Thursday, May 31, 2007

The Blair Decade 3: Condescension

The return of Big Brother reminds me of some, probably ancient, Top Gear I saw recently. BB's presenter, Davina McCall, was the 'star in the reasonably priced car'. Clarkson made some scathing remarks about BB, adding that he would never watch it. McCall's response was significant. She accused him of taking no interest in 'popular culture'. What she did not say was, 'You should watch it, it's a great show.' The phrase 'popular culture' is a way of saying, 'I know it's crap, but you can't call my bluff because that would sound elitist and, anyway, some popular culture like The Simpsons is, in fact, high culture.' In other words, Davina was hiding rabid elitism behind a mask of populism. Of course, BB is not only crap, it's vile crap and Davina is not the only elitist responsible. As I pointed out in my article about the betrayals of the boomers, Peter Bazalgette, the power behind the show, is a privileged man - he should be, he is the great great grandson of the great Victorian engineer Joseph Bazalgette who built the Thames Embankment and the sewers that suppressed cholera in London. Joseph saved the working classes from disease; Peter poisons their imaginations to make money. This is, in its most savage and cynical form, the contemporary form of condescension brilliantly described by my friend George Walden in his book The New Elites. The wealthy and well-educated affect populism out of self-interest. Once it was only the preening and condescending Tony Benn that did this, now everybody is at it; it is the only political game in town. As far as the left is concerned, it is, of course, a complete reversal of the postwar aspirations born of the conviction that 'nothing was too good for the working man.' Blair understands this change perfectly. No wonder. His primary task when he took over the Labour Party was to ditch socialism and turn the party into something acceptable to the secular, materialistic, barely-educated masses. Again, as with legalism, it seems to be the case that the cultural trend was in place and all Blair had to do was exploit it. Now the spectacle of privileged people talking, with infinite condescension, about 'popular culture' is so commonplace that it goes unnoticed. This tends to neutralise what energy there actually is in mass art by smothering it with old Etonian middle men and, more seriously, it deepens class divides. That these effects have been so successfully concealed is yet another testament to the political genius of Blair and the commercial talents of the new elites.

8 comments:

  1. Spot on, Bryan. Contempt masquerading as bonhomieness. Or is it bonhomienessness? Feed the people with crap thus making them in a sense 'the masses', with all that word's dehumanising connotations. And then when someone wishes to raise peole to something like their real human state and necessarily points out the evils of the idiot culture/tabloid culture etc, then that person is an elitist. Which was something like the argument used by the Grand Inquisitor to Jesus in the Brothers Karamazov. That the enslavers of mankind were being kind as man wasn't fit for freedom. In the interests of laziness here's a quote used in a Nige thread:
    expounded by the DH Lawrence character, Rampion, in Point Counter Point:
    'The industrialists who purvey standardized ready-made amusements to the masses are doing their best to make you as much of a mechanical imbecile in your leisure as in your hours of work. But don't let them. Make the effort of being human.'

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  2. And your Grand Inquisitor reference, Andrew, is also spot on.

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  3. As usual, I have a comic verse appropriate to the subject.

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  4. You're on to something there, Bryan. There is no doubt that popular culture is equivalent to a form of mass sedation. And Big Brother is one of the stronger sedatives on the market. When heavily sedated, people are easily duped.

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  5. it's strange and repellent how pervasive inverse-snobbery in all its guises has become - people keep telling me i'm classist because i look & sound posh, albeit in a sinister way, and don't dress in an egg-stained wife-beater vest, and because i hate chavs; oh, and apparently i'm 'academic' because i read books and can sometimes spell. i don't harangue people for not reading Kierkegaard, but they feel entitled to harangue me for not watching BB, and then go further & harangue me for reading Kierkegaard.

    At university i had to put up with some old-school snobbery for doing my thesis on Tolkien, which didn't really bother me. i've also had to put with good old-fashioned Tory racism. None of this irritates me as much as the inverse snobbery of neanderthals from Bradford, who failed university but succeeded in the university of hard knocks, who know about 'real life' as opposed to the 'bullshit' in books, etc. etc. etc.

    It's unsettling how our society offers more opportunities for advancement & learning, at the same time as people seem to be less & less interested in anything other than diamond-encrusted ipods and gossip about gilded chavs like Beckham. Laziness really is the prevailing spirit of things now.

    When the War comes, the lazy will perish.

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  6. But tell me, elberry, does dossing around on blogs all day count as 'lazy' or 'busy'?

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  7. it's an energetic kind of laziness, and will stand me in good stead when the chav hordes swarm over the barricades and it's each temp for himself, man versus chav. Then i'll be glad of it.

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  8. I'm kinda puzzled by this one. Big Brother does hold some kind of mirror up to society. Two days ago my wife asked me why Victoria Beckham gets so much press coverage - well, we have a wannabe Posh Spice in the house this time. I also found the Shilpa Shetty incident very revealing, particularly the response to it through our hysterical media. And do we want really more television a la Newsnight Review, with Guardianistas imposing their right-on worldview on us all? Finally, it is usually the good guys that win Big Brother, the kind and sympathetic ones. The public sees that and votes for it. A redeeming feature perhaps?

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