Janan Ganesh has written in the FT about the trendy nonsense the over-educated often fall for. We have so many graduates these days who’ve got used to academic ways of thinking, he says. This makes them susceptible to quack lifestyles, woke extremes, millennial anti-vax ideas etc. He calls them clever fools.
In contrast, the uneducated rely on tradition and direct experience – or common sense if you like. So they tend not to fall for the kind of claptrap that requires abstraction.
I find this interesting but not convincing. After all, the uneducated do fall for the bunk of populists such as Trump and Johnson. Abstract bunk too, in that it lies beyond the direct experience of the unschooled. The Brexit-related emphasis on sovereignty springs to mind.
And another thing … can you even call a person intellectual if they fall for fashionable nonsense? But hang on now. I mustn’t make the same mistake I’ve criticised in others. I need to practise what I preach and allow that intellectuality can have a negative side.
I must say I didn’t learn abstract thinking at university. I learnt it at school, if anywhere. At university I learnt how to copy down blackboards full of mathematical equations. At school I had a broader curriculum. Ganesh’s notion likely applies more to humanities graduates. Yet at uni I did come into contact with people who valued the life of the mind, and this must have influenced me. The kinds of conversations I had there must have affected me, and so on.
The words common sense used to trigger me as a young adult because I feared I lacked that quality. And my mother would often mention common sense. They may be clever but they have no common sense! she would say of the airy-fairy. She never directed her remarks at me, but I felt the cap fitted.
In one of her books, Jilly Cooper tells the story of a guardsman who acquired his first bank account, aged twenty. The bank sent him a letter telling him he was overdrawn by £50. He panicked and sent them a cheque for £50 in the next post.
I had an element of that guardsman in my make-up at his age. At twenty you have so much to learn about the ways of the world. A shelf-stacker may focus on life skills for want of anything else to think about. The student has incoming stuff about the Uncertainty Principle and differential equations. He may neglect worldly things through lack of bandwidth.
Yet common sense has its limits. Take my own subject: physics. Common sense once said that a dropped boulder will hit the ground sooner than a pebble.
In a physics problem you first identify the relevant law of physics. You then write down the equations and solve them. You don’t try to think it through using common sense. And if the answer goes against common sense then too bad. Common sense struggles to take a lot of variables into account. Can you describe quantum mechanics and relativity in common sense terms? Hardly.
Yet many laymen consider science the gold standard of down-to-earth, respectable, common sense.
And common sense fails in the face of the ultimate questions. Why does anything exist at all? What is consciousness? Science has no answer either since these questions lie beyond its scope.
Some will say that common sense sensibly ignores such questions. Even Bertrand Russell inclined towards that view. If it pains you to think about something beyond a certain point, then don’t think about it. I paraphrase him.
Still, I don’t like thought-taboos – and I guess a lot of other people don’t either. I want to force the common-sense-people to admit that common sense breaks down at some point. Their confident and worldly manner says I have life sorted. But they won’t admit the price they’ve paid: they can’t think about certain topics.
Yet I also have to allow the possibility that they don’t care. They have a thousand more interesting and important things to think about.
Orwell has made an appearance in the quality media lately. A book about his wife that I mentioned in my last post has had some reviews in the papers. Ganesh sees Orwell as a model of plain common sense in his writing. I haven’t read much by Orwell so I’ll have to take his word for that. Anyway, Orwell never attended university. He went straight from Eton to join the Imperial Police in Burma. Later he lived Down and Out in Paris and London.
Now I reckon Orwell should consider himself lucky he didn’t do a science degree. That error would have set him back even further. The literary world he wanted to join can accept a waiter or even a policeman into its ranks. But the scientist can never fit in. A science degree counts as a veritable dis-qualification.
An aristocrat would once marry any foreigner rather than a middle-class English woman. The foreign woman was a blank slate upon which the aristo’s family could write what they pleased. Likewise the arts establishment will attribute artiness to a blank slate of a person. But they won’t grant it to a chemist, for example. Not even if the chemist lives on a council estate. Not even if he’s worked as a waiter. You are over-qualified! as employers sometimes say.
What makes me think this? I have to admit that I extrapolate from my own prejudices – despite my science degree. For me, it even extends to arty types with the wrong sort of personal life. I recently read an autobiography of Andrew Motion and found myself thinking How can this man be a poet? He’s on too many committees! One looks for a misspent youth, affairs, drug-taking, mental illness. Many share this prejudice I suspect. And yet when we examine the life of a novelist or poet we often find introversion. By contrast, the study of their works attracts extroverts.
The above can work in the scientist’s favour when it leads to respect – albeit patronising respect. Auden once said something to the effect that science trumps class distinctions. Even among the class-conscious English. When an eminent scientist holds forth in company his audience listen and defer to him as though he were a Lord.
At the college where I once worked the Principal – an arts man – would give us science teachers an easy ride. He’d leave us to our own devices. Yet he’d find plenty to criticise in his fellow arts colleagues in the English department. I admit he likely also saw the latter as troublemakers – more lefty, rebellious, and so on.
Each side finds it difficult to get the other to give them due respect on the other’s home turf.
The scientist dabbling in the arts feels like an old person talking about youth culture. The oldster may know a great deal and talk the talk, but the youngster will never accept it coming from him. It would upend their worldview. It goes against the injunction to stay in lane.
Or take the reverse case: the novelist dabbling in scientific ideas. Now the scientist finds herself unimpressed. The novelist has done his research but still doesn’t quite get science. He doesn’t understand the importance of maths, let’s say. He doesn’t understand the graft needed or the attention to detail. He’s latched onto the sexy stuff thrown to the public to justify funding.
The artist seems by nature unfocussed. The scientist has to unfocus to fit in – has to drop precision and logic.
Blackthorn 