[新聞] Clive James Interview

Clive James
Interview by Bill Moyers

CLIVE JAMES: Liberal democracy encourages that-- that lack of awareness. Because it produces contentment, prosperity happiness and all of these things which are the enemies of knowledge. And the incentive to study history is removed. And it has to be replaced.

歴史だけじゃない

CLIVE JAMES: That was true in Germany and especially in Austria. There were quotas and so on. The tendency in the universities was that the Jews were either forced into secondary academic lines-- for example, nuclear physics was regarded a rather down-market thing. The reason so many Jews were in nuclear physics is it wasn't the-- the thing that the top scientists did in universities.

And, in Vienna especially, there was-- because the universities weren't fully open, the Jewish intellectuals were forced into the cafes and tended to develop a language which we are still speaking now which is the language of normal conversational rhythm about profound things. I took it the initiative away from the academy and-- in my view it should always be taken away from the academy. I've got a lot of respect for academics. My wife's an academic. I'm part of an academic meilleu.

But academic language should not drive the conversation. The conversation should be driven from journalism. I think what we're doing now and what we write in journalism is not incidental to culture, but basic to it. And it was demonstrated by the Jewish intellectuals in the Vienna cafes, they learned to write the article-- what they called the feuilleton, the little leaf, the entertaining thousand word piece which is the basis of the whole of modern culture-- that I find fascinating.

そういえば僕の学問観も、どちらかというと「学問｣ではなく、新聞記者であった祖父のものに似通ったところがあり、main streamなAmerican liberal intellectual（not academic）のものだと思う。