Anti-Intellectualism and Irish Politics

In the Guardian blog Comment is Free, Professor Anthony Giddens bemoans the lack of esteem with which intellectuals are held in the UK. He compared the bestseller non-fiction lists in the UK and USA and finds that the latter’s list is dominated by works “of a quite intellectual nature,” which compared unfavourably with the British list dominated by books on cooking, gardening and biographies of TV celebrities. Top of the US list at the moment is Barak Obama’s The Anatomy of Hope, described as “a serious work of social and political policy.” Apart from a few local authors, the Irish list is similar to the British. Are the Irish as politically illiterate as the UK by Giddens’s reckoning?

Over thirty five years ago, in the first modern political science textbook on the Government and Politics of Ireland, Basil Chubb highlighted the importance of authoritarianism, conformism, anti-intellectualism and loyalty as distinctive elements in Irish political culture. Such elements reflected the residual effects of a peasant society and the strong prevailing influences of Catholicism. The much vaunted modernisation of Irish society has largely removed those influences so what factors are responsible for keeping our political culture largely free of serious intellectual debate and why is it that, as in Britain but unlike much of continental Europe, there is no significant link between political and intellectual life?

Irish elites like to think they are more European somehow than the British, but in reality our culture is firmly lodged in the Anglosphere. Our consumption patterns, including our consumption of cultural products in the broadest sense, are similar to those of our nearest neighbour. Our shopping malls and our Main (or should that be High?) Streets are increasingly dominated by the brands of British multiples. There is something of a paradox in that the factors that gave rise to anti-intellectualism in our political culture could hardly have been different to those prevalent in Britain. Nevertheless, as in Britain, there is little popular esteem for intellectuals and no direct transfer between universities and politics.This is not to deny that the occasional academic figure hasn’t achieved high office. Garret Fitzgerald, undoubtedly a man of letters as well as a professional number cruncher, was Taoiseach after all. In the late 1960s—in advance of the socialism that was to come by the seventies—the Labour Party managed to attract a coterie of intellectuals including David Thornley and Conor Cruise O’Brien. I can’t think of anyone in Fianna Fáil that is comparable. In any case, such examples were atypical.

Even if they wanted to, political parties would find it difficult to manage to get their chosen scholars elected because of the structure of our electoral system and the requirements needed to break through at constituency level. The lack of a list system or, as in Britain, the existence of scores of safe seats for a chosen one to be parachuted into, means that most academics will probably opt to stay within their universities. The political class is effectively walled off from the rest of society because of the barriers to entry. While anyone can join a party and seek elective office, in practice it takes years of local activism to make a breakthrough.

Conversely, there is little esteem held by academics for the political system. Occasionally, prominent public intellectuals are appointed to boards and commissions and produce reports that are then largely ignored. There is little systematic effort on the part of university academics to address wider issues of public policy in a way that would help turn the coverage of political issues away from obsession with personalities and horse race issues. Surely it is time for a few scholar-bloggers to make their way onto the Irish scene? The collective blog Crooked Timber might be a useful model. Even if academic economist, social scientists, historians, lawyers and philosophers just started discussing these issues among themselves but let the rest of us into it, it would be a start.