Some thoughts while returning on the Eurostar from Paris. 1. It’s a cliché but nonetheless true that the intellectual culture in France reminds us what we are missing in the UK. 🧵 2. In the UK, our idea of a public intellectual is someone who dresses eccentrically and utters banalities in Latin. Thanks to the destruction of ideas in the media, systemic and radical critiques in public life are almost absent. We don’t interrogate concepts that shape our lives, like capitalism. 3. To continue with this example, the only large, mainstream media outlet in the UK in which you can critique capitalism is The Guardian. As a result, hardly anyone here even seems to know what is. We mistake it for commerce, an entirely different (and in some respects opposite) concept. 4. So we fail to identify the sources of our problems, let alone resist them. We're not idiots, but we internalise a political and media culture that treats us as such. Instead of thinkers in public life, we have thinktanks. In most cases they exist not to encourage thinking, but to crush it. 5. Intellectualism here is cynically conflated with elitism, by real elite interests such as the media barons. But we once had a lively working class and cross-class intellectual culture in the UK, as France does to this day. 6. In multiple newspapers, TV and radio outlets, millions of people in France are exposed to profound and fascinating ideas, radical challenge, proposals for systemic change. Intellectualism, a dirty word in Britain, is valued and respected. People devote time and subscriptions to engaging with it. 7. Radical groups and publications occupy fine buildings close to the centre of Paris and run large teams. Politicians might move in and out of them. By contrast, in Britain, most are sidelined and marginalised, surviving – or folding – on tiny budgets. 8. It’s true that the strength of intellectual culture in France might not save it from political disaster in 2027, nor has it prevented sinister plutocrats like Vincent Bolloré from building a media empire. 9. Nor does France escape the many diseases of our age, the rise of the ultra-rich, the alienation, the scapegoating, the spread of environmental disaster. Perhaps oligarchy and its concierges will crush intellectualism in France as they have in the UK. 10. But for now its intellectual culture offers possibilities for resistance. When countries are embarrassed by challenging ideas, and resist systemic critique, little can change. We should fight the fake snobbery that marginalises intellectualism here, and treat new ideas as everyone’s property. The thread on one page: skywriter.blue
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