The Cretinising Influence of Snobbery

Few things have been more pernicious and corrosive in our era than the explosive growth of snobbery. As economic inequality has increased, more people have had the opportunity to look down their noses at others, and have usually taken it.

      If there is any group more toxically insecure than the newly rich, it is the newly middle class. Desperate to cling to status, they despise those whom their grand-parents would have seen as neighbours, though not necessarily as friends. This process has been analysed in a popular book “Chavs – the Demonisation of the Working Class”. Of course, in reality it is the non-working class who have suffered the most. Computers and automation have rendered the services of the less intelligent surplus to requirements, and they have been demoted from working class to drongos and layabouts.

       Social snobbery has multiplied, but its damaging effects are possibly less than those of intellectual snobbery. Purely social snobbery mainly affects what parties people are invited to. It's probably true that it has less effect on occupation than it used to. Few jobs are now reserved exclusively for Oxbridge graduates, or the children of Guards officers. The pervasive intellectual snobbery, on the other hand, has serious effects on important decision-making. Quite often, the two will occur together, and are hard to separate.

       In particular, the perception that the less educated are culturally inferior has affected immigration and unemployment. The chattering classes prefer to employ a foreigner, over one of their own countrymen. It isn't only that foreigners are cheap, though that is a factor. It is also a matter of having contempt for the minds of the lower orders, from whose ranks the contemptuous have so recently sprung. The drunkest of Poles is seen as a better worker than a poorly educated English person. He does not carry uncomfortable associations the way a native poor person does. There but for the grace of God go we, but we don't want to think about it, so push them out of sight. Weirdly, in England it is politically correct to have race hatred for your own race, or at least the lower orders of it.

      Snobbery has had an extremely destructive effect on the arts, in a way which is relatively new. About twenty years ago, I saw a TV interview with Margot Fonteyn, in which she said that her favourite dancers were Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire. It's hard to believe that a contemporary ballerina would say such a thing. The Great Caruso used to perform at the Hippodrome, along with jugglers and the like. Afterward he would enjoy a game of cards with them. Those days are gone. I saw an interview with an orchestral conductor in which he was asked what type of music he preferred. He said that he liked all types of music, and then reeled off a list of subdivisions of classical Western music. It's become fashionable for those in 'high-brow' arts to pretend that popular art simply doesn't exist, or even foreign arts like gamelan or Indian music. In so doing they cut themselves off from much that is brilliant and beautiful, but gain the vast consolation of looking down their noses at the rest of us.

       Intellectual snobbery affects decision-making at the highest level. It distorts the perceptions of and evaluations made by the powerful. Government ministers are prone to this, as they desperately seek 'intellectual respectability'. All such considerations detract from the objective weighing of the merits of an idea. Ironically, this reduces the quality of decisions to the same level of functionality as those of a stupid person. The effect of a lack of objectivity, i.e. the taking of incorrect decisions, is externally indistinguishable from that of a lack of intelligence. All forms of snobbery are cretinising influences, reducing bright people to the same level of effectiveness as oafs.
      For example, if an Army officer promotes a complete twerp to a captaincy, does it matter if he does it because:
   a) He is a nitwit himself, and doesn't know what he's done?
Or because:
   b) The promoted man 's great-grandfather was at the battle of Omdurman, and his sister is married to an equerry?
      The effect will be the same in either case, enhanced casualties.