The End-of-History Smart Set
by Matt Purple, The American Conservative:
Sound the knell: The public intellectual is dead. His intellect has been narrowed by specialization, while his place in the public square has been crowded out by Twitter edgelords and Clubhouse grandstanders. And away with him too has gone something else, the literary set, those clubby packs of writers who once defined their nations’ arts and letters over boozy lunches-cum-dinners-cum-self-hagiography-scenes. The last of these was a clique of British intellectuals that TAC contributor Ben Sixsmith dubbed the Loomers. They were Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, and, as Hitchens would have readily told you, many, many more comrades and friends.
Sixsmith coined the “Loomer” label both because these men were Baby Boomers and because they loomed over British intellectual life for decades (and in some ways still do). His assessment is mostly a disapproving one. The Loomers, he thinks, represented the triumph of literary style over substance, and within style the prioritization of cleverness over power. I don’t wholly agree—McEwan, at least, is an elegant and precise stylist—but I do think the Loomers are worth examining for another reason, one that Sixsmith also touches on: their politics.
The Loomers—I’m going to culturally appropriate Sixsmith’s term if only because no one else has ever come up with a better one—captured a political tendency that, as recently as 15 years ago, seemed unstoppably ascendant. It would be unfair to call them “neoliberals,” a word whose meaning has been almost wholly devalued in any case. But they did come to represent, stylishly and often unsparingly, a kind of center-left establishment consensus at what was supposed to be history’s end. That viewpoint has since faded and may never return to its former prominence.
The first thing to know about the Loomers is that they were all either atheists or agnostics (and there is a difference, stressed Amis, who thought atheism could be too premature and “lenten”). Hitchens, late in life, wrote a book subtly titled God is Not Great and spent much of his time sparring across lecterns with clerics and imams. Rushdie was famously the subject of a fatwa by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, which forced him into hiding and resulted in several assassination attempts against him and his translators. Hitchens in particular viewed both this kill order and the attacks of 9/11 as clarifying moments, when the free and secular world was brought into inexorable conflict with the backward hordes of theocratic unenlightenment.
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