Plain Talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

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For some time now a theme has preoccupied a number of writers and commentators: where are the voices of intellectuals and why has their role receded? It is a well known fact that writers and intellectuals have always been the spearhead of revolutions and social changes. What happened in the Eastern European bloc is an example. It was the intellectuals in Czechoslovakia, for instance, who brought about the political transformation, and their leader Vaclav Havel, a playwright, became the first president after the fall of the communist regime.

Likewise in Egypt it was intellectuals and men of letters who were at the forefront of the forces for change. In our modern history, from the time of Muhammad Ali until 1952, it was they who fought against colonialism and imperialism, as well as internal tyranny.

But it seems that Egypt is not alone to decry the absence of intellectuals' voices. In a recent article in the London Observer, Henry Porter asks, "Where is our Orwell, where is our Dickens?" In this article he bemoans the receding role of English intellectuals since 1997, when 90 percent of writers and public intellectuals voted Labour. With Tony Blair's victory, Porter goes on, "they eased back. The new Prime Minister seemed to be so completely the product of their own values and at one with their view of society that there was no longer any need to concentrate." I would venture to say that was the same attitude of our writers and intellelctuals when the 1952 Revolution took place. The Revolution was a realisation of the dreams they had nurtured for decades.

In his article Porter criticises the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufacturers and Commerce, a recent creation of the Government. One of the tasks of this society is "to explore a model of how individual behaviour is shaped and as a consequence social outcomes are achieved. Such a model needs to be nuanced and dynamic."

Such ideas, coming from official think tanks, try to "remake us into pro-social citizens". They make no room for independent thinking, however, "because it is all part of Westminister set-up and is calculated to alter or inspire policy, which means it must attract one lot of politicians or the other".

But what is needed is something more -- sharper eyes and braver minds. A couple of years ago, in the opinion of the writer, there were a number of such public intellectuals who provided this service. Among them were Germaine Greer (an outspoken feminist and professor of literature), Melvyn Bragg (known for his book The Adventure of English ) as well as such writers as Pinter, Rushdie, Amis, McEwan, Byatt etc. There was never any shortage of serious social criticism. It was part of British life, and each generation threw up such figures.

At the moment, the writer claims, it is not writers or public intellectuals who have the most interesting things to say, but mainly conservatives, who are "the only intellectual opposition to the government outside Parliament", and the entertainment- obsessed media. "Public intellectuals," writes Porter, "just aren't cutting it any more and writers who could have been so important in this role have taken themselves on an extended book tour."

Then he asks, "Where are the novelists with their indictments of government and society? Where are the exposes of some unregarded part of the termite heap? Where are the dramatists who can barely speak for their anger? And this is not the fault of politicians, but it's just artists who absented themselves from the floor since Labour came into power."

There are still issues to be tackled which need the urgent attention of a writer's sensibility. The widening gap between poor and rich, the seething anger of the underclass, the steady attack on the rights of those who cannot protect themselves, the war in Iraq, the regular deaths of British soldiers in Afghanistan, Guantanamo. Porter ends his inspiring article with, "George Orwell would have found much to write and think about."

Why not the writers of our own time?