Seminar Paper on John Carey's "The Intellectuals and the Masses"

John Carey, born in 1934 in the midst of the Modernist movement, is a British literary critic and Professor at the University of Oxford, a renowned anti-elitist and is known for attacking many well-respected beliefs and institutions. He wrote Intellectuals and the Masses in 1992 and he discusses many writers and literary theorists throughout the book regarding the rise of the middle class and universal education, such as Virginia Wolff, Friedrich Neitzsche and E.M. Forster.

In The Intellectuals and the Masses he examines the attitudes of the ‘intellectuals’ towards the masses and women, and the way in which the social structure has changed. A common theme is the loss of the intellectual’s hold over ‘avante garde’. This is defined as seeking “to take literacy and culture away from the masses, and so to counteract the progressive intentions of democratic educational reform”. This definition’s inclusion of the phrase “progressive intentions” suggests that Carey is trying to show intellectuals as not progressing, but being stuck in the past. This can also be seen in the way that the ‘masses’ are referred to as resembling “children and savages” which are “unambitious and common” and Carey’s constant referral to peasants and their place in history.

Thomas Hardy, for example, felt afraid and threatened by the mass and referred to “a monster whose body had four million” which held too close a proximity to him once London began to grow and the suburbs swallowed the villages such as Upper Tooting, where Hardy lived. This is a common theme in E M Forster’s Howard’s End where the “creeping” “red rust” is foreboding of the collapse of the established social order which intellectuals so cherish. This was also a major pre-occupation with Neitzsche who created images to show “the modern intellectual’s effort to limit and dominate the mass”. He continually used metaphors such as a herd of animals, swarms of poisonous flies, raindrops, and weeds ruining proud structures, in order to suggest that the mass gaining knowledge would result in the downfall of ancient traditions. This instability above all else seems to have terrified intellectuals, so much so for Neitzsche that the basic function of his writing was “to deprive the mass of human status”. This is dangerous, as James Carey points out, it can clearly be linked to what made Hitler and the Nazis think it acceptable to try to exterminate any race other than their own.

This denial of humanity became an important project among the intellectuals of the early twentieth century, as T S Eliot pointed out. The scientific approach included referring to the masses as seething, unclean “bacteria”, acting like microbes to “hasten the dissolution of dead bodies” (a clear comparison to the dissolution of social boundaries). These ideas were exploited by those that wanted to purge the mass, such as Stalin and Hitler, and used as a justification for huge crimes against humanity. This prejudicial divide between the less educated and the over-educated can therefore be seen as the catalyst for mass genocide. Gustav Le Bon had a large role to play in this, suggesting that “crowds are mentally inferior and intent on destruction”, an argument which has been and still is a frequently used get-out clause for those who are not respecting humanity. He describes the rabble as “suggestible, impulsive, irrational, exaggeratedly emotional, inconstant, irritable and capable of thinking only in images”, fostering a deep disdain in the intellectuals and accentuating the divide. Along this same line of discussion, he is derogatory to women saying that all these qualities are “in short, just like women” and saying that “like women”, the mass only respond to force, not kindness.

A woman’s place in society is much discussed by Carey in Intellectuals and the Masses. Women were seen by intellectuals at the modernist time as purely decorative, without any real opinion or skill. They therefore thought that the “emancipation and education of women were signs of modern shallowness” because it would do no good. For example, in Thus Spake Zarathustra, he says “Are you visiting women? Don’t forget your whip”, showing that he sees a need to control them, for their own good and thinks that their independence could only be a negative. This is because if women’s opinions could be heard, the male superiority and aristocracy, and therefore the whole social structure, would have to change and the intellectuals did not want this. However, Lord Northcliffe had a totally different attitude, “considering women readers worthy of attention” and even establishing the first magazine read and published by women (even if it was a flop). Since the women’s liberation, the latter view has become widespread and women are finally being seen as just as much human and capable of intellect as men. However, although, like women, the intellectuals dismissed “the rabble” as uneducable and a waste of time, unlike women, this has so far not been universally overturned.

The ambition to acquire culture is shown to be “ill-advised and unsuccessful” in much literature including E.M.Forster’s Howard’s End in which Leonard Bast, used as an example of the newly-educated and struggling masses, is eventually killed by what he is striving for. He tries in vain but never really acquires “true culture”. Forster seems to be giving a cautionary warning and declaring the masses to share Leonard’s “cramped little mind”. Virginia Wolff is also unsympathetic to those trying to acquire culture in Mrs Dalloway, suggesting that they never quite get it right; “she seeks comfort in Christianity, forfeiting her intellectual integrity in return” and therefore negating the whole process. James Joyce’s Ulysses is also a prime example in which Leopold Bloom, as a representative of the masses, is “distinctly not a literary intellectual”. However, this novel is sort of a contradiction of itself in that it both “embraces mass man but also rejects him”. The focus of the novel is on a nobody, and yet because we are getting to know him so intimately it seems that he is somehow important, however the way that it is written in modernist form excludes those that are not intellectual through “the complexity of the novel, its avante garde technique, its obscurity”.

This technique shows the principle behind modernist literature which was “the exclusion of the masses” however, “what this intellectual effort failed to acknowledge was that the masses did not exist... [they are] a metaphor for the unknowable and invisible.” The use of “masses” to describe most of the population is used specifically because it “denies them the individuality which we ascribe to ourselves and to people we know”. It makes it easier for intellectuals to forget that they are talking about the majority of humanity and their essential selfishness and narrow-mindedness for wanting to keep knowledge and literacy skills for themselves.

Freud said that the mass represents the “primal horde” and the most primitive form of human society, “it is impossible, Freud stresses, to conceive of civilization without the control of the mass by a minority, and that control will inevitably involve coercion”. However, as difficult as it is for us to conceive of this society, that does not mean that it isn’t possible. It was thought that “schooling transforms people into ‘enemies of society’, makes young people dissatisfied with honest toil, and recruits numerous disciples for ‘the worst forms of socialism’ ”, which in a way can be said to be true because it does encourage people to aim higher, but only because everyone one deserves the chance. The intellectuals could not stop the masses from gaining literacy skills, but “could prevent them reading literature by making it too difficult for them to understand”. Therefore the realism that the masses were assumed to appreciate was abandoned, as was logical coherence and “Irrationality and obscurity were cultivated”. By placing art beyond the reach of the masses, they were deliberately trying to “divide the public into two classes - those who can understand it and those who cannot”. Therefore, Ortega y Gasset suggests, modern art is not so much unpopular but more like “anti-popular”.

Neitzsche’s opinion of journalism as put forward by Carey was not very high, to say the least. The famous quotation: “the rabble ‘vomit their bile and call it a newspaper’” and that readers are “a complacent, prejudiced and unthinking mass” shows him looking down on the masses and those who provide for the masses. Carey sees the principles of new journalism as “ ‘giving the public what it wants’ but most of the book is arguing over whether the public deserves to get what it wants. If we assume that the masses are in fact human beings, then what is so wrong with giving them what they want? The quote from Intellectuals and the Masses “Sherlock Holmes’ adoption of the newspaper as an ally, when contrasted with the intellectuals’ horror of newsprint, makes a fault line along which English culture was dividing” just goes to show that there really is no way to please both camps, a theme that often comes up in discussion of modern day journalism, such as, how much privacy should celebrities have, given that they have chosen to live their lives in the public eye? Are they public property? F.R. Leavis said that “the mass media have brought about ‘an overthrow of standards’ ” which can be clearly seen in the modern landscape where journalism has changed immensely since its birth.

In the latter part of the book, George Gissing, H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, and Wyndham Lewis are all examined as case studies to show the bad practice of separating the intellectuals from the public and ‘high’ culture from ‘low’ culture. However, many of the concerns that Carey has with these writers are a simple as their personal preferences and their own social distance from the ‘real world’. This intellectual hierarchy, while terrible, does not really effect everyday life.

Chapter 1 explores how the ‘masses’ are perceived and treated by the intellectuals, and their rejection on the grounds that they let down the idea of the individual, however it is the term “mass” which took away individuality - a term ascribed to them by intellectuals- and the mass is in fact made up of many individuals. The intellectuals are shown to look down on ordinary people, for example they are referred to as “vulgar, trivial working millions”. I would argue that it has to be remembered that it is the individuals doing their nine-to-five, un-rewarding jobs who keep the country running. The work of intellectuals is no more important than analyzing what other people do. (On the other hand it could be said that this improves society overall as we can learn from our mistakes, although who actually reads the works of intellectuals in their spare time?) As Carey said, intellectuals are “functionless and ignored” and we are quickly “dispensing with the need for novelists” to re-hash all these philosophical ideas about the world. Therefore, all of this is completely pointless.

John Carey, while celebrated as a literary critic, says “I write to stimulate and involve the reader”, something which this book definitely achieves, whether you want it to or not. Many of the issues covered are so universal that no-one can come away without some kind of opinion. For example, the idea of two sides pitted against each other; the intellectuals and the masses, is intriguing because you are either one or the other. Carey sees himself as part of the masses and is opposed to the effort of the intellectuals to take knowledge from the masses; “The idea that there are absolute, eternal values in art and literature, to which experts have access, is not one that I find convincing”. As Robert Sandall of the Sunday Times states, Carey “questions the origins of our strong and often unexamined ideas about cultural hierarchies and anybody who manages to do that with such wit and humanity deserves to be heard”. However, my final point is that i don’t believe that people who publish intellectual books are actually heard, or at least not by many and not necessarily in the way that they would like. The only people that will read it are intellectuals, and we all know that they aren’t going to pass the knowledge and insight on to the masses. Therefore, it is a waste of time, energy and paper.