In general it seems to me a primary condition of national health
that there shall be free and
abundant contact between the most advanced culture and the masses, that
due pains shall be taken
‘to marshall well the ranks behind’, and keep the whole army
together. Where there is a great
residuum of ignorance and stupidity, everything is dragged down... But
if ever this contact was
needful it is now and here; for evidently what has put the finishing touch
to our confusion is the
fact that the residuum of ignorance and stupidity has become our master
and our judge... Just
when the religious tradition had been dethroned by scepticism, and the
constitutional tradition
by radicalism, a new sovereign was crowned who knew nothing of either.
Ignorance was
proclaimed king, and an authority set up.
Before whose fell approach and secret might
Art after art goes out, and all is night!
It is well worth pondering Seeley's gloomy cultural assessment
delivered to the Ethical
Society of Cambridge a few years before his death in 1895. It is not so
much the
pessimism attendant upon the era of mass politics and society that is so
arresting. He was
quick to acknowledge a brighter, more hopeful prospect in the passage which
followed.
It is more the idea, so fervently expressed, that national life is best
served by the
existence of an intellectual elite whose abiding concern is to tend the
cultural well-being
of the less advanced majority – to furnish and communicate moral
truths, a vibrant
atmosphere of thought, and a body of ideas that would at once provide unity
and
direction to society as a whole. He was not alone in entertaining these
hopes, but instead
expressed a common outlook among the leading thinkers of his day: despite
very real
divisions in the intellectual elite centring on such questions as free
thought versus
religion, tradition versus radicalism, imperialism versus ‘little
Englandism’, all sought
a prominent role for intellectuals in defining the central ‘public’
values and identities
of their society through their scholarship and personal conduct alike.
