The intellectuals and the masses Book

6 stars. How I haven’t come across this writer before I have no clue. I’ve already ordered a handful of some of the other books John Carey has written. This is a dangerous book in many ways. A testament to its danger is the fact that I am now reading Mein Kampf as a result of some of the insights I gleaned from this book. The intellectual and the masses is about what it says on the tin – intellectual elitists and the sheepish masses. John paints a hugely lugubrious picture of what would today be the iPhone addicted, Instagram pouting, snapchat chatting, brain dead, culture starved junglist masses. He gives examples from a whole host of writers that I have been lucky enough to read already. His writing style is ridiculously readable and at the same time the level of abstraction and intellect he stretches his points with was very very impressive. It's the cerebral equivalent of boxing against Naseem Ahmed: you're hit from angles and power shots you never expected. He talks about authors such as Nietzsche, HG Wells, DH Lawrence, EM Forster, and Bernard Shaw inter alia. He says that at the time of the turning of the last century before the world wars began, the anti-massive views that some of these authors shared were not as inflammatory as it comes across today. Nietzsche was quoted and probed more than any other author in this exquisite morsel of a book. Some of the best bits in the book were:
• Orwell: “my poems are dead because I’m dead. You’re dead, we're all dead. Dead people in a dead world, life under a decaying capitalism is deathly and meaningless … look at all these bloody houses and the meaningless people inside them.”
• “The intellectuals could not actually prevent the masses from attaining literacy. But they could prevent them reading literature by making it too difficult for them to understand." - Ju get me bruv?
• "The Frankfurt theorists shared the view that mass culture and mass media as developed under capitalism had degraded civilisation in the 20th century. They blamed radio, cinema, newspapers and cheap books for the disappearance of the inner life.”
• “What care I that some millions of wretched Israelites died under the Pharoes lash or Egypt’s? It was well that they died that i might have the pyramids to look on. Is there one amongst us who would exchange them for the lives of the ignominious slaves that died?
• "What Is life but heroic pretence? Our houses are jerry built, our clothes shoddy, our food adulterated, ourselves not what we are."
• “Peasants were also favoured because they seemed pre-commercial. Their bond with the soil went deeper than mere economics. Commerce lay at the heart of Gissing’s discontent with the modern”
• “The submerged population talk in a crude dialect and listen to babble machines which broadcast crude false news items and shout slogans to attract attention. Even in the upper city levels Graham finds there are no books any more, only videos or porn videos labelled in simple phonetic English. “
• “Thousands of people who know nothing of literature go around under the delusion that they are alive but without literature you can’t see, hear or feel in any full sense.”
• “But he feels even sorrier he declares for true born Englishmen who find themselves in competition with Jews. He presents it as a scandal that a man of the same blood as Chaucer and Shakespeare should because his parents have not had the low cunning to accumulate money be obliged to abase himself before some offspring of an Asiatic bazaar tout” - my personal "theory" on the Jewish link to their apparent fascination is this. To some degree I believe it to be true. The majority of Jewish people I have personally met first and foremost I should have had more dimensions than that part which is associated with money. However I do believe that link is a valid one; a subtle and at times a more prominent focus on the monetary value on any item or service that they buy can be seen marginally more on the whole than in the gentile community. Why? My reasoning is a simple one: as a historically nomadic group of people, their peripatetic movements would have put them in different towns and villages and countries. One thing above all else that could have supported their safety was money. The other: knowledge.
• “The press the cinemas and advertisements must have the stains of pollution removed and be placed in the service of a cultural idea. (This reminded me of Robert musil's the man without qualities). There must also be compulsory physical education at school with plenty of boxing and gymnastics and a corresponding let up on purely mental education, so as to stem the weakness and degeneracy of the urban population who are at present unfit for life’s struggle.”
• Intellectuals have opposed the spread of television just as vociferously as they condemned newspapers in the early part of the century. I don’t see how any civilised person can watch TV far less own a set pronounced WH Auden in 1972” – totally agree with that. We don’t have a TV in our house either :)