That’s the title of one essay in my forthcoming book Debating Faith. Here is an example of Bell’s amazing elitism:

” How are the civilizing few to be supplied with the necessary security and leisure save at the expense of the many?… Civilization requires the existence of a leisured class, and a leisured class requires the existence of slaves – of people, I mean, who give some part of their surplus time and energy to the support of others…[the select few must be above] the soul-destroying dominion of circumstances”:

Clive Bell, Civilization (1928), pp. 175-176.

Writing in 1928 when Hitler and Mussolini were getting going, the Bloomsbury art critic Clive Bell had no time for “men of action” who threatened freedom of thought:

“Action in itself is worthless…Real men and women of action.. do not as a rule make wars and massacres, do not domineer over the weak and provoke the strong, meddle with their neighbours and turn the world upside down from altruistic motives. These things they do because only in doing can they assert themselves. What is called a man or woman of action is almost always a deformed and deficient artist who yearns to express himself or herself but, unable to express by creating, must assert by interfering. Such people are our misfortune, and there are a good many o them… They must have power, they must impose themselves, they must interfere. They are the makers of nations and empires, and the troublers of peace…They must impose their standards and ways of life…. They can and do impose external uniformity and discipline… they have nothing better to do than seek power, and as the majority is stupid and docile, they generally get it”:

[ Civilization, 1928, pp. 159-160]

Politicians may loom large for a time, but as one English poet, it may have been Alexander Pope, put it about most of them:

“Alive ridiculous, and dead forgot”.

Clive Bell, the Bloomsbury art critic, was an unpleasant person, but he had wise things to say on the evils of patriotism and nationalism. Civilised people, he said, “see a certain unreality in the grouping of people by nations” and “nationalism is a bogey: none can tell you precisely what a nation is”. He preferred cosmopolitanism.

“As soon as me begin to think freely the grip of patriotism is loosened… obviously an Englishman who cares for beauty, truth or knowledge, may find himself more in sympathy with a Frenchman, German, or Chinaman who shares his tastes than with a compatriot who shares those of Punch and John Bull ”  [ Civilization, 1928].

We remember E. M. Forster as the guy who wrote novels such as Room With a View and Passage to India, brought to millions in Merchant Ivory’s wonderful films. But Forster wrote much non-fiction that discussed the world crisis in the 1930s and 40s, topics covering the human condition, ethics, class, race and totalitarianism and much on the arts, which he saw as “an antidote against our present troubles” (1951). As early as 1935 Forster spoke out against “the menace to freedom”, against Hitler’s persecution of the Jews and disregard for freedom of opinion and individualism, “assailing the human mind at its source”. He worried that “people do not believe in freedom any more”. They were in the state “of being half-frightened and half-thinking about something else at the same time”. This was a “moment of general collapse, this moment when the governments kill and the Churches have nothing to say”(1939).

Forster collected many of his earlier essays in Two Cheers for Democracy (1951).

Wyndham Lewis, founder of the Vorticist art movement, was always controversial, but I’ve been reading more about him lately and some of his ideas were truly demented and horrible – in books such as The Art of Being Ruled (1926), Time and Western Man (1928) and Men Without Art (1934). He was elitist, proto-fascist (admired Hitler and Mussolini), racist (anti-black, anti-Semitic), hated popular culture and all democracy and would happily have contemplated the extinction of millions of the deprived and uneducated in favour of rule by the intelligent few who might breed a superior breed of human beings.

If you, like me, admire H. G. Wells’s futurist novels, you may not be aware of his advocacy of genocide and selective breeding in his “utopian” New Republic. He warned that “whole masses of human population are inferior in their claim upon the future”. “Base and servile types” would be euthanised, including criminals, insane, physically disabled or genetically diseased. “Swarms of black, and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people, who do not meet the new needs of efficiency, will have to go”

[Anticipations, 1901]

” Man must go steeply up or down and the odds seem to be all in favour of his going down and out. If he goes up, then so great is the adaptation demanded of him that he must cease to be a man. Ordinary man is at the end of his tether. Only a small, highly adaptable minority of the species can possibly survive” .

H. G. Wells, Mind at the End of its Tether (1945)

” Adapt or perish, that is and always has been the implacable law of life for mankind. Either the human imagination and the will to live rises to the plain necessity of our case, and a renascent Homo sapiens struggles on to a new, a harder and happier world dominion, or he blunders down the slopes of failure through a series of unhappy phases, in the wake of all the monster reptiles and beasts that have flourished and lorded it on the earth before him, to his ultimate extinction”

The Fate of Homo Sapiens [1939]

H. G’s early science fiction and futurist writings were gloom laden, even predicting atomic warfare (1913) and the end of the world, But he could also be super optimistic, writing 1in 1902:

“All that the human mind has accomplished is but the dream before the awakening. A day will come when beings now in our thoughts and hidden in our loins will stand upon the earth as one stands upon a footstool, and laugh, and reach out their hands amid the stars” [Anticipations].