{The Middle Classes}[23rd August 1990]

[Redbook7:226-229][19900823:1142]{The Middle Classes}[23rd August 1990]

19900823.1142

‘I asked: “Why are our new projects moving so slowly? Why do we always lag behind the USA and other countries, why are we losing the technology race?”* …. I don’t know what kind of answer I expected. Twenty years later, when Turchin, Medvedev and I posed the same question … we answered that insufficient democratic institutions … and a lack of intellectual freedom … were to blame.’

– Andrei Sakharov, Memoirs, quoted by Ernest Gellner in his review in [The] T[imes] L[iterary] S[upplement] 19900817-23: 863; 864, describing his answer when Beria unexpectedly asked him if he had any questions.

The interesting thing is that the problem as summarised by Sakharov (and glossed by Gellner as ‘The conclusive defeat in the technological and economic race’) for the Soviet Union, is also the problem for Britain, as compared with Germany, France and now Italy rather than with the United States of America. Could our answer be the same? (Incidentally, the fact that I ask this question should make [it] clear that I regard any cyclical pattern of history as as descriptive, not deterministic.)

Conventional explanations relate to history, size, economic practices; but I have been conscious for years, and never more than now as I follow the Writing School course with its confident guarantee, of the dead weight of conventional thinking which controls all sectors in the United Kingdom.

*(Gellner adds the economic race to this, in his comments)

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