Professor A. C. Grayling tells me that he doesn’t really understand the term ‘public intellectual’: “These are labels other people stick on one.” Stuck on or not, he is surely one of the most prominent examples of a thinker who, via numerous books and “thousands of words” written for the newspapers, has endeavoured to engage the public in a way more typical of intellectuals in countries like France.
His latest work, The God Argument, continues the recent cultural onslaught against theism also associated with figures such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. He might not be as pugnacious as some of the other ‘new atheists’; indeed, he has been described as the ‘velvet version’. But he is no less keen to tackle the beast. Is there a need for another book?
Religion, he says, is a very difficult thing to pin-down. “Fighting it is like boxing an enormous lump of jelly, because when you punch it in one place it just bloops out in another.” He also wants to move the debate on, “the question now is, what’s the alternative?” For him it is Humanism: “it’s not a doctrine, but an attitude, premised on the most generous and sympathetic understanding of the human condition.”
But it is not for his books that Grayling has sparked a furore of late. In a country like ours, a philosopher has to do quite a lot to make himself controversial. We are sitting in his office at the top of the New College of the Humanities (NCH) in the Bloomsbury district of London. His new institution is set in a beautiful 18th century terrace overlooking Bedford Square. I mention how, as I clambered up the staircase to the Master’s office, I had been put in mind of a small PPH, a sort of secular St. Benet’s Hall. “I always say, I will found our department of theology right after I set up our department of astrology,” he jokes.
He is keen to emphasise that the majority of press coverage has actually been positive, but far more noticeable have been the vitriolic attacks. Terry Eagleton, a man for whom Grayling evinces little fondness, penned an article titled simply: “AC Grayling’s private university is odious”. Somewhat rich, the philosopher points out, when it transpired that Eagleton himself has teaching commitments at a very expensive private American outfit.
Why such apoplexy on the left? Because Grayling will be charging students £18,000 a year for their education, which is “a marriage between the liberal arts model and the Oxford tutorial model.” Grayling dismisses the equality complaints as a “fetish” and highlights the fact that one third of his students receive full or partial help with fees. But this rings somewhat hollow when you consider how socially exclusionary a college where two thirds of students can afford to pay £18,000 a year up front must necessarily be, even before the exorbitant costs of living in London.
Far more defensible is his desire to raise an endowment which enables full needs-blindness. Within 10 to 15 years he hopes to have enough money to admit people “purely on their intellectual merits. I explored trying to start it as a charitable foundation from the outset and raise the endowment first. But that would have taken so long…we don’t have that culture [of charitable giving] in this country that they do in the United States.”
I am left wondering why he has not laboured this point more before. The caricature of NCH as a capitalist venture, advantaging the offspring of the indecently rich, holds less water if in the end the college will be no more socially exclusionary than Oxbridge or the top of the Russell group. Grayling is passionately supportive of the idea of expanding high quality educational provision for undergraduates, and of giving academics research opportunities without the restrictive demands of the Research Assessment Exercise. Even if the fees situation at present is frankly unjust, as a long-term concept his arguments in favour of NCH become more compelling.
But Grayling feels that his opponents have not been willing to give his case the time of day from the off. More than once he describes the behaviour of the The Guardian, for which he wrote for many years, as “such a deep disappointment.”
Indeed, he suggests that its coverage of NCH amounted to dishonest journalism. “This is the first time I have spoken about this publicly…I was told by two separate Guardian-related people, one of them a very very senior columnist at the Guardian, and one of them one of the letters editors, that they’d had a meeting immediately after the announcement of the college. The Guardian decided that they were going to run negative stories, or attack stories every day…they asked the letters editors to look out for things that The Guardian could use a hook for a negative story.”
The whole treatment of his new institution has made him lose some of his former faith in the probity of the broadsheet press. “They made up their mind that they were going to have a go, not on the merits [of the issue], but on principle.”
Perhaps it is his lack of relish for the bloody-mindedness of public argument that makes him so ambivalent about the idea of being a ‘public intellectual’. He speaks with real pain in his voice about the treatment dished out to those who stick their heads above the parapet. “You become a figure of such vilification. People have no idea about you, how much you love your children and your dog, how hard you work or how sincere your aspirations are, in a way that makes you not want to be out there in the public domain. I would rather be an entirely private individual and just not have to put up with that sort of thing.” Does it hurt? His voice rises, “I am a tiny bit thin-skinned about these things. It does hurt a bit.”
When his eyes really light up are when he enthuses about working every day with young minds opening up to the new perspectives which education enables. “I jump out of my bed every morning.” The whole experience has been “exhilarating”, he says.
His passion for the humanities is unbridled; missionary. To really flourish as a person, “you need to know something about how you got here and your society got here, you need to have had your insight into the human condition expanded and educated a bit by looking through the windows of literature at other lives, other choices, other possibilities. You need to have challenged your assumptions and thought a little bit about the concepts that we live by.”
This is where he is happiest; he lets our interview overrun by half an hour, holding off his next appointment in order to migrate with me across the expanses of human ideas which we end up discussing.
A. C. Grayling is a fiercely intelligent man. His speech is peppered with references to Bruegel, Chinese proverbs, contemporary French philosophers, Plutarch and Aristotle. How did he gain such an extraordinary breadth of knowledge? He smiles. For once his answer comes out in a soundbite. “I read.” He would have all of us do that sort of thing a great deal more.
