Shaming
And now that we’ve given the charitable reading room to breathe, let’s take it back again. Let’s say the hell with the charitable reading – it can hold its breath. Because the problem with the possible feelings of superiority thing (besides the ones I’ve already mentioned) is that it just isn’t necessarily true, and it’s destructive (and often hostile and unkind) to assume that it is. Sure, it’s always possible that The Subject likes [Shakespeare/Bach/Whatever] for invidious reasons, just as it’s always possible that The Subject does anything for invidious reasons, but that’s not quite good grounds for assuming that she does. What the feelings of superiority explanation overlooks is the possibility that The Subject just really does like [Shakespeare/Bach/Whatever] and finds a lot of joy, interest, meaning and the like in doing so – that The Subject is genuinely, passionately, self-forgetfully absorbed in [Shakespeare/Bach/Whatever] and is not thinking about her superiority or inferiority at all, that her liking for [Shakespeare/Bach/Whatever] has nothing to do with presentation of self or jockeying for position or display or competition or looking down on people. That could be true even if The Subject is delusional and wrong to like [Shakespeare/Bach/Whatever], even if she is merely slavishly conforming to conventional tastes, even if she is merely obediently liking what the culture has told her to like.
So that’s the problem with the possible feelings of superiority thing, and the problem with the anti-elitism campaign that it feeds into is that anti-elitists have a tendency to like to shame and humiliate people for being putative elitists. It’s easy to do. It always is easy to shame and humiliate people who are excited and enthusiastic about something – just wait until they’re maximally involved in talking about whatever it is they’re enthusiastic about, and then interrupt to tell them they’re elitists for being enthusiastic about that. It’s a familiar old schoolyard trick, of course – just let old four-eyes get going on atoms or poetry or algebra or whatever sucky nerdy geeky thing it is he likes to get going on, and then pounce and tell him how nerdy and geeky and sucky he is, and maybe beat him up for good measure. I’ve mentioned before here a very interesting, indignant, poignant passage Stephen Jay Gould wrote on this subject in Bully for Brontosaurus – the quantity of intellectual curiosity and excitement that gets teased and beaten out of children in school playgrounds in the anti-intellectual culture of the US. (The apotheosis of George W Bush is unlikely to make that kind of thing more scarce.) John McWhorter writes about a very similar phenomenon in black culture – an incident in his childhood when a boy held his younger sister up so that she could repeatedly hit McWhorter because he had spelled a word correctly on request. It’s depressing, in fact heart-rending, that kind of thing – kind of like ‘The Office’, where people spent so much of their energy ripping each other to shreds.
I used to work with someone who was a classic case, in one of the many menial jobs I’ve had (elitist that I am). He was quite a bright guy, I thought, and I also thought that was probably why he was so hostile – frustrated intelligence. He had it in for me. I had the audacity to read sometimes at lunchtime, so he never missed an opportunity to taunt me. I didn’t much care, because I was indifferent to his opinion, but it was irritating. But the thing is, he had two young children, and he was proud of how smart they were – but he was also threatened by it. He said truculent things from time to time about not letting them get too smart, about teaching them to be real boys, blah blah. God how that depressed me – he wanted to make sure they would end up as frustrated as he was. No doubt he’s succeeded by now. Well at least they won’t be any damn elitists using high-falutin’ big words and thinking they know everything. That’s a relief.
There are very real dangers to being too smart. No, really, listen up. It can contribute to daydreaming, thinking above one’s station, … even in a few cases an unhealthy and (surely!) effeminate concern with good causes and making the world a better place.
Even worse, it can lead to questioning God and moral values and from there to all sorts of moral turpitude!!
How awful. Musn’t be too smart.
I know we’re not supposed to mention it, but in the BBC coverage on The Day After they talked to a guy in an Ohio bar who explained the egregious one’s victory very simply. He pointed out that religious people always make better decisions than atheists. After all, it is obvious that all the trouble in the world is being caused by atheists, isn’t it?
Really, I’m not making this up – and the interviewer didn’t say a word! Presumably he would have been accused of being elitist if he had questioned this statement.
Chris – I saw that too. Damn near choked on my marmite sandwich. All this time as an atheist and I didn’t realise I was such a monster. No wonder I haven’t got a girlfriend.
Oh you can mention it. I wasn’t declaring an embargo, merely expressing a plan not to dwell on it myself.
No, I know you’re not making it up! One can hear that kind of thing everywhere all the time. And too right about the interviewer. I mentioned here last spring, seeing a minute of some ‘discussion’ on Fox News that had a static subtitle: “Elitists Trash ‘The Passion'”. Anti-elitism here is so much more a right-wing thing than a left-wing one – and they use it in such a stupid ass-backward way. ‘Elitism’ has nothing whatever to do with money or privilege, it’s all about intellectual curiosity and interests. As long as you’re thick and incurious enough, you can be as rich, lazy, and privileged as you like, and everyone will go on and on about what a reglar guy you are. It makes me want to screeeeeeeeam.
“What the feelings of superiority explanation overlooks is the possibility that The Subject just really does like [Shakespeare/Bach/Whatever] and finds a lot of joy, interest, meaning and the like in doing so…”
Yes, and this reminds me of something I’d almost forgotten about. I once went out to a bar with some college friends and classmates at the time I was working as a music/film reviewer for the college newspaper. One girl who was there just could not understand why I always said such mean things about certain box-office smash movies or multiplatinum artists that she liked and I didn’t. She asked me an interesting question: “Are you a 24-hour critic?” I told her I wasn’t sure I understood what she was asking. “Well, do you ever just stop being critical and enjoy listening to popular music?”
I pointed out that she was essentially asking me if I ever enjoy music that I don’t enjoy. Then I asked her if she ever relaxed her preference for the films/bands that were household names, and went out to enjoy, say, a subtitled Japanese film or a performance by a world music artist. The point of all this was to get her to realize that my tastes really were my tastes -they didn’t and couldn’t change just by deciding to “relax.” I can’t recall if she got the point or not – she just seemed very determined that it was “normal to like what everyone else liked. In her mind, critics who disagreed with her tastes were either abnormal or championing artists they could not possibly like for valid reasons.
Phil
Ah – that is interesting. I’ve had versions of that discussion too. People wondering if I never just turn my critical faculties off and enjoy something dopy or silly or mindless. Well – no. If I don’t like something, I actually don’t like it – I’m not in some hyper-cerebral mindset that prevents me from liking something I otherwise would, I just really don’t like it. I’m perfectly capable of liking silly stuff, but I have to like it – I can’t like something I don’t like by, as you so well say, ‘relaxing.’
In fact the very word ‘relax’ is quite interesting. I’ve noticed that recently. Some people seem to love ‘relaxing’ music or travel, other people seem to love the strenuous variety. Some of that – probably a lot – has to do with work demands and anxiety levels, but I think some of it also has to do with an ideal of relaxed mindlessness. But I always think there’s plenty of time to be relaxed and mindless once we’re dead, so why be in a hurry to be that way before then?
I think that there is something bad which is often called “elitism” – if I don’t like Star Trek because I think it has no plot arc and lousy acting, then that’s okay, but if I don’t like it because it’s the most popular SF series of all time and I don’t like liking the same thing as lots of other people, then that’s less okay. At the very least, I’d be being “a bit of a cock” as another commenter put it on another thread.
I realise that this may be difficult to test (how do you tell other people’s motives?) but I think it does exist.
Yep. That’s what I meant for instance in the bit about people being resourceful in figuring out ways to feel superior, and the bit about finding ways to like what everyone else likes but in a superior more sophisticated way.
I was of course drawing on experience as well as other factors. I well remember feelings of irritation as a teenager when other people liked the same things I did – not all other people, but other people I considered less insightful or aware or whatever the hell it was than I considered myself to be. I was a right little elitist then, I grant you. Not at all deterred by my spectacular, fiery flunk-out in the 11th grade – an unprecedented event in my tiny demanding school. Latin, French, Math – I made a clean sweep. I think I thought that showed I was somehow distinguished. Listen, I was a real imbecile then, so I know how these imbecilities work.
But it can cut the other way too. I was delighted when I really liked the highly popular movie ‘The Fugitive’ – I was happy to be able to like something other people liked for a change. So I think not liking the most popular thing can be deeply tangled up with judgments of its quality – I think if you really love it and are bowled over by it, that’s going to trump the not wanting to like the most popular thing. But if you think it’s mediocre or only pretty good, you might think the popularity is out of proportion and wish smaller but better things were as popular. Ya know? It’s all rather complicated.
“So I think not liking the most popular thing can be deeply tangled up with judgments of its quality – I think if you really love it and are bowled over by it, that’s going to trump the not wanting to like the most popular thing. But if you think it’s mediocre or only pretty good, you might think the popularity is out of proportion and wish smaller but better things were as popular.”
Yep.There are indie-rock fanatics who insist that anything on a major record label is just garbage for the masses. This causes them to overlook both the large amount of interesting music that’s also popular, and the supreme crappiness of much of the independent music they champion.
One thing that contributes to this confusion is the use of the word “popular” itself. People on all sides of the culture wars talk about the distinction between “high” culture and “popular” culture as if those labels corresponded to distinctions in quality. They don’t. The fact that champagne society likes something isn’t an argument about its merits, just as the fact that millions of people like something can’t give good reasons to like or dislike it. Plus, the very definition of what’s popular changes all the time. Shakespeare was popular culture at one time, as was Mozart, Dickens, Twain, Alfred Hitchcock, and so on. But whatever merits these artists may have that makes them continually interesting have always been part of their work – defining them as popular only tells us how many people are enjoying them at any given time.
Personally, I like many books, films and kinds of music that are among the most popular of all time. I like “Buffy” and “Spider Man” and The Beatles and Radiohead and the Peanuts comics, and love horror movies of all kinds. But out there in the cultural marketplace, all sorts of people continue to confound popularity with quality, and that’s a bit perturbing at times.
Phil
In my early student days in the West of Oirland, people who ‘read too much’ were called ‘pseudo-intellectuals’ or ‘so-called intellectuals’ or ‘so-called pseudo-intellectuals’.
But of course the ‘anti-intellectuals’ do have a point – one can, in fact, read too much. If Nero, instead of fiddling, had been perusing ‘The Dialectic of the Enlightenment’ while Rome was ablaze, we could fairly say in criticism that he had been ‘reading while Rome burnt’. And as Goethe famously said: ‘Grey, dear friend, is all theory / But green the golden tree of life’. In other words, Faust may have been a swot but he also had an eye for the girls.
Incidentally, there are at this writing 7190 Google hits for ‘too much reading’.
It’s not that I’m defending anti-elitism – it’s just that one can overdo the theoretical stuff. Trotsky and Joseph Goebbels were both great bookworms – and look where they eventually ended up, after murdering a couple of million intellectually less gifted human beings!
Are exclamation marks permitted at Butterflies and Wheels, BTW?
“People on all sides of the culture wars talk about the distinction between “high” culture and “popular” culture as if those labels corresponded to distinctions in quality.”
And as if they corresponded to fixed unchanging categories instead of to categories that often change places with dizzying speed. Yeah – all that is an aspect I’ve been meaning to get to, and will one of these days, along with some other aspects.
“But of course the ‘anti-intellectuals’ do have a point – one can, in fact, read too much.”
Hmmm. Yeah, maybe, but is there much danger of it? Not that I can see. And the subject isn’t just reading anyway, it’s also listening, looking, thinking, judging, thinking, discriminating.
Are exclamation points permitted at B&W?! What a question! Do I strike you as a particularly calm, laid-back, chilled out, tranquil type who never exlaims?! Godalmighty! My voice rises to a scream on the smallest of provocations. Jerry S could tell you that (if he didn’t have other things to do). He being such an irritating bloke, he heard a lot of my shrill screeching.
Phil Mole writes:
“The fact that champagne society likes something isn’t an argument about its merits, just as the fact that millions of people like something can’t give good reasons to like or dislike it.”
Bullshit, ma brudda, and you’re playing to the gallery. By ‘champagne society’ I presume you mean ‘educated people’, as opposed to ‘millions of people’, by which I presume you mean ‘educated plus uneducated people’.
Sorry, but the fact that educated people like something is an indication that that ‘something’ is probably of better quality in objective terms than something they don’t like, but which uneducated people do like. I don’t know much about what Thurber (I think) called the ‘two phoney arts – painting and music’, so I’ll stick to literature to make my point.
Educated people, in general, prefer to read Flaubert’s ‘Madame Bovary’ than Rosamunde Pilcher’s ‘Wild Mountain Thyme’, which they’ve probably never heard of anyhow. This is because, in objective terms, Flaubert’s novel mirrors the warts-and-all real world better than Rosamunde Pilcher’s, which is slick, low-level kitsch whose function is to pander to obtuse, wishful-thinking females whose idea of reading a novel is to fantasize about what life might have been if they had found Mr Right and married a prince, or something on the same lines. Educated people, so to speak, would prefer to be marooned on a desert island with Flaubert’s classic than with Pilcher’s total tear-jerker. To put it bluntly and elitistly, Pilcher is for the secretarial staff, while Flaubert is for the staff whose dictations they type (or if the latter do have any Pilcher stuff at home, they’ll at least hide it from the view of their dinner-guests).
If that example isn’t good enough for you, try this one. The English cartoonist Posy Simmonds is the author of the brilliant comic-strip novel Gemma Bovery (plot based on Flaubert’s masterpiece). Educated people prefer it to, say, cowboy and Indian comics of the ‘bang bang you’re dead’ variety. They prefer it because it is a better reflection of the complicated, convoluted, real world than the simpleton ‘gotcha’ world of ‘Lucky Luke’. Simmonds can ‘do’ the real world better than other cartoonists can, just as qualified pilots can fly planes better than I can – in purely objective, instrumental terms. And educated people generally have enough intelligence to discriminate between authors who are good at ‘doing’ the real world than authors who aren’t.
However, if all you are saying is that there is some overlap between the preferences of the highly educated and the less educated – well, then I take back the ‘bullshit’ allegation. If you are merely saying that not everything that educated people claim to like is objectively good in terms of its truth content, well, no doubt you’re right. I ploughed my way through Scott Fitzgerald and it sucks almost as much as Pilcher (probably – I confess I haven’t read her crap) sucks – yet thousands of educated people think that this ueber-sentimental jerk is a ‘great novelist’.
Still, I’d be interested if you could supply just one example of stuff that
(a) educated people generally dislike and
(b) uneducated people generally like and
(c) you also, despite being educated, like.
Other than the popular painter Jack Vettriano, puh-leez (though you’ve probably never heard of him, since you’re educated).
Don’t worry James, I’m an atheist and I’ve got a girlfriend. There’s hope.
As for elitism – I tend to put a lot of the bad things that are called elitism down to the old ‘differentiation/emulation’ model as identified by top dead German sociologist Norbert Elias. This does not mean that there are not also a number of good things also referred to as ‘elitist’.
We need more words before we can talk about this sensibly. As ever, linguistic confusion helps to keep the people on top of the pile in the style to which they are accustomed.
Cathal Copeland writes:
“However, if all you are saying is that there is some overlap between the preferences of the highly educated and the less educated – well, then I take back the ‘bullshit’ allegation.”
Sure, that’s what I was saying. To say that something is good because the educated, well-to-do folks like it is to commit the population fallacy. Just as you can’t conclude that Wagner’s music is terrible because Nazis liked it, you can’t conclude that, say, Shakespeare is good because rich, educated folks like it. There are plenty of good ways to argue for the merits of Wagner and Shakespeare, but pointing out who likes them isn’t one of them. (I should add, though that I think there’s something in the observation that highly skilled readers are more likely to prefer complex, challenging books to the works of someone like Danielle Steele. But that’s not a valid argument for the actual merits of the book in question…you still have to make the case based on what’s actually in the book.)
“Still, I’d be interested if you could supply just one example of stuff that
(a) educated people generally dislike and
(b) uneducated people generally like and
(c) you also, despite being educated, like.”
Well, I’m not sure that’s a valid question to start with – it seems to assume much more homogeneity among the educated than actually exists. I like “The Simpsons,” as do many uneducated people. Younger educated people tend to share my enthusiasm, but older educated people do so considerably less. There are plenty of other examples. I love horror movies like George Romero’s “The Crazies,” and many uneducated people do, too. But certainly many educated people would not like the film, and most have never even heard of it.
Phil
I think that just being smart isn’t enough – it can mean that you just come up with better reasons for believing whatever you already believe.
I’d nominate “country music” as something I really like that many educated people aren’t that keen on, and many less educated people like. But Phil Mole’s point about the elite not being homogenous means that the question isn’t actually that useful.
For example, I know of professional academics in the sciences who believe in Creationism or that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS. These people are smarter than I am, but they are still able to believe weird things.
“For example, I know of professional academics in the sciences who believe in Creationism or that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS. These people are smarter than I am, but they are still able to believe weird things.”
Exactly. Often it’s the people with PhDs who are the main pureveyors of New Age crap – they think that because they have advanced academic degrees, they can speak about politics or science or art or anything else with unimpeachable authority.
This gets to an interesting point. Often, New Agers like Deepak Chopra or Carolyn Myss succeed because of a careful mixture of populism and elitism. The populism consists of telling large segnments of the general public what they’d most like to hear (that the soul is real, aging is an illusion, etc.), while the elitism consists of establishing their own authority to talk about these things. Chopra, for instance, uses his MD to argue for popular hopes in an authoritarian way. He tells us we’re right to believe that aging is illusory, but that we need him to prove the case for us.
Phil
“New Agers like Deepak Chopra or Carolyn Myss succeed because of a careful mixture of populism and elitism.”
Very interesting point.
Maybe you’d like to write an article for us on the subject!
I am too idle to write the article that OB suggests, but I can suggest another article to write: “How not to turn to the dark side: tips for academics on how to talk on things outside their speciality without making a complete fool of themselves”?
“Maybe you’d like to write an article for us on the subject!”
Maybe I would! Sometime in the near future, I just might get to that.
Phil
Outstanding. We’ll look forward to it.