true that politicians tend to
want solutions for problems that theyre facing today or perhaps
tomorrow or maybe even next week, and so you do have this
question is that going to be the best solution for a particular policy
question or should you sort of step back and take a longer look at
it?
MALIK: Lee Edwards, Distinguished
Fellow in Conservative Thought at the Heritage Foundation,
President Bushs favourite Washington think tank.
EDWARDS:
It seems to me what the Heritage
Foundation does is to do both: when there is a particular bill or
legislative item which is before the Congress, well provide analysis
on that; but, at the same time, well look at bigger issues, you might
say more controversial issues, such as social security, missile
defence, both of which weve been writing and talking about for
several decades.
MALIK: Many critics of think tanks suggest
that youre not really public intellectuals but simply experts who are
very narrow in your way of thinking.
EDWARDS:
Well I dont I dont like to sort of
you know get into a battle of curriculum vitae, but I know for
example, speaking for myself, I have written thirteen books, I have
been published in a number of publications which I think are rather
substantial, including the Washington Post. As a matter of fact, I
also am an adjunct Professor of Politics at the Catholic University of

America and I dont think that Im atypical.

MALIK: But a long CV does not always an
intellectual make. Here, as elsewhere in life, size is not everything.
In any case, as Lee Edwards happily acknowledges, the power of
think tanks like the Heritage Foundation resides as much in their
political clout as in their intellectual acumen.
EDWARDS:
Whats remarkable, it seems to me, is that if
one looks around Washington DC today and looks at the various
executive departments that there are a number of think tank people
who have positions of responsibility. For example, in the State
Department there are and I counted this up the other day about
four Under Secretaries who all come from think tanks. For example,
over across the river at the Pentagon in the Defence Department,
the Deputy Secretary of Defence, Mr Wolfowitz, is a graduate, if you
will, of a think tank here in Washington DC.
MALIK:
But what Lee Edwards sees as the
strength of think tanks may also be their weakness. Institutions like
the Heritage Foundation have become an adjunct of government, a
means by which intellectuals have transformed themselves from
outsiders, often challenging received wisdom, to consummate
insiders, at ease in the corridors of power. And once on the inside,
critical thinking often becomes subordinate to the needs of the
political process.
But how new is all this criticism? Our culture has dumbed down.
Intellectuals are not as good as they were. Theyve sold out.
Havent we heard all this before? Havent the doom-mongers
always been with us? Professor Stefan Collini of Cambridge
University certainly thinks so.
COLLINI:
The language of the decline of the intellectual
is something which is repeated in different forms in each
generation. In some way, the real intellectual is always assumed to
be elsewhere in the past, so hence the whole theory of decline, or
in other societies. It seems to me that in that traditional British view
those real intellectuals are always presumed actually to be in
France. Its not at all so obvious that there are any intellectual
figures who are more gigantic in France at the moment than in
Britain or anywhere else actually. There is a certain glory or
grandeur which attaches to those who were in previous generations,
those who are now dead. Those we see around us, we see too
much of the comings and goings, we see too much of the stops and
starts of their -in this case- their thinking and their writing perhaps to
put them on the pedestal, so that always produces this optical
illusion, it seems to me, that the really great names are in the past.
MALIK:
Its true that every generation
tends to look back to a previous generation as a golden age. And
yet, what is happening today is not simply a replay of the past.
Think of the intellectual cast list from, say, the 1940s and 50s:
Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, TS Eliot, John Maynard
Keynes, Karl Popper, George Orwell, JBS Haldane, Frantz Fanon,
and so on. The intellectual depth of this line-up, compared to a
similar cast list from today, is surely more than just an optical
illusion. As is the importance many of these figures placed on being
not just intellectuals, but intellectuals involved in political
movements and public debate.

Its as great a myth to believe that nothing has changed as to

believe that everything has changed. The cult of celebrity, think
tank philosophy, the democratisation of culture - each has helped
recast the role of the public intellectual in our society, transforming
both the public and the intellectual side of the equation - and not
necessarily for the better.

In the end, though, the question is this: why should we listen to

intellectuals at all, however brilliant they may be? Heres Andrew
Motion.
MOTION:
I think there can be something
embarrassing or worse about writers, just as there is about any
other kind of group of people, who are in some sense giving their
opinion without taking responsibility for it because theyre not getting
involved in sort of practical support for what it is that they might be
saying. There must be deeds, protests, going on marches, you
name it, along with the simple fact of saying a thing. There is a kind
of suspicion that free floating, free standing intellectuals have
separated themselves from society and so why should we take it
from them, especially if their pronouncements are not surrounded
by practical actions. There is something rather repellent about
people who stand outside the flow of daily events and tell us what
we should think and so on about things. But I think whats important
is that writing in general and poetry, in particular, moves at a
different speed and takes longer perspectives, so a good poem
about whatever event it is or whatever circumstance it is thats being
spoken about might not make its mark immediately, but it might well
turn out to be the thing which survives almost everything else.
MALIK: And as with poetry in particular, so
with ideas in general. At their best, the ideas of intellectuals provide
depth and vision to public debate, clarify moral and social issues,
and possess lasting significance. Thats why we should worry about
a culture that encourages intellectuals to be entertainers and in
which long-term thinking often seems subordinate to short-term
policy needs.