THE INTELLIGENTSIA
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building trusts, research laboratories, universities and medical services
are all owned by the State; the author, actor, architect, scientist, etc.,
is in fact a civil servant, though the atmosphere is not exactly that of
Whitehall. But even the literary movements in Russia-'Revolutionary
Romanticism', 'Socialist Realism', 'Operative Literature', 'New Pa–
triotism' have not spontaneously, organically grown, but were decreed
at Party-Congresses and by utterances of government spokesmen; and
the same applies, in varying degree, to poetry, drama, architecture,
films, not to mention historical research and philosophy. The succes–
sive philosophical and artistic movements in the Soviet State look as
if they were performed to the pattern 'Left turn-Right turn-As
you were.' In the German Reichskulturkammern the transformation
of Parnassus into a barrack-square was equally thorough.
In the Anglo-Saxon countries a similar development is difficult,
but not altogether impossible to visualize. Above all, a number of
different roads may lead to the same goal. Total mobilization during
the present war was a kind of dress-rehearsal for the Western version
of the bureaucratized state, and during the last two years the intelli–
gentsia has to a large extent been absorbed as temporary civil ser–
vants in the M. of
I.,
as P.R.O.s, in the B.B.C., etc. For the time
being 'job' and 'private production' are still kept in separate com–
partments (with the result of the latter becoming more and more
atrophied) ; but it is imaginable that a situation may arise in which
the two merge; when, instead of regarding the former as a kind of
patriotic hacking and the latter as the real thing, the energies become
suddenly canalized into one stream. A few may start the new mode,
and the rest follow suit; the individuals concerned may believe that
they are following a personal impulse, whereas in reality it would be
a process of adaptation to the changed social situation of the man–
agerial state. The danger of this happening is all the greater as con–
formism is often a form of betrayal which can be carried out with a
perfectly clear conscience; and the temptation to exchange the miseries
which intellectual honesty entails for the heart-warming satisfactions
of managerial. efficiency is great. The collapse of the revolutionary
movement has put the intelligentsia into a defensive position; the
alternative for the next few years is no more 'capitalism or revolution'
but to save
some
of the values of democracy and humanism or to
lose them all; and to prevent this happening one has to cling more
than ever to the ragged banner of 'independent thinking'.
It is, at present, a very popular banner; and unique in this
respect, that on its cloth the spittle of derision has clotted together
with the blood of our dead.
