Let’s stop thinking and embrace the apocalypse
In a 1980 piece by Susan Sontag on Roland Barthes — written within a week of his death — she writes:
One felt he could generate ideas about anything. Put him in front of a cigar box and he would have one, two, many ideas — a little essay. It was not a question of knowledge (he couldn’t have known much about some of the subjects he wrote about) but of alertness, a fastidious transcription of what could be thought about something, once it swam into the stream of attention. There was always some fine net of classification into which the phenomenon could be tipped.
I love that ‘fastidious transcription of what could be thought about something’.
The point is, or was, that Barthes was no expert. What he was able to do was to think about things. Deeply. Which is a level of expertise in itself, I suppose.
Michael (I know nothing and I’m proud of it) Gove declared that people are tired of experts telling them what to do and think. (He was saying this in the build-up to the Brexit vote, of course, so you could say he was not entirely honest.)
And in the US, again we have the trouncing of expertise. Trump could not win a vote where people trusted experts.
Expertise has been subverted. Partly because so much expertise is called on to support the status quo. Partly because expertise is seen as separate from the lives of ordinary people.
Education has been hollowed out. The Tories have driven our institutes of higher learning down the road of teaching vocational courses to the exclusion of everything else. General Arts courses have been decimated and the message given is that to spend years — and excessive amounts of money — pursuing a degree in History or Philosophy or English Literature is a waste. The elite especially despise and distrust history because it lays bare the paths followed in previous times. The mistakes of the 1930s are repeated more easily when few people can see the echoes of the past.
The upshot is that we have more and more experts in narrower subject matters and fewer people able to think like Barthes. This, of course, sits nicely with the corporate take-over of our state. The fewer number of people able to think — to transcribe fastidiously the various possibilities inherent in policies or actions — the less danger there is of challenge.
Sontag’s description of Barthes is almost a caricature of the intellectual. We have now replaced intellectuals with celebrities. And celebrities are expected to wallow in their popularity and not indulge in opinions. Witness the right wing backlash against Gary Lineker for making some statements that in normal times would be regarded as almost trite declarations of compassion and humanity. Even those regarded as smart people in their field — such as Richard Attenborough or Professor Brian Cox — are expected to stick to their designated subject matters. Politics is for the politicians; economics for the economists. Don’t worry your little heads about such things; we have it all worked out.
The right wing media sustains this disdain of intelligence. Smart ideas that challenge the status quo are mocked; the same old ideas that maintain the privilege of the elite and hasten the descent to global destruction are praised. Science is denigrated when it produces data that counters the worst of the lies and hypocrisy of the media but it is praised for local victories against disease or discovers new ways to use technology and industry. When, in short, it delivers new ways to make profit.
Susan Sontag, like Roland Barthes, is now dead. And, as with Barthes, her incisive intelligence is missed. Sontag, George Orwell, Tony Judt, Albert Camus are names we sorely miss now.
We have Michael Gove and the trashing of expertise. We have Donald Trump and the claim that climate change is a hoax. We are in deep shit.
The apocalypse is only a few ignored thinkers away.
