Never mind endangered animals – it's the thinkers that we need to save
Today the thinker is an endangered species. All our universities are turning into book-balancing business schools or results-driven scientific research centres, treating students as client-customers who deserve to see an investment return in the form of increased living standards and higher salaries... Once you joined a university to service the global advancement of ideas. Now you employ it to make you more employable.
In the early 50s, everyone was happy because there was only one TV channel and it was programmed by patronising and benign paternalistic liberals. Their crazy beliefs were encouraged by the hoary establishment buffers who held the purse strings and who saw arts, thought and culture as hallmarks of a civilised society, even as they retched in secret at the increase in downwardly angled thought ducts like cheap Penguin paperbacks, red brick universities and Play for Today.
In those halcyon days, the entire nation would sit down with bottles of stout and plates of dripping to watch a programme in which an enthusiastically cigarette-smoking Bertrand Russell, or someone of similar super-intelligence, sat motionless in a chair and discussed for hours the finer points of philosophy in incredible detail with an equally un-televisual man. Their noses and ears full of tufts of hair, their brains crackling with mental electricity, their flappy trousers hoiked biffin-tight, and their little odd socks showing, they reassured the hoi polloi that, although they were very clever, and we needed and valued them as a society, these people were loonies.
In the 1970s, even ITV, which is today a Galápagos of McGuinnesses, had some thinkers on its payroll, like the windmill-armed celebrity egghead Magnus Pyke. When I got a university place in 1986, Pyke was used by my anxious grandfather as an example of the dangers of education. "Be careful you don't learn so much that you send yourself mad like all these professors," he said, pointing at Pyke dancing about in a Thomas Dolby video.
Today the thinker is an endangered species... Read on..
