Plain talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

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Occasionally I dig up some of my old books and magazines. Apart from enjoying contents of a very high standard, I usually try to relate those old treasures to current realities.

In the August 1972 issue of Encounter, I came across an article by Robert Nisbet, professor of history and sociology at the University of Arizona and author of several books, including The Degradation of the Academic Dogma.

Under the intriguing title "The Nemesis of Authority", it starts with the premise that civil society "in whatever degree it may exist at all, is a tissue of authorities, however loosely knit these may be in times of stress". To him authority is not power or coercion nor is it rooted in force or threat of force. It is built in the very fabric of human association, and exists in the very roles and statuses of the social order.

There is, in Nisbet's opinion, an indispensable element of authority in culture. He uses the term in the sense of high culture, of works of imagination in the arts, of scholarship, science and artistic performance. Without the authority of taste and learning there can be no culture. There is the authority of Shakespeare, Goethe, Einstein or Picasso, just as there is an authority of logic, of reason, taste and genius as well as "the authority of the moral judgement and of the conscience that is its internal manifestation".

Then there is, of course, the authority of language which is "of all forms of authority, the most fundamental to both the social bond and to culture". No community, no association, no culture can exist without language.

While there are ages of cultural efflorescence, so there are ages of cultural sterility. Such ages have a number of common characteristics. One of them is a retreat from language -- even a repudiation of language and of the modes of thought which go with richness of languages.

Under the guise of search for the simple, there is sabotage of all that is authoritative in language. There is a turning to "the child" to the "noble savage" and the Barbarian.

Having given a description of linguistic corruption the writer asks "Is our age one as I have just described?" He thought it was then too soon to be sure, but there were some familiar signs of such ages. He could see an erosion of the authority and community of language, in the semi-illiterate and "language- hating ranks of militants for whom a single four-letter word, endlessly repeated, can be the stock of political attack, and also, at the same time, of withdrawal from the toil and traps of a language they fear".

The essay also deals with the issues of "performing selves", the culture of contempt and "the intellectual and power". I would like to dwell here on his opinion that together with the revolt against authority, intellectuals are fascinated with the kind of power that is inseparable from social movements and crusades and "that is invariably embodied in a singly charismatic person" despite the illusion that it is based on the support of "the people".

This relation between intellectuals and power is not new to the West, claims Nisbet. It can be traced to Renaissance Florence and the philosophers of the French Enlightenment. Even people like Voltaire and Rousseau sought power. They were not single-mindedly interested in liberty. It was liberty for themselves, in their onslaught against church and traditional authority.

Nisbet ends his article with the premise there could be no "performing self" with out a crisis. It was crisis that created the Caesars, Cromwells and Napoleons -- not to mention a Hitler -- in history. If you do not, in fact, have a crisis "it becomes necessary to create one". Intellectuals have known this since Plato. "No such crisis exists in America at the present time" wrote Nisbet in 1972. Now that we are in 2004, can the term "the performing self" be applied to President Bush? Was the war against terror a "created crisis"? I wish Robert Nisbet could answer this.