The English Crisis: I. The Intellectuals

...They are still the brains of the ruling Labour Party;they have supplied its dominant prejudices and reflexes as well as the broad mass of its reasoning...

...They are obviously by definition at best coarsely indifferent, at worst harshly inimical, to minority tastes, cultural interests and moral beliefs, and also to the freedoms which protect these...

...They were keen on variety of provision (provided profits were excluded), and the whole structure was to be democratically controlled through numberless channels by the "organized" and "informed" criticism of consumers...

...I have used the word "parents" half metaphorically...

...Crosland seeks also to abolish), to deprive the old of dignity, the young of hope, and all families of the power to stay above mediocrity for more than one generation, and to illegitimate and repress a profound and valuable part of human nature, productive of much past progress...

...Crosland who strive, by savage taxation of income during life and of capital at death, as also by inflation, to deprive parents of one of their noblest incentives (another, the purchase of a decent education, Mr...

...beyond that it means force...

...His success was not achieved Hard Times overnight: It was not until the 1960s, after fifteen or twenty years as a journeyman, that Bronson began to surface as a well-known, if limited, character actor, with roles in such movies as The Dirty Dozen...

...But such a characterization seems inadequate to account for one contemporary cinematic hero—Charles Bronson...

...With his weatherbeaten face and his painfully squinting eyes, he might easily have stepped out of one of Walker Evans' photos...

...For a full treatment of this subject, see Helmut Schoek's brilliant book Envy...

...Laski quotes with approval Sir Arthur Salter's pompous dictum that "committees are an invaluable instrument for breaking administrative measures onto the back of the public...

...Why these motives should be preferred is not always clear...

...Hard this for Orwell to believe: nore likely a "hypertrophied sense of orler...

...he astute young literary climbers who ire Communists because it is fashiontble, "and all that dreary tribe of highninded women and sandal wearers and )earded fruit-juice drinkers who come locking towards the smell of progress ike bluebottles to a dead cat": all these ire the freaks who, in Orwell's view, have thought socialism into disrepute...

...Crosland and his friends mistaken in grossly overestimating the present prevalence and virulence of envy (a misjudgment which may be explained by the fact that the only poorer people they know are sour Labour activists, notoriously hostile to everything in any way superior to themselves...

...organized society, living beyond subsistence withan eye to something more than naked ego gratification, is even more demanding...

...They might indeed be disappointed by the results of progress so far achieved, but I presume they would still advise us to press on...

...They are "just entertainment"—a condescending verdict supported by irrefutable evidence: their popularity...

...In the absence of a higher moral priority, we are all reduced to a world in which the philosophy which governs is the philosophy commanding the bigger battalions, the view which can muster the superior show of real or implicit force...

...and his twc,-fisted films—to intellectuals, at least—are guilty of the greatest possible moral sin: frivolity...

...they are actual elitists posing as abstract egalitarians...

...yet how on earth can any bourgeoisie arise if it is thrust back into the mud every time the bell tolls...

...Not so in Mr...

...And hese intellectuals often describe their nental processes as "scientific...

...Bronson's latest movie, Hard Times, provides some clues to the nature of his peculiar brand of cinematic heroism...

...but also in those "moderate," reformist, egalitarian intellectuals like Mr...

...If you seek the Webbs' monument, come to Britain today...

...We in Britain find ourselves in a stationary or declining state of society, the former described by Adam Smith as "hard" and "dull" for rich and poor alike, the latter "miserable" and "melancholy...

...Although Warshow was describing the heroes of relatively recent movie Westerns, his definition seems curiously incongruent with our modern sensibilities...

...And who is knocking them down...

...the very existence in any neighbourhood of a non-producing rich family, even if it is what it calls well-conducted, is by its evil example a blight on the whole district, lowering the standards, corrupting the morality and to that extent countering the work alike of the churches and the schools...

...People like the Webbs, unable to tell the difference between freedom and power, are obviously very inadequate defenders of freedom, if not actually hostile to it...

...We stand in Britain," Mr...

...It was for this reason that Durbin had become a reluctant but convinced socialist...

...Our heir becomes aware of and troubled by his own good fortune...

...The extinction of such a philistine mob of loafers as is described above would be no loss...

...What Warshow did have in mind in his definition is precisely what Bronson, as Chaney, embodies: the idea of the hero as an actor, acting out, as Lionel Trilling characterized it, "his own high sense of himself...

...Colin Welch The English Crisis: I. The Intellectuals A Prefatory Note from the Editor Since—roughly speaking—the first quarter of the last century, a powerful sense of cultural inferiority has crept into American realms of influence...

...Beatrice Webb regarded elections as a device to get the "conscious consent" of the governed...

...subsequently, after a couple of spaghetti Westerns and a half-dozen minor vehicles, he built up a large following in Europe that was not equaled in the United States until he burst into stardom with Death Wish, a little over a year ago...

...Now the present shambles in Britain does not bear much resemblance to the ordered Utopias envisaged by intellectuals like the Webbs, Laski, and Tawney...

...All rights reserved...

...It appears to come from the natural promptings of an embittered and unlettered heart...

...For Bronson is not a moral hero in his films, not even in the Hollywood sense of movie morality...

...Crosland's remarks about the danger point is some fantastic notion that, once this point is reached, we can in some way retrace our steps to safer ground and all will then be well again...

...Nowhere here can we find any genuine respect for democracy...

...Who on earth does he think built them...

...but what separates Hard Times from other films of the same genre is the peculiar dignity that Bronson brings to the hackneyed myth of the loner...

...Tawney cared less about material wealth than vague spiritual assets like fellowship, and would be distressed less by our drabness than by our morose ill-humor and by the class-hatred which declining fortune always exacerbates...

...On the other hand, if the Libertarian concern for these rights, justices, or humane gestures is, indeed, only lip service, then the worst we have heard about them is true...

...Crosland and his friends has been to press ruthlessly on till even they see unmistakable signs that it has been reached...

...I described our society today as "less competitive," and here also I think our intellectuals would demur...

...guilt he turns upon his parents and upon the capitalist system which they represent...

...Would it not go better if these wants were supplied...

...Another is that those parts of the British and American economies which are monopolistically controlled have not grown much in the last seventy years—except where, in Britain, the government has intervened vigorously to promote private concentration in the thirties and public corporations as well since 1945...

...but experts are notoriously indifferent to considerations of cost...

...The most important clue lies in Mr...

...Yet indeed with the establishment of all the institutions proposed by people like the Webbs, Laski, and Tawney, it might seem to the rest of us at once impossible and desperately important to participate in all of them, to prevent them from being dominated by people like the Webbs, Laski, and Tawney, and by all the hordes of qualified scientific socialist experts favored by them, to whom of course these institutions would be infinitely congenial...

...This continuous leveling down presents obvious dangers to all forms of hereditary culture, which depends entirely on what Mr...

...Crosland of 1956 regards further rapid growth as both essential and certain: no need to bother about it...

...Crosland, writing in 1956, full employment is securely achieved, its maintenance easily insured by judicious and timely expansion of domestic demand: i.e., by that "continuing mild inflation" which he and other like moderates consider tolerable or even beneficial...

...It was to a society which fulfilled these conditions which Mr...

...To the vast extent that our economy has been removed from the private into the public sector, we already suffer from a stagnant tyranny of busybodies and bureaucrats...

...And so to bed...

...What follows is the first essay in this series...

...Some oaf shrieks, "Shoot the bosses...

...Why should they be...

...Foaming denouncers of the bourgeoi;ie...

...it certainly has nothing to do with individual freedom or consent...

...This is what justifies any study of the British left-wing intellectual...

...And your personal preference, unless you can link it to some higher value than your opinion versus mine, is not an adequate basis on which to build a peaceful, functioning society...

...A society of slaves might thus be a free society in their eyes: indeed, I am sure that this philosophical confusion—as well as ignorance, gullibility, callous indifference to suffering, and that hypertrophied sense of order to which Orwell referred—helps to explain the scandalous prostration of British intellectuals before the full horrors of the Stalin tyranny in the thirties and forties...

...In some of these cases a harsher term than callous indifference is appropriate: for who does not know, and cannot find in the literature of the thirties if he looks, that positive delight in cruelty and violence from which book-learned ideologues have never been immune...

...Now if the civilized Mr...

...The American Thorstein Veblen's caricature is the most amusing, but it appears in forms more absurd and solemn in the jeremiads of his English forerunners, contemporaries, and disciples...

...The enjoyment of personal success," Professor Hayek has written, "will be given to large numbers only in a society that, as a whole, progresses fairly rapidly," and in which as a consequence more people are rising than falling—and in which indeed most of those falling are falling only relatively though still rising absolutely...

...how am I to know of such processes...

...We know too little about incentives," concedes Mr...

...develop it as it night be developed and we could all live ike princes...

...Instead our country is (relatively) poorer, less free, more equal, and less competitive than it was, and one might suggest that the teachings of such intellectuals have powerfully contributed to these developments, however laudable they may be...

...He ignores the likelihood that inflation, in order to perform the beneficent task he allots to it, must be less and less mild, more and more rapid and progressive, always a bit more than is expected: for "expected" inflation is discounted in advance, and produces no effect on demand...

...In such states class hatred and bitterness must thrive, together with those who cause, exacerbate, and exploit our miseries...

...At the moment we do this without fuss or palaver, by buying this but not that, by shopping not here but there...

...Prestige" is often only a pretty word for pompous public relations, for hobnobbing with politicians, in Britain for a hunt for titles, and for conspicuous waste in general...

...nor will those who have already gone be drawn back by sudden changes of heart or policy in a socialist party they have grown to mistrust, fear, and hate, which is generally hostile to their interests and which can never permanently be excluded from office...

...And, to tis bitter regret, socialism is often picured as a state of affairs in which such 'vocal socialists would feel thoroughly at tome...

...mistaken in overlooking the possibility that, in the relatively equal or "rationally" differentiated society they favor, envy would assume ever more vicious forms and find ever new victims for its malice...

...In this respect he is what Tawney called an "intellectual villager," without background, terms of reference, or context...

...Does lot science proceed with more prudence...

...That may be Libertarian...

...He is not astonished that islands of wealth and culture should slowly and miraculously have risen from the sea of savagery, but vexed that civilization is not universal and evenly spread...

...And when we get on to new wants, what we don't yet want but shall want when we see it, the difficulties multiply at a compound rate...

...Nor are all the signs of that danger point particularly easy to spot or quantify...

...When we get on to new processes for satisfying existing wants, the difficulties multiply...

...The Mr...

...The world, potentially at least," he :ries elsewhere in The Road to Wigan ier, "is immensely rich...

...Their conversion to Communism, on the face of it incongruous, took place only when disorder had been ferociously suppressed in the Soviet Union and when the risk of disorder in the West, thanks to the Depression, seemed imminent...

...This nobility is most apparent The Alternative: An American Spectator January 1976 15...

...With irresponsible levity they proceed on their mad experiment, like some ignorant peasant cheerfully piling more and more onto a half-starved donkey, or some crazy doctor in a concentration camp using prisoners to find out how much cold the human body can stand...

...The Talkies by Robert Asahina "A hero," Robert Warshow once wrote, "is one who looks like a hero...

...It is not here a true but a false conception of liberty that is adumbrated, a gross invasion of the right to privacy, which indeed is alwaysone of the goods to be "socialized"—i.e., destroyed...

...We find," wrote Tocqueville, "an ad-ministration almost as numerous as the population, preponderant, interfering, regulating, restricting, insisting upon foreseeing everything, controlling everything, and understanding the interests of those under its control better than they do themselves...

...Orwell wonders about the motives of 10 The Alternative: An American Spectator January 1976 he tract-writing intellectual...

...Crosland and his friends are not likely to be the first to see them...

...but that is not what Warshow had in mind...

...Less free for whom...

...We may not wish to obtain the qualifications...

...We note also tones of voice, turns of phrase, manners of speech...

...Heroism, we now believe, is more a matter of substance than of style...

...and other pleasures to most of which he is no stranger, and even for their failure to stop Georgian buildings being knocked down...

...Greed for power is not usually regarded as an attractive quality, and Dr...

...It was he who said that in the long run we are all dead—a remark which would occur to no man with children of his own...

...Crosland confidently looked forward...

...For the Webbs at least were actually timid petty bourgeois, highly respectful of "established expectations" (including their own annuity) and terrified of revolution, which their own inevitable gradualness seems largely designed to avert...

...How has this come to pass...

...such gewgaws as the court, titles, soldiers, and diplomats enraged them...

...Other problems will indeed remain, fortunately for intellectuals whose lives would be empty without them: not only problems of resentment and envy caused by residual inequalities but other problems in the fields of psychology, sociology, divorce reform, and so forth...

...But when this exodus becomes apparent to all, it will be too late to stanch the flow...

...But economics as the dismal science will have served its turn...

...For these reasons the wise monopolist is not like the intellectual's caricature of him: he is a timid not an arrogant man, always behaving as though he were not a monopolist at all...

...We shall be publishing this book with Doubleday later this year, and the essays within it will appear in the New York Times Magazine, Encounter, and other magazines as well as The Alternative...

...And if I pay a lot of attention to comparatively dull dogs like Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Harold Laski, John Strachey, R.H...

...The plot spins out its predictable logic—including the brief affair with the proverbial hooker-with-the-heart-ofgold, and the inevitable climactic bout with the stranger in black—and then Chaney leaves as he arrived, by boxcar, in the dead of night...

...How can people live for service and self-sacrifice, he wails, if society is dominated by ruthless egotism...

...Crosland's extraordinary views about economic incentive and motivation, views which are fully shared not only by other intellectuals but by successive Labour governments (to which he has been intellectual-in-residence) and their more responsible supporters, and which have clearly guided or justified policy...

...We note their rapturous submission to the Soviet Union, which forcibly .suggests that their devotion to the machinery was far greater than to the democratic spirit which was supposed to inform it...

...Beatrice Webb herself wondered why British socialists should be more sympathetic than their continental counterparts to Russian Communism...

...And it is this curious ennoblement that is the source of Bronson's popular success—and his artistry...

...Moreover, throughout the outpourings of all these intellectuals runs an obsession with war and the supposed achievements of arbitrary wartime governments, with their direction of labor, capital, and materials—an obsession particularly ludicrous in people so ovine and unwarlike, and an obsession certainly inimical to democracy and freedom...

...For Mr...

...Is it seriously suggested that we should turn up in endless tedious committees to argue our preference for New Zealand butter and French burgundy over French butter and Australian burgundy...

...Yet the use these great writers made of their freedom has enriched the lives of millions who lacked the power and now lack the freedom to express themselves fully...

...Crosland further concedes that "some danger point must evidently exist at which equality begins to react really seriously on the supply of ability (and also of effort, risk-taking, and so on), and hence on economic growth...

...he is not bound to us by the nexus of profit and loss...

...Without power, freedom to them is a mere useless formality, a hollow mockery, like the beggar's freedom to enter the Ritz...

...All that I would ask is that, while we await Justice Future's verdict, we do not totally ignore the learned utterances of that veteran if imperfect pleader, Counselor Past...

...The intellectual justifies it by venomous caricatures of the attitudes and interests of the leisured and better-off classes...

...What cannot so easily be doubted is the freedom it confers on all to live lives of service and self-sacrifice if they so wish...

...We may not think ourselves qualified to meddle with such matters...

...What I do mean is a person who thinks himself to be moved primarily or solely by his intellect (which may of course be very feeble or very powerful), who regards himself as an intellectual and makes a living thereby or, unable to do so, is influenced by those who do, in the columns of the New Statesman and elsewhere...

...Can it be that his forebears stole from the poor what was really theirs, that they enslaved, exploited, and disinherited them, milked them of surplus value...

...in short, in a constant state of barren activity...

...they would cry...

...His vanity is often unbounded, typified by Shaw's amazing claim that he knew more about banking than any banker, a remark which reveals him to know even less about banking than the rest of us: contrast Goethe's profound humility in declaring that the invention of double-entry bookkeeping was one of the greatest achievements of the human mind...

...For one thread running through all their works is that competition, whether desirable or not (it is usually qualified by such epithets as "disorderly," "wasteful," "cutthroat," "unregulated," and so forth), was by the time they wrote dying or dead, being succeeded everywhere by the monopoly which Marx predicted...

...None of these things would exist without some sense of tradition, some sense of oneness with a past and a future that we will never be a physical part of and that hold no Libertarian IOU's drawn against our personal accounts...

...Nor is this wholly surprising —for in fact one can learn more about human motivations and frustrations, intentions and despair, by talking to ordinary people in a pub than by poring over the official statistics and surveys which are the intellectual's normal source of information...

...he was more consistently egalitarian than he was consistently anything else...

...Life itself is a perilous journey...

...Tawney is more of a democrat, but this in a peculiarly hectoring way: he is forever demanding that citizens must "participate" in committees and industrial boards and local governments and so forth: it is not merely a right but a duty incumbent on us all to be "concerned, self-educated and active...

...Everywhere he derides the contribution of financial incentive, competition, profit, and individualism to economic growth...

...Strangely enough, we discern in this idea, that the rich have robbed the poor of their birthright, a dim and unacknowledged survival of the golden age myth, also discernible in Morris' mediaevalism and elsewhere...

...Particularly in Sir William Beveridge, a socialist in all but name, we find reiterated the view that freedom is a peacetime luxury which we can no longer afford even in peacetime, in which as in war the economy must be directed by what he typically describes as an economic general staff...

...The typical socialist is not for him a ferocious worker with a raucous voice...

...fere Orwell himself displays in an aber'ant form that guilt-ridden mania for irabness and uniformity so characteristic )f those he derides...

...National economic failure is of course measurable in many ways: we are getting expert at it...

...But we need not argue the point if we think Mr...

...Let us quote Orwell once nore, and then step outside...

...Crosland at one point, "to make firm statements"—firm statements about whether "equality and rapid growth are hard to reconcile" and about whether "socialist policies must necessarily slow down the rate of growth...

...the rewards for saving and investment are far too high, and may with safety be reduced...

...Less debatable, more measurable, and perhaps less reversible is the rising tide of skilled and talented emigration which I expect soon to become torrential, an exodus which will leave behind a stagnant and impoverished quagmire bereft alike of wealth and culture...

...In general such intellectuals are also totally unable to see the ways in which we all benefit by freedoms which only some of us can enjoy...

...The "progressive" ways of the English have been pointed to throughout this century by Americans intent on conducing America along the English path, and so successful have these 'Progressive" Americans been that today most of our government expenditures go toward the support of institutions very similar to the social democratic institutions of England...

...In Tsarist Russia, moreover, the freedom of Tolstoy and Dostoievski to write what they did could not be used by many, and would therefore be regarded by the Webbs as formal and valueless...

...only their own personal preference...

...Like other intellectuals, the Webbs, Laski, and the rest seem wholly incapable of grasping the role of risk-taking and profit-or-loss-making in the maintenance of economic efficiency and above all in innovation...

...If they could have grasped it, they would never have proposed to substitute for it, magically simple and infinitely complex as it is, their foothills and mountain ranges of boards and committees, their swarming hives of bureaucrats and busybodies and experts, their snowstorms of paper, their echoing wastes of gassing and boredom, their pandemonium of ceaseless but sterile controversy...

...How can I be concerned or active about what I cannot envisage...

...Of course, Bronson does not "look like" a hero, in the sense of resembling, say, Gregory Peck...

...Experts may advise me...

...No, it is poverty that has to be explained...

...like the Webbs themselves, they tend to prefer the best technically to the best economically, and to exaggerate the importance of maximum output irrespective of cost...

...But there can be little doubt that Bronson deserves some accounting for...

...and, at a reported $1 million per picture, he is one of the world's best-paid performers...

...Wells who, for all too obvious reasons, directed the state to act as parent to all the children engendered by the free love he urged and practiced...

...Bronson plays a drifter named Chaney, who arrives by boxcar in New Orleans during the depths of the Depression...

...and our heroes and antiheroes—both cinematic and real-life—are likely to be defined morally, not aesthetically...

...A Prismer cannot draw his prison without leavng his cell...

...The Webbs and Laski certainly expected vast material wealth to be produced by the elimination of capitalist "waste" and "inefficiency...

...Crosland excitedly proclaims, "on the threshold of mass abundance...

...But so far we deal only with existing wants and known preferences...

...not only in the catastrophist socialists, like the Communist poets of the thirties, who urgedthe overthrow of existing society (including, by definition, of existing families) in the bizarre expectation that something better would emerge...

...There are hundreds of books from Marx onwards to tell him that this, part rubbish, part oversimplification, is so: and thus in self-righteous hatred, rage, and...

...They described men as they are, governed among other motives by an egotism, whether ruthless or enlightened, which may by freedom and wise regulation be turned to public good...

...We may well lack the means or the brains to write the equivalent of Shaw's plays, say, or the Webbs' vast oeuvre: but I do not think Shaw or the Webbs are in a good position to deny that we may have benefited from them...

...if he pleases ten, he can afford to ignore nine with impunity...

...Having begun with Buncombe, let me end with de Tocqueville who, describing another sort of ideological wrangle, wrote that, "After a lot of shouting, we both agreed to leave the verdict to the future, that enlightened and just judge who, unfortunately, always arrives too late...

...Implicit in Mr...

...But I think all four would kick up a hullabaloo where I have said "less free...

...Why should Evelyn Waugh, say, or Stravinsky (or even Tawney himself, did he not wish to) bother himself about municipal buses, bakeries, housing, and sewage...

...He was writing of French Canada under the ancien regime...

...Hey-ho...

...What bothers him, if he is at all curious, is why some should be poor...

...What they worshipped was always power and success...

...And yet these are the things that we really cherish...

...I suspect that that Janus-faced mandarin Keynes in one of his many protean guises has done much to make such depredations respectable...

...Such people standing as they do in our recent history predominantly on the Left, I expect the epithet "left-wing" to be understood wherever I use the word "intellectual"—and "British" too, for I am not qualified to write of others...

...How on earth would we know )f these potential riches if capitalism had lot thrust them under our noses...

...motors, hotels...

...Miss Efron, for example, finds hard-line Conservatives odious (perhaps rightly so) in their pliant acceptance of varying amounts of repression, segregation, corporal punishment, censorship, antisedition measures, and other societal curbs, curves, preferences, and bounds...

...This sense of inferiority (combined with shared customs) allowed Europe, specifically England, a powerful influence over American life...

...Their life is easier if novelty is suppressed, and no more profitable if it is not...

...Many who have never seen Bronson's movies (and many who have seen them) are inclined to dismiss them—with the same contempt that was once reserved for Clint Eastwood's movies—as models of mindless macho escapism...

...Would any artistic freedom be safe anyway in the hands of total philistines like the Webbs, who discussed the incidence of sickness during pregnancy during the entractes of Parszfal...

...this is for him the normal state of affairs...

...Crosland's case...

...Our heir surveys the past and present coldly, without humility, wonder, or gratitude...

...Some of the very values that humane (though they might wince at the adjective) Libertarians claim to hold dear are negations of their core belief...

...Without intending it, they may do grave and irreparable damage, may have already done it, indeed, may have done it before Crosland wrote...

...John Strachey (first a socialist, then a near-Fascist, then a Stalinoid Marxist, then a Labour Minister, and rich throughout) denounced Macy's, Harrods, and the Galeries Lafayette, and hoped that privation would restore to the bourgeoisie their former power to think...

...How can I expect committees and experts to be concerned and active on my behalf...

...Crosland berates our "illiterate" wealthy classes for their cars and houses, holidays in Cannes, servants, gin...

...Hence in part our present difficulties, with an unprecedented inflation rate and rising unemployment...

...Crosland calls the "accident" (which may not be an accident) of birth...

...and precisely because Bronson is a little old for all of this—he is 53—he brings a certain authenticity and gritty credibility to his portrayal of a. Depression-era drifter...

...Such doubts would induce in other, more modest men, if they valued growth as he does, an extreme caution in enforcing equality, in destroying existing incentives and in pressing ahead with socialist policies...

...For, already some twenty years before he wrote, Evan Durbin, one of the most civilized and percipient of intellectuals, had lamented that taxation was too high to permit the con12 The Alternative: An American Spectator January 1976 tinued vigorous survival of the free economy...

...Freedom which is enjoyed only by a minority is not to them a freedom at all, but a privilege to be at best tolerated, more likely obliterated...

...The moderate and hedonistic Mr...

...But—and here is the heart of the Libertarian dilemma—unless "humane" Libertarians are only paying lip service to combating these real or supposed evils, they will have to resort to massive doses of statist, antilibertarian intervention to halt them...

...Crosland took any such threat seriously, he should be genuinely disturbed: for he has ceaselessly proclaimed his devotion to a mixed economy and a free society...

...Copyright © 1975 The Alternative...

...he is often profoundly ignorant of his forebears' struggles, skills, services, and achievements, which are as incomprehensible to him as a watch to a monkey (Tawney's simile, sadly appropriate to his own contemptuous attitude to liberal civilization...

...Laski is everywhere vexed and alarmed by the possibility that socialist plans might be reversed "by some chance hazard of electoral fortune...

...Past and fuure progress are alike taken for granted...

...But alas, things have, at least for the time being, turned out very differently...

...He sees in Shaw, for instance, a lull empty windbag who knows and cares lothing about poverty, who thinks it must >e abolished from above, by violence if -iecessary—perhaps preferably by vioence: hence Shaw's worship of "great" nen, of dictators Fascist or Communist, )f Stalin and Mussolini...

...if you prefer, end of disconnected ramble...

...Alas, today England's social democratic institutions appear to be terminally ill and before ours fall into a similar condition, we at The Alternative decided to publish a book on the "Crisis of Social Democracy in England" with especial concern for the lessons that decline holds for England's prodigal son...

...Pitiful organs to this end do exist in the ineffective representation of "consumers" on national boards and in Parliament, which is of course, as the Webbs recognized, totally incapable of controlling the vast and complex functions which it has arrogated to itself...

...The Webbs raved against the functionless rich, their futile occupations, licentious pleasures (including luring boys and girls into "concert rooms" for vice), and insolent manners...

...I suspect the reason may lie not only in greater ignorance, but in the complacency bred by distance and by the reassuring presence of the English Channel and British Navy, at that time still formidable...

...The plot should sound familiar: If the pickup matches were gunfights, the movie might be any of a hundred Westerns...

...The Webbs envisage that you and I, or they (it matters not), should collectively as consumers make known what we want and make sure that we get it...

...This was the purpose of their vast and all-embracing Babel-tower of national and local and municipal boards and public corporations, producing all goods and supplying all services, not for profit but to satisfy measured and objective needs (not "appetites"—for some reason a dirty word for them) and to fulfill a majestic public purpose...

...By "intellectual" I do not mean an intelligent person, who need not be either left-wing or strictly an intellectual...

...The pickup matches are staged in alleys, on piers, and in warehouses—with Speed fronting the money and arranging the bets, Poe acting as the trainer, and Chaney dealing out, and absorbing, the punches...

...An equal society is thus by definition to them a free society, in which no freedoms exist (or need exist) which all do not have the power to enjoy, and in which all can enjoy such freedoms as may exist, if any, and thus be "free...

...What keeps him cheerful (if he still is, which we may doubt) is an almost unbounded optimism, akin to that felt by the classical economists (though far less securely reasoned) and far removed from the destructive and hysterical nihilism of the catastrophists...

...And yet it is precisely the products of these cumulative individual concessions and individual contributions to a larger whole that make life livable—families, friendships, books, monuments of the past, and visions of the future...

...Crosland oddly supposes to be egalitarian), is far too wide...

...The resemblance is not accidental, of course...

...What looks an unassailable monopoly is in fact (unless protected by statute—a very important exception) a fragile structure, its shaky foundations forever washed and eroded by the currents of potential competition, this ready to become actual the very moment technical advance and new needs make it possible and desirable...

...Their indignation would be based on the fact that in all four heads, as in those of most intellectuals, is inextricably muddled the difference between freedom to do something and the power to do it...

...How could they be...

...Among those who abased themselves were the Webbs, Laski, John Strachey, Stephen Spender, the Red Dean Hewlett Johnson, and many others, all listed in David Caute's book, The Fellow Travellers...

...It is nonetheless odd that an intellectual so cultivated as Keynes should have preferred the first-generation climber to his third-generation successor, who usually has more leisure for thought, learning, art, patronage, and public work...

...These tirades, it should be added, were financed alike by domestic parsimony and by Beatrice Webb's unearned annuity of a thousand pounds a year—a large sum in those days...

...Thus for the Webbs and their friends there arose no question of preserving or extending competition, which was moribund and deservedly so...

...For when a Libertarian expresses the belief that"The national government should guarantee that all adult citizens, except for criminals and the insane, should have the right to vote," and then adds the qualifier that "people should never be given the right to vote in a manner that would violate any individual's rights," what he or she is really saying is that there is a moral absolute, though Libertarians can give no moral or spiritual genesis to justify it...

...Local government is for Laski merely "educative"—i.e., the citizens are there to be instructed, not to control their so-called servants...

...At one stage he therefore thought it proper to demand of the Tories, as a condition of their return to office, a pledge that they would repeal no socialist measures...

...And indeed, for all he vividness of his caricature of the intelectual, there is much that he could not ;ee from the inside, so to speak...

...this fixed salary should, if anything, be lowered, by taxation or other means, for the spread of income in this country, though narrower than in Russia (a country which Mr...

...I do not myself have to be able to compete in order to profit by the competition of rival playwrights, biscuit makers, ideologues, and doctors for my patronage: indeed, as tertius gaudens, I profit more obviously than those who compete and fail and may be ruined by their efforts...

...Yet surely it is not fanciful to discern some actual dislike, explicit or suppressed, of parents, children, and the family not only in intellectuals like H.G...

...Indeed, Warshow might have had Bronson/Chaney in mind when he formulated his definition of a hero...

...and the three join forces in business—the business of illegal, bare-knuckled streetfighting...

...One may question whether capitalist society is more or less dominated by ruthless egotism than other societies...

...He knows when his position, formidable as it looks to the thoughtless, is in fact constantly menaced by the irresistible forces of modern technological "creative destruction" (Schumpeter's phrase for what the Webbs call "waste...

...For the rest of us would be excluded, by our own decision if not by that of the vocal socialists themselves...

...and, most important of all, mistaken in ignoring the possibility that the suppression of envy may be essential to the survival of a free capitalist or "mixed" society and that its legitimization (or, by Tawney, virtual canonization) and subsequent triumph will be fatal alike to freedom and prosperity...

...Where exactly this point lies, no one knows...

...If the good life could be lived under Nero, why on earth not under Gladstone...

...But the Webbs' vast machinery at present lacks the powerful motor and controls they thus devised for it...

...Chaney soon meets a fast-talking gambler named Speed ( James Coburn) and a hopheaded unlicensed physician named Poe (Strother Martin...

...The typical intellectual is like the spoilt :hild of rich parents: he does not at first yonder why his parents and others are ich...

...Their task accordingly was to devise another and quite different industrial system which woulddo all that competition had ever done, but more and better...

...In trying to describe the intellectual I am daunted to find how much of my work was done for me nearly forty years ago by George Orwell, one of the breed himself for all his percipience and humanity, in The Road to Wigan Pier...

...A moment before Chaney flattens him with a single punch, a young opponent in one of the bouts sneers, "Hey, Pop—you're a little old for this, ain't you...

...Three considerations, to my mind, they entirely overlooked...

...prosperity is here to stay...

...Why can they not...

...and he loudly proclaimed his contempt for the hereditary principle and for the control of wealth by "third-generation men...

...End of sermon...

...With their general contempt for economic motivation, Mr...

...He might have been writing either of the Webbs' Utopia or of Britain today...

...It would be quite unjust to accuse them of seeking to impose upon us a uniform tyranny...

...Crosland is still doubtless patiently watching the dials: but he does not seem to see what we see—a nation bleeding to death...

...In parenthesis it may be added that Orvell's own idea of "a state of affairs vorth fighting for" is hardly more allurng...

...Tawney, and Anthony Crosland, this is not because I think them more amusing than their wilder sidekicks but because I am sure they and their innumerable followers have had more influence...

...It expresses itself in a blind and irrational faith in the ability of capitalism somehow to deliver the goods, no matter how emasculated, overburdened, over-regulated, diminished, deprived alike of stick, carrot, confidence, hope, and rational motivation...

...Envy is said to demand it, and would in Mr...

...and, in such a fortunate society, it is probable that the nit-picking envies and resentments which elsewhere obsess him would fade into insignificance, affording little material for distress or further exploitation...

...even the most rude and earthy, the least doctrinaire, the most pragmatic, greedy, unreflective, and unprincipled, as well as the most woolly and sentimental, of its active members were often drawn into its service by their teachings, directly or at one remove...

...it can be taken for granted...

...Indeed, like Laski, and like Graham Wallas, who considered, perhaps playfully, that even abnormally strong acquisitive instincts might in the future express themselves in the collection of shells or postage stamps, they tend to rely on other preferred sorts of motivation to keep the show on the road—the self-identification of business leaders with their firms, professional pride, desire for prestige, public esteem, and greed for power...

...no, it is either a youthful snob Bolshevik or, more typically, a prim little white-collar job man, possibly a teetotaller or vegetarian of nonconformist background, and with no intention of forfeiting his social position: both "unsatisfactory or even inhuman types...

...Johnson thought no man so innocently employed as in making money...

...technological and productive advances, in his view, spring rather from "people working on a fixed salary in a large managerial structure...

...et past progress was the fruit of a sysem they despise acid seek to end: how hen can they be sure of future progress, )r even of maintaining ground already conquered...

...Paul's Cathedral, you may find Sir Christopher Wren's tremendous epitaph— "Si monumentum requires, circumspice "—if you seek his monument, look around you...

...If it goes on, as it will, material poverty will cease to be a problem...

...This again was not the Webbs' ideal: one motive force in particular is missing, and that is the supposedly tremendous power of organized consumer criticism to maintain and increase efficiency and to ensure that new processes are promptly introduced and new needs met...

...Love of the he working class, from which he is so far emoved...

...Crosland's view be assuaged by its accomplishment...

...If the latter were true, the liquidation of the wealthier classes might arguably be desirable even if the poorer classes were, as I think inevitable, impoverished thereby...

...We may think we have more important things to do, a concept presumably incomprehensible to Tawney, who defined citizenship for the scholar as "knowledge applied to social improvement...

...Orwell here states, with fore qualification than usual, a view :ommon to nearly all intellectuals (see es)ecially William Morris, who for Orwell vas another dull windbag...

...Crosland, is still alive, Britain is still governed by them, perhaps increasingly so...

...Another is that monopolies should, as Joseph Schumpeter advised, be regarded not only as they are now, or at some other particular moment, but in time...

...And, anyone who believes in this is not really a Libertarian...

...Why on earth should we "participate" in all these activities, to many of us profoundly tedious...

...I do not myself believe we have yet reached it.'' We have surely reached it now...

...There would exist what was described by Orwell, quoted above: "a state of affairs in which such vocal socialists would feel thoroughly at home"—yes, indeed, and they alone...

...What then are the signs that the danger point has been reached...

...No classical scholar, for instance, could by this definition be a citizen...

...In St...

...He found it in Barcelona during the >panish Civil War: the wealthy classes tpparently wiped out, the bourgeoisie :illed or in flight, almost no "welliressed" (his quotation marks) people, mly rough working class clothes, blue )veralls, various military uniforms...

...Keynes publicly avowed his preference for the bourgeois "fish" as against the proletarian "mud...

...The great classical economists did not say that people should be dominated by ruthless egotism...

...Despite the fact that only one of those I have mentioned, Mr...

...the more-water-in/our-beer reformers, Shaw the prototype...

...The resultant torpor is not even spread uniformly through the economy: incentives totally inadequate at one point may still elicit effort elsewhere...

...In a recent international poll, he was voted the "most popular actor in the world...

...book-trained intellectuals who want o throw what remains of our great but -talf-wrecked civilization down the sink, )referring a mechanized socialist future )f "iron and water...

...adequate capital formation is assured, risks of depreciation much reduced...

...Perhaps not: more sensible to delegate our choice to some elected manager...

...Baldly stated, without qualifications otherwise desirable, one is that there is not known to me any natural or theoretic tendency towards monopoly in an unregulated capitalist system...

...For ignorant as they are of where the danger point lies, the practice of Mr...

...But Mr...

...Yet dimly behind such outbursts we are aware of the prompting and blessing of some remote grey ideologue, half forgetten yet still potent...

...or "Make the rich squeal...

...investment incentives will remain buoyant, with high savings, high incomes, and high consumption...

...In the same way, Tawney somewhere blandly describes competition as being of value only to those able to compete...

...How on earth can one measure such impalpables as effort withheld, enterprise thwarted, hopes blasted, skills unacquired or wasted, idleness preferred...

...But he is only answerable to us as a mass: he need not bother about individual or mi14 The Alternative: An American Spectator January 1976 nority preferences...

...London University and local authorities are among the worst villians...

...Crosland is still entitled to debate to what extent measurable failure is due to lack of incentive...

...He does not see poverty and toil as the natural or original state of affairs, in which capitalism found nearly everybody and from which it has rescued many...

...The Alternative: An American Spectator January 1976 13 Another piece of Tawney-nonsense, while we are at it, expresses the moral hatred which he and fellow intellectuals feel for capitalist society...

...Shaw, himself a vast and greedy acquisitor, derided the pleasures of the rich —chocolates, cocktails, silly novels (what he Alternative: An American Spectator January 1976 11 about silly plays...

...At the least, this means compulsory indoctrination...

...As a crony of Ben Buncombe's, I would be the last to suggest that there is a non-libertarian, nonconservative panacea—what Ben was so fond of calling a "philosophical skeleton key" to all human ills...

...Those who have actually served in any kind of armed forces are normally less respectful of the extreme efficiency of military methods...

...Yet somehow we doubt their democratic protestations...

...What rubbish this is...

...RET The fish, so the French say, decays from the head first...

...The patrician Tawney sneered at the common vulgarity and ill-manners of business men, though when shop girls were rude he applauded...

...mistaken in underestimating their own role in fostering and exploiting such envy as exists, thus making themselves incidentally objects of envy...