As regular readers of this space know, I was in London last week and took the opportunity to visit some of the sites associated with some of the important thinkers and writers who shaped the modern world. I visited the tomb of one of the Founding Fathers of the Blogosphere, Joseph Addison, in Poet’s Corner at Westminster Abbey. While there I also paid stopped at the tombs of Sir Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin before going out to Greenwich Observatory to see John Harrison’s H-4 clock that made it possible for navigators to determine their global position and so facilitated the vast expansion of trade and communication that defined the last 200 years. I visited the houses of two more great bloggers — Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Johnson — and paid my respects to St. Sir Thomas More, Leigh Hunt, George Elliot, Henry James and Thomas Carlyle in Chelsea.
This was not even scratching the surface of literary and intellectual London — no visit to the Reading Room or to Marx’s tomb, no stroll through Bloomsbury (though I did see Virginia Woolf’s entry in the guest book at the Carlyle House), no visit to the Dickens Museum, the new Globe or to countless other places associated with the great people and great minds who placed this city on a level with Athens, Jerusalem and Rome in the annals of western and indeed world civilization. But it was enough to challenge and sharpen my thinking about what blogging is about, what intellectuals should be up to, and what we are trying to do at The American Interest Online.
Joseph Addison, ur-blogger.
If you go back far enough, all the intellectuals were in the Church. It’s been frequently noted that during long stretches of the Middle Ages, the nobility and the fighting men thought literacy beneath them — and nobody bothered teaching anything to the common people. If you were literate, you must be in the church — this belief was so firmly fixed that it was part of the law. From 1351 on, if you could read (or recite Psalm 51, the Scripture passage usually used for the test), you could plead ‘benefit of clergy’ and either have your case transferred into the (dilatory and merciful) ecclesiastical courts or get off entirely. The English practice crossed the ocean with the early colonists; Wikipedia asserts that in South Carolina defendants were still pleading benefit of clergy on the eve of the Civil War.
(I would hate to think that it was because literacy was so rare in my native state that this practice survived its elimination in federal courts by sixty years. One hopes it was South Carolina’s deep reverence for learning that kept this medieval survival alive even after the British got rid of it.)
In any case, during much of western history, the universities were part of the Church and the high offices of state were filled by the clerics who, alone, had the learning to manage the business of government. The rest of the learned were mostly found in monasteries, partly because before printing became widespread there were so few collections of books in private hands.
What we might now consider free range intellectuals, people like Macchiavelli and Thomas More who made intellectual careers outside the Church, start to pop up in significant numbers with the invention of printing. The closure of the monasteries in Protestant countries sent scholars and thinkers out to make a living in the wide and bitter world. Men like Roger Ascham, Elizabeth I’s famous tutor, in earlier eras probably would have found a niche somewhere inside the ecclesiastical establishment; although thanks to his famous pupil Ascham ended up with a nice clerical living, he never took holy orders. In England, the break comes in the reign of Henry VIII; when Cardinal Wolsey fell, he was replaced by the layman Thomas More; from that time forward the government of England has largely kept the clergy to the side.
As Thomas Macaulay observed from his comfortable and well upholstered perch in the nineteenth century, the eighteenth century saw a revolution in the social and economic position of intellectuals. At the beginning of that century, there were four ways to earn a gentleman’s living as a thinker or writer: a university fellowship, a clerical ‘living’, a comfortable government place (whether active like Lord Chancellor or honorary like Poet Laureate), or a private post (tutor or librarian in a great noble house). Men like Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Sir Isaac Newton navigated this system fairly well; the unattached writers of Fleet Street floundered on the outskirts of destitution, living from hand to mouth and frequently in peril of arrest for outstanding debts.
Samuel Johnson lived through this transition, desperately working to keep body and soul together for many years, angling for and failing to get the patronage of Lord Chesterfield, and at times he was literally homeless. Arrested for debt in 1756 he did not become truly secure until George III gave him an annual pension worth about $50,000 in today’s money. Nevertheless, Johnson carved out an independent career as a free lance poet, essayist (like Addison he wrote a blog-like series of essays known as The Rambler) and lexicographer. From Johnson’s heyday through the middle of the twentieth century, a galaxy of writers and critics were able to support themselves from the commercial proceeds of their work — though not a few endured financial setbacks and uncertainty as harrowing as Johnson’s early life.
A handful of ‘wits’ in London got the ball rolling, and the more I look at their work the more I see the similarities between what they did and what bloggers now do. Writers like Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Richard Steele and Joseph Addison (occasionally joined by people like Alexander Pope) started writing informal essays and observations about politics, society, the theater, fashion and anything else that caught their fancy. These essays were handed to the printers and distributed by post and sold to subscribers. The Tatler, one of the first of these publications, even had a precursor of the comments section; if you paid a little extra you got an additional page on which you could post observations and gossip of your own before mailing the issue on to a friend.
These paleoblogs took the country by storm; they also made money for their authors. For the first time, English writers could make money based on the popularity of their work with the general public. As a mass audience developed for contemporary literature and criticism, more and more writers would be able to follow this path, supporting their study and their work by the contributions of their readers. The rise of the intelligent lay public and its ability to support independent writers and analysts was one of the most important developments in the history of the modern world and in the growth of democracy. Writers no longer had to please exalted patrons in church or state; with a lively style, keen sight and an instinct for what the public wanted to know, writers and thinkers could make their own way in the world.
It was never particularly easy; nor should it be. But the eighteenth and nineteenth century saw more and more thinkers and writers finding ways to support their work by engaging with the public. The proliferation of magazines and book publishers, the gradual move to provide writers better copyright protection, and, when the railroads made travel easier, the rise of the lecture circuit enabled people like Frederick Douglass to enter public debate in new ways.
I’m not going to attempt an economic history of the intellectual in a blog post, but the twentieth century seems to have reversed the trend of the previous two hundred years. Increasingly as the twentieth century moved on, intellectuals and writers were forced back into the pre-modern pattern. Poets, novelists, essayists, critics, historians: it became increasingly difficult to sustain any of these vocations outside the universities and the think tanks and university and think tank presidents took over the old task of shaking down the wealthy to subsidize the learned through patronage of various kinds.
There was another way in which the writer was increasingly yoked — not always happily — to institutions. During the twentieth century, magazine and book publishing inexorably became more businesslike. To print and distribute a book or a magazine was so expensive that with a handful of noble exceptions only large and well financed companies could succeed. This gave tremendous power to editors; the editor’s ability to figure out what would sell was the vital spark that kept book and magazine publishers going. At the limit, writers for magazines like the old Time, Life, Newsweek — and in the Economist today — wrote anonymous copy that was heavily edited into a homogeneous house style. But even in publications and publishing houses where individual voices were prized, writers were dependent on editors for the opportunity to put their work before the public.
This is not the way it was when Addison and Steele were writing the Spectator. The writers produced the paper: they decided what went into it, how long each article should be, when it would appear and what it should look like.
Today’s blogger has the same freedom that the progenitors did. Anybody with a computer and an internet connection can set up a blog; you don’t need the mighty machinery of a powerful media company to get your message out to the world. Figuring out how to get and keep an audience is as hard as it ever was, and converting public interest into a reliable revenue stream remains dicey. Nevertheless, it is easier and cheaper to put ideas in front of the public than it has ever been.
What remains to be seen is whether the new media will reverse the decline of the free range intellectual, allowing more creators, writers and thinkers to earn their living from the public, rather than seeking the patronage of institutions. I hope so; as I wrote in The Last Post, the institutions that support intellectual work in this country are in trouble, and I suspect that the financial bind affecting all levels of government will soon result in some very painful university cutbacks while the great journalistic meltdown will only get worse.
But I also think something vital is lost when a society’s artists and thinkers live on the bounty of established institutions and must negotiate the complicated political and ideological dances such institutions require in order to live. The quirky, cranky critic who doesn’t really care what anybody thinks is often wrong, but sometimes these people at their rudest and crankiest are pointing to vital truths that the complacent and timeserving cultural bureaucrats and custodians of conventional wisdom cannot see or will not speak. In revolutionary times like ours we need to hear from the thinkers who won’t be politically house trained, who speak the ugly truths that no decent person would utter, are atrociously rude to the donors and make no secret of their belief that the dean is a hack.
To visit London and poke among the tombs and shrines of long dead writers is to be reminded that the intellectual professions don’t stand above history, judging from on high. We are shaped by the times we live in, the way we earn our livings, the technology that allows us to reach the public as well as by the changing fashions in ideas. The economic and social turbulence that is reshaping American life is not going to pass intellectuals by. Every profession and every trade in America is being transformed; the literary and intellectual professions are going to change in ways we can scarcely imagine.
Here at The American Interest we are going to have to do more than host interesting pieces by insightful people; like everyone else in the business we are going to have to rethink the way that authors and publishers collaborate in this changing world and find new ways of connecting with the public. We will be writing about the many faceted and accelerating changes that are remaking the world of the American thinker, but we will also be trying to be a part of those changes and to follow as best we can in the footsteps of those earlier generations who repeatedly reinvented and reformed the relationship of thinkers and writers to society even as they wrote books that we still read with astonishment and delight after hundreds of years.
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