Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/06519_Field_TCUM T84.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 979b | 16 lines

     Had Benda known his history, he would have been less
angry and less surprised. For it has always been the role of
intelligentsia to act as liaison and as mediators between old
and new power groups. Most familiar of such groups is the case
of the Greek slaves, who were for long the educators and
confidential clerks of the Roman power. And it is precisely this
servile role of the confidential clerk to the tycoon—commercial,
military, or political—that the educator has continued to play in
the Western world until the present moment. In England “the
Angries” were a group of such clerks who had suddenly
emerged from the lower echelons by the educational escape
hatch. As they emerged into the upper world of power, they
found that the air was not at all fresh or bracing. But they lost
their nerve even quicker than Bernard Shaw lost his. Like Shaw,
they quickly settled down to whimsy and to the cultivation of
entertainment values.