Stop the Milieu, I’ve Got to Get Off

Now and then in England, if less often in America, one comes across the sort of intellectual whose lonely emancipation from Liberalism is based less upon intellect than upon taste, upon sheer stylistic self-respect. There are of course plenty of intellectual objections to Liberalism, and these are well known; but sometimes the really decisive thing can be the experience of participating, day to day, in the Liberal sub-culture itself. Liberalism does have a few birds of wondrous plumage perched uneasily amidst the jackdaws, but, on the whole, participating in the Liberal milieu is like being locked into an endless conversation with James Wechsler, Lord Snow, and some square-jawed, horn-rimmed, Selma-marching atheist Quaker from Boston, while all the while there runs, as background, a soundless film of Lenny Bernstein conducting. One doesn’t have to be a philosopher to look for an exit. The mere man of sensibility cries out Stop! I’ve had enough.

George Orwell, for example, A. J. P. Taylor, and Malcolm Muggeridge are disparate figures indeed, but they have in common a thorny independence, and in each case one senses that it derives from an instinctive stylistic judgment. In their different ways they are all fastidious, especially about words, but not only about words; and they have found the philistine not, as Arnold did, upon the Woodford Branch, but on the BBC panel, in the editorial offices of the Liberal weekly, in the university common room, in what Muggeridge calls the “inimitable” editorial prose of the New York Times.

About the Author

Jeffrey Hart

Jeffrey Hart is a contributor to National Review.

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Now and then in England, if less often in America, one comes across the sort of intellectual whose lonely emancipation from Liberalism is based less upon intellect than upon taste, upon sheer stylistic self-respect. There are of course plenty of intellectual objections to Liberalism, and these are well known; but sometimes the really decisive thing can be the experience of participating, day to day, in the Liberal sub-culture itself. Liberalism does have a few birds of wondrous plumage perched uneasily amidst the jackdaws, but, on the whole, participating in the Liberal milieu is like being locked into an endless conversation with James Wechsler, Lord Snow, and some square-jawed, horn-rimmed, Selma-marching atheist Quaker from Boston, while all the while there runs, as background, a soundless film of Lenny Bernstein conducting. One doesn’t have to be a philosopher to look for an exit. The mere man of sensibility cries out Stop! I’ve had enough.

George Orwell, for example, A. J. P. Taylor, and Malcolm Muggeridge are disparate figures indeed, but they have in common a thorny independence, and in each case one senses that it derives from an instinctive stylistic judgment. In their different ways they are all fastidious, especially about words, but not only about words; and they have found the philistine not, as Arnold did, upon the Woodford Branch, but on the BBC panel, in the editorial offices of the Liberal weekly, in the university common room, in what Muggeridge calls the “inimitable” editorial prose of the New York Times.