I opened the Sunday Times books section, glanced at the list of bestsellers, and had a heart attack. The cause was hardback non-fiction. This realm was previously populated by Gibbon, Keynes and Jean-Paul Sartre. It was now home to a meerkat which hadn’t even the temerity to exist. A Simples Life had topped, yo-yoed and Power Rangered the chart. Of every non-fiction writer since the dawn of time, none, it seems, could compete with the wisdom of Aleksander Orlov.
An advertising agency had thought of a bad pun- market, meerkat, ha ha ha. This was extrapolated into an entire fictional universe. Once becatchphrased a book was written- based on a catchphrase based on a non-existent bad pun in an advert- which then became reality. Tony Blair was third in the chart. A hundred thousand Iraqi children clearly died in vain.
I recovered Pulp Fiction-style and winced. How could such cartridged stupidity be rammed into the breech of the Martini-Henry of the British public with such brutal, simplistic sagacity? And how (so cartridged) could the nascent cannonade be bazookaed so fast and unpenitently into the yodelling hordes of rabid Zulus that is the Sunday Times bestseller list?
Obviously the country had gone mad. It was hardly surprising. After all, most people are stupid most of the time. This is less true, but emphatically still true, for me. As a vulture would say, I am above the common herd. However, a scientist, architect, or sportsman would put me firmly in my place as a worm of commonality, as would anyone with any understanding of pop culture, or a moral code. I am useless at such hobbies. But at least I can make rational decisions. That divine autonomy was not bequested to all the human race, nor was it meant to be. We are emotional creatures who like a laugh. What else could explain the rise of Lembit Opik?
You’d have thought Oxford would stamp it out of us. That’s its job. But no. Undergraduates are cocooned in their own worlds. They know about their own subject and maybe, just maybe, about a bit of someone else’s. But beyond that their ignorance is boundless. How can somebody not know (as I have encountered Oxonians not knowing) the date of the Queen’s accession, or the age of the Earth, or what animal Mrs Tiggywinkle was? But they fanny around without even vital knowledge like that. The scale of our ignorance is matched only by the strength of our opinions, and is typically in proportion to them.
A fusilladinous fact-shitter like myself can’t begin to reprehend such ignorance enough. It takes very little time for a person to read random stuff on the internet. They do, in fact. They read sport and celebrity tittle-tattle, and then proceed to belch it out in lewd, pisspoor accusations of snobbery. They are inarticulate but actually right: it is snobbish to hate this sort of culture. One piece of knowledge is as valuable as any other. Katona has just as much a right to be philosophised as Kripke, and has the advantage that we can actually know what we’re talking about. So knowledge can’t be knullified. It’s all about perspective.
Music is the demesene of quite the most abominable race of backside-starers yet bequeathed to Albion. Everyone who’s anyone is a musical snob, and society through breach of moral righteousness has declared this A-OK. It isn’t. I like Rameau a lot, but I also like the Beach Boys. Who am I to put the one above the other? In the same way, whilst I consider the Black Eyed Peas’ lamentable bawling of I Gotta Feeling to be the musical equivalent of a scotch egg, I do not feel it right of me to place myself on a higher moral plane than those who, oafs as they are, consider it tolerable.
Liking one sort of art more than another is a personal not a moral taste. Though some people are small-minded and crass in their artistic choices, that does not make them objectively worse than the rest of us. They are merely ignorant. And as Alan Davies so famously said, if ignorance is bliss, why aren’t there more happy people in the world?
