Anti-intellectualism

Common sense: the enemy of reason

Instinct and popular wisdom might butter parsnips, but they don’t design jet engines or cure smallpox

“Some folks set a powerful store by this here eddication, but I tell y’all right here and now that readin’ an’ writin’ an’ cipherin’ ain’t never got no sinners into Heaven yet!” – Evangelical Missouri preacher quoted in Ozark Folk Songs vol IV, ed. Vance Randolph (1949)

We’ve established, over the last few posts, why quite a few folk have “had enough of experts”, and some of the mechanisms by which rationalism is being undermined. One question we haven’t considered is this: who do they want running the show instead? Fine, so you’re anti-intellectual; but what are you pro?

Many don’t seem to have thought that far ahead. All they know is, the technocratic status quo isn’t quite to their liking, and they want it gone pronto, consequences be damned. Leave the EU with no deal! Lock her up!

But abandoning ship in the absence of even a makeshift lifeboat is criminally reckless. That’s why so many Britons are still so passionately opposed to leaving the EU; we haven’t heard any better ideas yet. Wishy-washy promises of a socialist utopia, or a “global-facing Britain”, both entirely dependent on variables over which we have little control, will not do. We want a detailed bloody plan.

Some give off the impression that they just want things to be like they were; before the EU, before all those horrid forriners moved in. But they’re overlooking three things. First, the hardships of life before 1973: lower living standards, labour disputes, moribund industries, high inflation, dwindling resources, diminishing world influence. Second, the rest of the world has moved on; the UK no longer enjoys the democratic, technological or military superiority it once did, and in this dynamic, hyperconnected world, the best way to survive is to maximise your international ties, not sever them.

Third, you can’t just wave a magic wand and undo 46 years of structural change. The UK’s economy is now intricately woven into the EU and the wider world, and if you just rip it out lickety-split, it will, quite simply, stop working.

Only one realistic alternative to technocracy has been proposed, but you won’t find any manifesto spelling out its methods or aims. It exists only in half-lit corners, in fragments of tweets, at the tail end of flip insults.

Kirk versus Spock

Tweet: 'Don't quote that evidence and statistics crap at me' — And, uh, what will you be basing those on then, Mark?

To explain, I’m going to bring in another book (sorry, Brexiters). Thinking Fast and Slow, published in 2011, is a tour-de-force roundup of the work of psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. At the risk of doing Kahneman a disservice, his thesis is essentially that humans have two primary modes of thought: he calls them system 1 and system 2.

System 2 is deliberate, reflective, analytical; it involves focus and application. It’s what we mean when we say we’re “putting our thinking caps on”. We use it to tackle novel or complex problems, to carry out complex calculations, to make long-term plans, and learn skills. Most of its operations take place in the prefrontal cortex, the newest, most uniquely human part of the brain.

System 2 is also creative, original, often brilliant. The catch is, it’s slow – and takes a lot of effort. It monopolises valuable resources (because when you’re focused on one task, you can’t undertake any others). Improvising a speech, writing a play, attacking a mathematical problem: few can sustain these activities for long without a break. As a result, we do all we can to avoid engaging system 2 thought, particularly as we get older.

The good news is, we don’t have to – because we have a spare brain.

System 1 has none of system 2’s hangups. It is quick, bold, almost effortless. It’s what we’re using when we talk about doing something automatically, or “without thinking” (we are thinking, of course – we’re just not conscious of it). What’s more, it’s remarkably good at a vast range of tasks. Estimating distances, locating sources of sounds, pattern recognition, basic arithmetic, completing common phrases. System 1 can even – after lots of practice, for which it is admittedly indebted to system 2 – manage complex functions like playing the piano and flying a plane.

But speed comes at a price. The reason system 1 is so snappy is that it uses a lot of short cuts. Because its functions are centred on the amygdala – one of the oldest parts of the brain, the part we share with lizards – its deductions and decisions are rooted in instinct and emotion rather than reason, and thus can be wildly off the mark.

(If I have one bone to pick with Kahneman’s book, it’s that “system 1 versus system 2” isn’t a terribly memorable opposition. So henceforth, I shall refer to system 1 – the the old-fashioned, impulsive, combative brain – as Kirk, and system 2, the more modern, analytical brain, as Spock.)

Kahneman spends much of his book detailing Kirk’s commonest cockups – the cognitive biases. I’ve covered these in a previous post, but those that crop up most in online discussions are the third-person effect (“My opponent has fallen for lies but I haven’t”), the projection illusion (“Most people act like me, for the same reasons as me”), the slippery slope fallacy (“Soon we’ll all be under sharia law!”), the sunk cost fallacy (“We’ve come this far – we can’t turn back now”) and the availability heuristic (“I’ve seen or read about this behaviour, so it must be everywhere”).

Essentially, humans have two different operating systems, with complementary strengths, suitable for different situations. One is great for getting you through everyday tasks and dire emergencies; the other is better for novel quandaries and counterintuitive problems.

As fascinating and rigorous as Kahneman’s book is, it is, in a way, just a restatement of an age-old theory. Ideas about the duality of mind date back at least to the concepts of chokhmah and binah in the 13th century and run on through instinct and reason, conscious and subconscious, to id and superego.

So what’s all this psychobabble got to do with the common fisheries policy? Look back at the description of Spock thinking. Reading, problem-solving, creative solutions, learning: it’s basically the operating manual for an intellectual.

Academics, experts and their ilk don’t only use this mode of thought. We all have access to both Kirk and Spock; they are what makes us human. What differentiates one person from another is not their access to these systems, but the frequency and efficiency with which they use them. Genetics may play a part, but there’s little doubt that education is a decisive factor.

People who have read more widely, who have studied to a higher level, travelled more widely, mastered a skill like a language or a musical instrument, or spent more time solving problems or creating things, are more likely to have a well-developed Spock brain, and to use it in a wider range of circumstances.

Meanwhile, those who aren’t so in touch with their Spock side – because they didn’t go to university, or learn a language – prefer, wherever possible, to stick to Kirk.

“As popular democracy gained strength and confidence, it reinforced the widespread belief in the superiority of inborn, intuitive, folkish wisdom over the cultivated, oversophisticated, and self-interested knowledge of the literati and the well-to-do” – Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life

Just plain folks

Tweet: 'Donald Trump's genius is that anyone can understand him' — Trump. Genius. Let’s see if that makes his Britannica entry.

One of the crucial factors in Donald Trump’s appeal seems to be his gift – in the eyes of just enough American voters – for “telling it like it is”. An exit poll taken during the South Carolina Republican primary, for example, reported that 78% of those who rated “tells it like it is” as the top quality in a candidate planned to vote for Trump.

For non-Trump supporters, this is flabbergasting. Few of us could name anyone who tells it less like it is. It’s a documented fact that Trump has told an average of six lies for each day of his presidency. So what do they mean by this?

I think what they love about Trump is not his laser accuracy or his staggering genius, but his simplicity. He tells it not like it is, but like they wish it was, breaking every problem down into a formula so basic that they can absorb it without breaking sweat.

Kahneman might translate thus: “Donald Trump speaks to me in my language. He offers solutions simple enough for me to understand without effort, in words simple enough for me to understand without effort.” In other words, this is a Kirk-dominant brain communicating in a way that is perfectly clear to other Kirk-dominant brains. And the language it is using is common sense.

Common sense. The rallying cry rings out again and again and again across tabloid editorials and the social media battlefield.

$Tweet: 'No facts needed, just common sense\$ Their passion is not wholly misplaced. As we’ve seen, the system 1 brain, honed over millennia, is a perfectly good remedy to many problems. You sure as hell don’t want to be hanging around engaging your Spock when there’s a rock hurtling straight at your head.

But in the wrong situations, common sense is poison. Its ingrained cognitive biases make nuance and compromise impossible. Kirk is abysmal at performing cost-benefit analyses and hopeless at planning for the long term. While going with your gut might serve you well in a live combat situation or on a frenetic trading floor, it’s a downright liability when it comes to negotiating intricate trade deals, eliminating terrorism, or persuading a rogue state to abandon its nuclear research programme.

When confronted with unfamiliar problems, ones that Kirk is not best equipped to deal with, lizard-brains react in one of three ways: fight, flight, or give up.

The first two are apparent in just about every one of Donald Trump’s policy decisions. Drain the swamp (fight). Build the wall (flight). Lock her up (bit of both). And 99% of his Twitter diplomacy consists of hamfisted playground insults and threats. The man is literally incapable of a measured response.

The third reaction is interesting.

Armchair critics

One of the things that has struck me most during my online interactions with Brexiters is how little work they are prepared to put in. Few lifted a finger or eyelid to inform themselves about the pros and cons of EU membership before the referendum, and the number has scarcely been augmented since. When responding to statements they disagree with, they seldom elaborate beyond “You’re wrong”, “Bollocks”, “Nonsense” or “Yawn”. If you send them a link to an article to back up your point, they rarely click on it, and when they do, they don’t read past the headline.

As for creative phraseology, forget it. They talk almost exclusively in clichés and slogans, and their “arguments” are all ripped verbatim from Farage or the Express. This is why it’s sometimes so hard to distinguish Brexiters from bots.

Tempting as it is to write off all diehard Brexit and Trump voters as stupid, that might be an oversimplification. My theory is that because their Spock brains are less developed, analytical thinking is even harder for them than it is for the rest of us, and so they’re even more likely to avoid it. They just prefer to use their Kirk, even when it’s clearly not the right equipment for the job. They’re not dumb, necessarily; just intellectually lazy.

Revenge of the pointyheads

Many people still seem to revere common sense as an unalloyed good, a panacea. It is not. Different operations call for different tools, and Kirk is painfully limited in scope. (For a good summary, read this.)

Common sense dictates* that you should run away from a bear. Don’t; you’ll die. Common sense dictates that you should throw water on an electrical fire. Don’t; you’ll die. Common sense dictates that you are safer with a close family member than with a stranger. You’re not. Common sense dictates that letting your anger out is good for you, that time passes at the same rate for everyone, regardless of velocity, that you can ascertain both the speed and location of an electron at any one time. Common sense dictates that you do not inject someone with a mild strain of a disease in order to prevent them from contracting a potentially fatal type.

(*Telling little phrase, that. Reason doesn’t dictate anything; it simply states.)

Common sense was all very well when humans scavenged on the savannah, and it served most of us adequately until quite recently. But it has always been our ability to reason that separated us from the animals, allowing us to create, to hypothesise, to codify, to pass on knowledge and, crucially, to specialise.

Common sense has had millions of years to eliminate war, terrorism, poverty, disease and famine, and it has failed miserably. It’s only since the Enlightenment broke its chokehold that humanity has begun to address those issues. And in this insanely complex modern age, when the amount of knowledge required for society to function is a thousandfold greater than any one person could hope to take in, the need for uncommon sense – ie, experts – is greater than ever.

The historical trend is undeniable: slowly but surely, Spock thinking is displacing Kirk, correcting its cognitive biases and giving us more effective solutions to our problems. Advances in medical science, the steady increase in the standard of living, the lengthening human lifespan and the gradual decrease in the rate of violent crime are all testament to this.

Now, perhaps resentful of this encroachment on their territory, the lazy lizard-brains have reared up. In a campaign unlikely to be of their own devising – I’ll save the speculation as to who might be responsible for my next post – they are sidelining, shouting down and smearing voices of reason at every turn.

It’s time to return fire. But I’m not suggesting that we try to eradicate common sense. We can’t – it’s an inalienable part of our makeup. But we do need to dispel this pernicious notion that gut feeling is the answer to everything; to escort Kirk out of the delicate galactic peace negotiations, pack him off to some distant planet with lots of slimy aliens to punch and green-skinned women to boink, and let Spock handle the tricky stuff.

Caller to James O’Brien’s LBC radio show: “I’m just an ordinary, common-sense mum … who believes that Britain framed Russia for the Salisbury poisoning”

Thanks, Lu.

Laziness, envy and fear: the handmaidens of Brexit

Fearful people want swift, simple solutions – and woe betide any pointy-headed intellectual who gets in the way with pleas for calm or evidence

Over the last two years, there have been more attempted explanations of Brexit and Trump than there have been leaders of Ukip. It was racism; it was the Russians; it was a longing for simpler times; the dumbing-down of culture; the echo chambers of social media; a collective brain fart. And all those things doubtless played a part.

But since it’s the alarming new wave of anti-intellectualism – the collapse of faith in expertise – that has enabled both these developments, it might be productive to consider how we’ve suddenly arrived in a world where knowledge is seen as a shortcoming and “I’m no expert” is practically a boast.

History tells us that surges in populism like the one we’re experiencing generally follow periods of economic strife. But while times may be tough by modern standards, our privations are nothing next to the hardship of the 1930s, 50s, or even the 70s (yet). Cashflow can’t be the sole cause.

I’ve already written about the evolution of language and culture to paint an ever darker picture of intellectuals; but as I said, those are as much symptoms as causes of the new climate.

Why, at an individual level, did people vote for Brexit and Trump? What have intellectuals and liberals done to deserve the sudden scorn of the masses? To my mind, there are three main factors.

Envy

It’s hard to escape the feeling that some of the people who voted for Brexit and Trump did so out of sheer spite. Having not, perhaps, achieved the station in life they feel they deserve, they are beside themselves at the notion that others might have found relative happiness. Their pain is all the more acute for being at least partly self-inflicted. They’re haunted by the suspicion that if, at school, instead of flicking bogies at the ginger kid who finished top in the spelling test, they had applied themselves, or if, in their first grown-up job, they’d thrown sickies less than once a fortnight, they too might have finished a little higher up the field.

Tweet: "Glad it's hurting" — How to persuade Remainers to get behind Brexit.

Others’ grievances have a little more substance. After all, the world is plainly full of high-flyers who haven’t earned their wings. Too many people have got where they are by cheating, or through nepotism, the old boys’ network, or dumb luck. And those who have put in the graft are often rewarded out of all proportion with their efforts. I’m sure running Lloyds Bank is no cakewalk, but is António Horta Osório’s contribution really worth £8m a year? Mark Zuckerberg may have sweated blood building Facebook, and his social network brings pleasure to millions (when not furiously fucking them in the arse), but is $65bn really a commensurate prize when talented, dedicated nurses and firefighters are topping up their weekly shop at the food bank?

We’ve reached a point where the top dogs have a bigger share of the Winalot than ever before. What’s more, the inequality has never been more glaring: it’s rubbed in our faces daily on reality TV shows, newspaper and magazine front pages, advertising billboards and Instagram.

But the perception that all people keeping their heads above water are similarly undeserving is grossly unfair to those who started without any advantage – and particularly so to intellectuals, such as writers and academics, who on the whole have it a lot less cushy than is widely believed.

Laziness

“Nothing has more retarded the advancement of learning than the disposition of vulgar minds to ridicule and vilify what they cannot comprehend” – Samuel Johnson

Far too many Britons – and I include Remain voters here – voted in the EU referendum in ignorance. I’m constantly astonished at the number of people with a tenuous grasp of the issues involved, even almost two years after the decision. The majority seem to have voted with heart rather than head, without taking the time to find out if there was any truth to the tabloid stories about Brussels bureaucracy, or how deeply integrated the UK’s economy is with the EU. I don’t think some of them even read the fucking bus.

There are a couple of reasons for this. First, I don’t think many people really believed their vote would count. Both sides were expecting a walkover for Remain (so much so that many plumped for the “Give Cameron a bloody nose” option, believing that it wouldn’t tip the balance). Why bother doing your homework when your vote won’t matter anyway?

Second, many people are not accustomed – or can’t be bothered – to take in complex information. They’ve got more important, or more interesting things to think about than what James Thurber called the “clanguorous, complicated fact”. Going through the minutiae is someone else’s job.

Indeed, that’s exactly how things work in a representative democracy, our usual system of government. Since we don’t have the time to do all the research required, we elect councillors and mayors and MPs, who then, with the help of expert advisors (we hope), make decisions on our behalf. But when it comes to referendums – the purest, most direct form of democracy – those crutches fall away. You’re the expert now. At least, you should be.

What’s more worrying is that some of the representatives we elect to make decisions for us think exactly the same way.

Nadine Dorries (MP!) came in for a lot of stick for her assertion that the vote to leave the EU was correct because international trade was too complex for her to understand, but she deserved it all and more. This is one of our supposed leaders, giving up on a matter of paramount importance just because it made her head hurt. If we all followed Dorries’ logic, humankind would have given up long ago on space flight, curing polio, powering our homes, building viaducts, developing antibiotics, compiling the English dictionary and mapping the globe.

A few months later, another Tory MP made a similarly unedifying contribution to the public debate.

To label this behaviour “stupidity” is to give Dorries and Fysh too much credit. What they are guilty of here is intellectual laziness; they’re not too dumb to understand international trade. They just can’t be arsed.

This pattern is repeated thousands of times a day, in pubs, in the comments under online news articles, and on social media. Attempt to explain a point in any detail at all and you’re greeted with a “Yawn”. Boring. Tell me something simple that makes my tummy feel fuzzy instead, like how all Muslims are paedophiles.

It’s hard to pin down what’s turning us all into Homer Simpson, but there’s little doubt that in this era of tweets and vines and all-round instant gratification, attention spans and patience are declining. In 1982, 57% of US citizens had read at least one novel, play or poem in the previous year. By 2015, that had fallen to 43%. In the UK, only 40% of children now read beyond what they are obliged to at school.

Probably the scariest study in this area was carried out by Kiku Adatto of Harvard University. She found that in 1968, the average quotation from a presidential candidate used in TV news lasted 42.3 seconds; by 1988, the duration had fallen to 9.8 seconds. In 2000, according to a later paper, it stood at 7.8 seconds. Donald Trump’s rousing battle cries – “Make America great again”, “Build the wall”, “Lock her up”, “Drain the swamp” – come in at an average of 1.3. You can’t solve complex problems like crime and unemployment and terrorism with 1.3-second soundbites. But people, it seems, aren’t willing to listen for any longer.

(I’ll go into this in more detail in my next post. If you want to do some prep in advance, I recommend that you go out and buy Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast And Slow. Even if you don’t intend to read the next post, you won’t regret it.)

Fear

Four years before the referendum, no one, beyond a handful of cryogenically frozen Tories and fanatical racists, cared much either way about the UK’s membership of the EU, probably because it had no readily measurable effect on their everyday lives. In a survey carried out at the end of 2012, just 2% of respondents said the EU and Europe were the most important issues facing Britain. But by June 2016, millions of people had suddenly become raving Europhobes. What happened?

The last great wave of populism in the 1950s occurred at a time of unprecedented flux. Millions had lost loved ones in the second world war, food and money were scarce, and the world was cowering under the threat of nuclear armageddon. Technology was advancing at a dizzying pace: newfangled gadgets from TVs to phones, from freezers to food mixers, transformed homes beyond recognition in a matter of years. Cultural change was not lagging far behind, thanks to contraception, vaccination, postwar immigration, and the more prominent role in public life played by women.

For many people, change engenders fear. We prefer to stick to familiar things and routines because they don’t require mental effort and we know from experience that they won’t kill us. Too much innovation too fast sends their primal instincts into overdrive. The calmer, more rational part of the brain is cut off. They want swift and simple solutions to their problems, and woe betide any “pointy-headed professors” who get in their way with pleas for calm or evidence.

Change-induced fear, I believe, was also a decisive factor in 2016. Immigration, sexual liberation, WhatsApp, gay marriage, wind farms, Amazon, contactless payments, self-driving cars: the scale and pace of innovation can be bewildering even to young, plastic minds.

Few of these things, however, are threatening in and of themselves. On a day-to-day basis, most of them can be mastered, or avoided, easily enough. But the crucial point here is not the change itself; it’s the perception of change.

Each and every one of the Remain camp’s warnings about the likely dangers of leaving the EU was airily dismissed with a cry of “Project Fear!”. But the other side was even more adept at peddling dread. “Turkey is joining the EU!”; “The EU is becoming a superstate!”; “The EU wants to form an army!”; “The EU’s share of world trade is shrinking”.

After 30 years of relentless Brussels-bashing by the tabloids, the Vote Leave campaign, with the forensic assistance of psyops firm Cambridge Analytica, weighed in with a bumper anthology of horror stories. Online, an army of trolls sputtered out every tale they could find, true or false, about terrorists and feminists and Muslim rape gangs and fucking Easter eggs. While the streets were notable for the absence of upheaval, the gutter press and gutter politicians successfully forged the narrative that the British and American ways of life – and particularly the white male way of life – were under immediate threat. To deliver their message more effectively, they used deliberately emotive language: when the likes of Katie Hopkins deploys the words “swamped”, “infestation” and “cockroaches”, she does so knowing full well which part of the brain she is poking at.

Those who did not take the time, or did not possess the critical faculties, to question what they read went into fight-or-flight mode. Few could point to any direct personal experience of the danger posed by immigrants or the European Union or Barack Obama, but they had been told that they were a threat. The papers said so. My friend on Facebook shared a meme saying so. Simple, swift solutions.

And so they gobbled up the vacuous, undeliverable slogans. And they voted for Brexit and Trump.

I have a couple more things to say about this, and then I’m going to take a bit of a break and write a hit romcom and retire to fucking Lanzarote. Brexit permitting.

Poisoning the well-educated: how the far right are waging war on knowledge

The demagogues can’t win the debate with intellectuals, so instead, they’re trying every trick in the book to shut it down

The western world is some way from being a technocracy. But there is no doubt in my mind that those sectors that are run on the basis of expertise – the judiciary, the civil service, academia, the creative sector – are under ferocious attack.

Intellectuals, however, are no pushovers, because – well, they’re bright, and they usually hold influence and power. When ideologues face experts on a level playing field, they tend to have their arses handed to them – see the epic owning of alt-right bilemonger Paul Joseph Watson by teacher Mike Stuchbery over the question of racial diversity in Roman Britain. So if a fair fight is out, how is this war being prosecuted?

Wherever possible, extreme rightwingers steer clear of direct confrontations. Jeremy Hunt declines Ralf Little’s offer of a live debate about mental health provision; Chris Grayling refuses to appear on a radio chat show with Andrew Adonis.

They’re assisted in this by the dumbed-down clickbait culture that’s consuming our media. The coverage of science in most newspapers these days is woeful: research findings are published without caveat, rebuttals added too late, if at all. And on news programmes, it’s increasingly rare to see a genuine expert consulted on any issue of note. You can understand why: academics can be a little dry and stuffy, their arguments detailed, nuanced, full of ifs and buts.

Watch the BBC or Sky next time there’s a debate about gun control: guaranteed, there’ll be someone from the NRA, spouting the usual inflammatory bilge, and as a counterpoint, if you’re lucky, you might get the relative of a shooting victim. They don’t want people who know about guns; they want people who care about guns (and who generally add little of substance to the debate). Similarly, in any discussion about the EU, do the producers summon a professor of European history or an economics journalist? Good God no, haul in a rabid Remainer and a batshit Brexiter and watch the sparks fly!

This sidelining of rational voices is even easier on Twitter, where Brexiters can obliterate all those who post inconvenient truths with a tap of the block button.

If a showdown with someone who knows their stuff is unavoidable, far right-demagogues have several ploys. The crassest is simply to prevent their opponent from getting a word in edgeways, as Nigel Farage did to Femi Oluwole on his LBC show, and Julia Hartley-Brewer to Heidi Alexander on Talk Radio. It seems the freedom of speech they profess to hold so dear only matters when it’s theirs.

Another part of their arsenal is the logical fallacy. I don’t want to regurgitate my entire post on the subject here, but to recap, they’re non-arguments masquerading as arguments – underhanded attempts to deflect or reframe the debate, or throw the opponent off balance, rather than address the topic at hand. The ones you’ll come across the most are the argumentum ad populum (“17.4 million people can’t be wrong”), the false dichotomy (“You’re either for freedom of speech or against it”), the appeal to emotion (any tweet by Daniel Hannan), tu quoque or whataboutery (“But Hillary’s emails”), tone policing (“Typical condescending Remoaner”), and Boris Johnson’s favourite toy, the straw man (“So what you’re saying is …”).

But the populist’s standard-issue weapon is the ad hominem: the personal attack. Play the man and not the ball, and hopefully you can forget about the ball.

I’ve written before, too, about the revival of the art of the smear. Essentially, Leave and Trump advocates, like fascists throughout history, love to sling mud. In logic speak, this is known as poisoning the well: an attempt to discredit the target such that people will no longer believe or trust them. Thus, no matter how wise their words today, Tony Blair (Iraq), Nick Clegg (tuition fees), Tim Farron (homophobia), Hillary Clinton (crooked, although no one has yet produced any evidence to support this assertion) and Jeremy Corbyn (IRA, Palestine) can, in some eyes, never be taken seriously again.

(The reason ad hominem works, of course, is that it is not entirely without foundation. Some people or publications are habitual liars or fools and, if shown to have been so often enough, probably should be ignored. Into this category fall most of the UK tabloids, Fox News, Hannan and many of his Brexit conspirators, and most of the alt-right – but also plenty on the far left. Generally speaking, however, people should not be permanently written off on the basis of one or two lapses of judgment.)

Intellectuals – and for the purposes of this section we can scale right down to passably intelligent liberals debating on Twitter – represent a particular challenge for the ad hominist. They don’t tend to be well-known, so their every past mistake and foible is not in the public domain. Populists will still take every opportunity to play the man rather than his argument, but where that’s made difficult (eg by the anonymity conferred by the internet), they’ll go after his sources, or his motives, instead. And in my experience, they tend to do so in one of six ways.

1) Fallible

You may have more information than me, but you were wrong once before, so you may be wrong now.

The argument that someone’s opinion shouldn’t be trusted because she doesn’t have a 100% record in her field is idiotic, but it’s one that’s trotted out with tiresome regularity, most often, in the context of Brexit, in respect of economists.

Yes, they goofed up once. (Or rather, a different group of economists did; that was 10 years ago.) But those economists were appointed to their jobs over thousands of hugely qualified rivals. If they weren’t generally good at their jobs, they’d have lost them long ago. They’re still far more likely to make accurate forecasts about the UK’s future outside the EU than Kev from Castle Point.

Say you find out the cardiac surgeon who’s going to perform open-heart surgery on you lost his last patient. Would you rather he operated on you, or a bricklayer? Someone’s past failings have no bearing on the credibility of their statement today.

2) Biased!

You may have information, but that information comes from a compromised source.

The word “biased” is tossed around by arch-Brexiters almost as freely as “democracy” and “Get over it”, and yet it’s far from clear whether they know what it means.

Bias is not a synonym for preference. You can prefer something to something else instinctively, or having considered both options carefully. “Bias” specifically means a predisposition to like or dislike something because you have a stake in the matter. I’m not biased against wasps; I’ve just weighed up the pros and cons of wasps and concluded, as I imagine most have, that they are a bad thing. If I argue that 1 + 1 = 2 and you argue that 1 + 1 = 3, I’m not biased towards the result 2. I’m just right.

Similarly, I don’t have a holiday home in Florence and I don’t have a crush on my Latvian barista. I have no vested interest in the future of the EU. I’ve just researched the issue, calculated the likely fortunes of my country within and without it, and decided, overwhelmingly, that within is better.

More commonly, this accusation is levelled at any source you use to back up your claims. There’s more justification for this – after all, the Mail, Express, the Canary, and fake news sites like Westmonster, Breitbart and Infowars are notorious for their partisan views and casual relationship with the truth. But a number of other news providers – the “mainstream media” – are also regularly rubbished.

There’s a lot of contempt for the Guardian, for example (mostly from people who haven’t opened it since 1981). Sure, it probably has more commentators from the left of the political landscape than the right, although most are tepidly centrist these days. But it provides a forum for voices from across the spectrum. It follows due journalistic process: it names its sources where possible, and allows those mentioned in its stories a right of reply. It has subeditors and lawyers and its staff routinely discuss the most balanced way to word headlines. On the whole, it uses neutral language in its news pieces, with minimal value judgments. It keeps its news reports separate from its opinion pieces. And above all, it is accountable to its readership, to its own ombudsman, and to the wider public. It responds to all complaints, and when it is incorrect, it publishes retractions and apologies.

The likes of Infowars, Fox News and the Express, meanwhile, are bound by no such constraints. They publish only stories that promote their narrow, ultra-right conservative agenda. News and opinion are an inseparable morass: their stories tell you not just what happened, but exactly what you should think about it.

Crucially, the established free press doesn’t routinely make shit up. Yes, it makes mistakes, and yes, it has been known to put a mild spin on things; but it doesn’t falsify footage, invent quotes, misidentify pictures, or blatantly publish provable falsehoods.

So next time someone plays the “MSM” card, stand your ground. Ask them: “What’s that got to do with anything? The BBC/Guardian is the fourth/seventh most trusted news source in America. (Fox News is 29th.) Which specific details of the report I linked to are wrong?”

3) Brainwashed!

Yes, you have more information than me, but it is false information imparted to you by another. You are a dupe; a stooge.

I love it when Brexiters pull the pin on this one. “You’ve been brainwashed into loving the EU.” As if, through some preposterous sequence of accidents, I had only ever been exposed to pro-EU messages. And it really would have to be preposterous: most of the tabloids (and the Telegraph) have printed nothing but negative stories about Brussels for decades; the quality papers, meanwhile, never said much positive about it because – well, come on, European politics. (If the EU really is a dictatorship, it must surely go down as the dullest in history.)

The circulations of the Guardian and Independent, the only unabashedly pro-EU papers left, are, as the right never tires of pointing out, dwindling rapidly. Personally, I can barely recall coming across any positive messages about the EU, even from the Remain campaign during the referendum. Am I missing something? Euro-conversion booths on our high streets, perhaps? The only real advertisement I ever saw for the EU (before I went looking for information) were EU citizens themselves – valued contributors to our economy and our culture, to whom I cannot apologise enough for the shitstorm Brexit has visited upon them – and the general impression that the country was more prosperous and culturally rich than when I was a boy.

Perhaps sensing the absurdity of that argument, some Brexiters shift the blame to an institution that, to them, is shrouded in mystery: university. Our places of higher learning, some seem to believe, are hotbeds of communism, cranking out rows of malodorous, long-haired men and short-haired women who love immigrants and homosexuals and quinoa and hate white people and Britain and America.

If any of these deluded souls had ever been within a country mile of a campus, they’d know the truth was more mundane. With the exception of the politics faculty and the student union offices, universities are not especially political places. Some right-on loon might make the news every few weeks with a call to ban music from campus because it’s discriminatory against deaf people, but most courses don’t even touch on politics (students of history and the social sciences make up 8% of the corpus) and membership of political groups is low. Most students aged 18-21, like most non-students aged 18-21, are more interested in beer, sport and sex than they are in social welfare budgets or the privatisation of the Land Registry.

Besides, how the hell is this monumental operation being conducted? Are there posters on every wall depicting a smiling Jean-Claude Juncker with the slogan, “Your country needs EU?” Is Ode To Joy piped into student halls of residence while they sleep? Are the student union canteen lunches laced with brie?

If there were some sort of conspiracy to indoctrinate western students in leftist ideas, you’d think someone would have produced some definitive proof. But 49% of Britain’s young people go into higher education. That’s half a million people a year. Surely one of them – or a rogue lecturer, or cleaner – would have recorded some footage on their mobile by now?

There’s a far simpler explanation for young people’s attachment to the EU: their minds are more idealistic, more plastic, more open to new ideas. In addition, university teaches them to think critically, and introduces them to people from a far more diverse range of backgrounds than they were exposed to at home. It’s not the current education system that makes people liberal; it is education itself.

And ask yourself this. Who is more susceptible to brainwashing: the person with at least three years’ extra education, who has been trained to question and critique everything she reads; or the person who never once raised his hand in 10 years of school?

4) Bribed!

You may have information, but it is information that you have been paid to disseminate.

We’re fully into wackjob territory now. I know George Soros is rich, but to fund every Remain vote and leaflet and march and pro-Remain MP and academic and research paper and CEO and judge and economist, and keep it all a secret … You know what? If that did turn out to be the case, I’d remain a Remainer, because I’d want to be on that man’s side.

5) Brideshead

You may have information, but it is esoteric information, irrelevant to everyday life.

Alongside the soap-dodging, sickle-wielding snowflake, another university stereotype stubbornly persists: of Rupert and Sebastian, foppish, entitled aristocrats lounging louchely in their double set while Mrs Miggins meekly serves them tiffin and opium. Entitled, effeminate, with alabaster hands that have never been in the same room as a screwdriver, they can solve complex equations or recite passages of poetry or critique Leibniz’s theory of monads, but when it comes to the business of getting by in life, they’re all at sea. And yet, on graduation, Daddy will fix them up with a cushy number in the civil service or on the board of a big bank.

This, I think, is the image the tabloids are trying to conjure up when they use phrases like “out of touch” and “elite” (the American equivalent seems to be “coastal elite”). They’re trying to foster this idea that students (and academics, judges, civil servants, and anyone else who may have touched a book by someone other than Danielle Steel or Andy McNab) are sheltered from hard reality and therefore unqualified to speak on real-world issues.

Loath as I am to break the devastating news to you, Brexit fans, things have moved on a lick since the 1930s. Ninety per cent of UK students are now from state schools. Daddy’s more likely to be a bookie than a landed gent. And contrary to your belief, the laws of the universe apply as much at university as they do in the “real world”. You still have to work hard, you still have to pay your way – most undergraduates now do regular temporary work on top of their full-time course – and the social competition from your peers is, if anything, more intense. All that, plus the crushing spectre of tens of thousands of pounds of debt hanging over you, and no guarantee of a job at the end of it. Small wonder that suicides among students have doubled in the last decade.

A greater number of students than ever are studying hard vocational subjects, in science, IT, agriculture and journalism, with clearly defined careers at the end of them. In any case, education isn’t about what you learn. It’s about how you learn, how to develop a curiosity about the world, how to question and understand and predict and follow chains of logic.

Besides, if people are so implacably opposed to a pampered, nepotistic elite, they’ve chosen a decidedly odd bunch of champions to rid themselves of the scourge. Jacob Rees-Mogg (Eton and Oxford), Daniel Hannan (Marlborough and Oxford) and Boris Johnson (Eton and Oxford); and in the US, Donald Trump (wealthy businessman), Steve Bannon (Goldman Sachs financier and media executive) and Reince Priebus (corporate lawyer).

6) Boring!/Bollocks!/Bullshit!

You may have information, but it is … bollocks. Because I say so.

Probably the most common responses from Brexit fanatics to any point I make, or any post I write, are one-word answers: “Rubbish”, “Nonsense”, “Bullshit”, “Bollocks”. They go silent when you ask them to elaborate. I can’t begin to imagine why.

So much, then, for the strategy behind the war on intellectuals. In my next post, I’ll look at the war aims.

Meep-meep to MAGA: how Road Runner paved the way for Trump

Is it any surprise that kids don’t want to learn when the learned are routinely portrayed as asexual, autistic archvillains?

So what is driving this new climate of distrust, bordering on outright hostility, towards people who think?

History shows us that populist surges generally follow periods of economic hardship, war, or both. We all know what happened in the 1930s after the Great Depression, but a similar pattern of events can be seen in the rise of Andrew Jackson after the downturn of the 1820s and in the aftermath of World War Two. As discontent grows, so does anger towards those in charge – whether they are responsible or not – and clever folk are usually part of that establishment. The time is ripe for other interest groups, usually those who have been sidelined from power, to step in and widen the cracks.

And there are always plenty of such candidates in the wings. As Richard Hofstadter notes, the impetus for anti-intellectual movements usually comes from one of three directions: big business, which rarely appreciates transparency; the church, whose very existence is threatened by concepts such as reason and evidence; and the nationalist right wing, which depends heavily on misinformation to get its message across.

These people aren’t exactly pushing at a locked door. The latent scorn for experts among the inexpert population is never far below the surface.

There’s one area that Hofstadter conspicuously glosses over in his analysis: culture. And yet for the most illuminating insights into a society, it helps to look at its fictions as well as its facts. Hence this post.

In western culture, real men don’t think. (It should become obvious in a few paragraphs why I’m only talking about men here.)

From the oldest folk tales to the latest TV shows, the heroes of British and American stories have overwhelmingly been men of action rather than people of learning: King Arthur. Robin Hood. Flashman. Hornblower. Jack Aubrey. Sharpe. Tarzan. Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers and virtually every comic-book character. Dick Barton. Dan Dare. Biggles. Bond. Roy of the Rovers. Starsky and Hutch … Men of courage, men of heart, honourable and true, but none of them likely to appreciate a subscription to the London Review of Books.

They are brave to the point of recklessness; chisel-jawed, dimple-chinned, gung-ho, love their mothers, love their country. They’ve rarely spent any time acquiring any of their prodigious skills; they’re just born that way. And usually, to be frank, they’re titanically dull, relying on quirky sidekicks for any entertainment beyond the thud of fist on jaw.

They might be possessed of a certain resourcefulness, a dry wit or cunning, but they are never learned men. They’re the first person you want to call when trouble breaks out – but the last you’d want on your Only Connect team.

More recently, Anglo-American culture has thrown up a second type of hero: the lovable rogue. In this category you have Molesworth, Just William, Bertie Wooster, Dennis the Menace, Minnie the Minx, Del Boy, Arthur Daley, Norman Stanley Fletcher, Homer Simpson. These characters aren’t just ambivalent about intellectual enrichment; they’re actively averse to it. They too survive on native wit and luck rather than on any insights they might have picked up by study or observation.

In terms of popular protagonists with actual brains, all I could come up with (after an admittedly cursory thunk) was Doctor Who and Iron Man. I’m discounting detectives – Holmes, Marlowe, Marple, Morse, Columbo – as brains are kind of the sine qua non in a crime solver.

(It’s perhaps worth noting that both Tony Stark and the Time Lord come to us as fully formed geniuses. Their brilliance is cool only because it is effortless. Stark magically knows everything despite spending his every spare moment partying and banging hot chicks, and the Doctor is an alien who picked up his magisterial knowledge before we met him. While you can bet a pound to a penny that any film about sporting prowess will feature at least one montage showing our hero training earnestly for the Big Match or Fight, cerebral heroes are never shown putting in the unglamorous work that got them where they are.)

There seem to be two roles reserved for bright characters in western fiction. The most common is socially inadequate, undersexed oddball sidekick: Willow from Buffy, Mr Spock*, Flash Gordon’s Dr Zarkov, Dan Dare’s Professor Peabody, Hermione from Harry Potter, Thunderbirds’ Brains – so narrowly defined by his mental acuity that he’s never given a real name – and Bond’s Q. While the hero kicks butt and pumps booty, these poor souls toil thanklessly in the shadows, emerging only to deliver their (often crucial) findings when the hero requires them.
* Thankfully, The Next Generation flipped the Kirk-Spock dynamic with Picard and Riker.

The other part the genius regularly gets to play, of course, is the bad guy. Dr Frankenstein, the archetypal mad scientist. Bond’s various evil-genius enemies. Dennis the Menace’s nemesis, Walter the Softy. The Mekon. The Bash Street Kids’ Cuthbert Cringeworthy. Street-smart Will Smith’s preppy punchbag cousin Carlton in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. None of these are helpful depictions for academics who are mostly trying to make the world a better place.

So far, so depressing. To my mind, there are two fictional universes in particular that encapsulate society’s unhealthy attitude towards its brainboxes.

The Looney Tunes cartoons featuring Wile E Coyote and the Road Runner, which initially ran from 1949 to 1966, were a straight-up battle between ingenuity and common sense, between artifice and natural ability. And who wins out every time? Wile E Coyote’s ingenious traps, courtesy of the Acme corporation, always end up blowing up in his face, while a combination of raw speed and luck allows the Road Runner to live to meep another day.

Intentional or not, the message is hammered home as surely as Wile E’s skull is pounded into the Arizona dust: instinct trumps science every time. Those with ideas above their station will pay the price for their arrogance; far better to accept your natural place and your natural gifts. The coyote, as the rightwingers and religious nuts see it, would have more luck if he just used his God-given animal instincts.

Hulk comic issue 1 — Sorry, Bruce. We need the big guy.

Then, in 1962, a character came along who distilled the brain/brawn dichotomy into a single body. Under normal circumstances, he’s Bruce Banner: a (supposedly) brilliant scientist, but weedy, emotionally distant, indecisive, ineffectual. But subject Bruce to stress, and he undergoes a priapic transformation into the Hulk: an unstoppable, unkillable powerhouse of limitless strength who’s barely able to form a sentence. Sure, Banner can recalibrate your mass spectrometer or fix the frizz on your TV, but if when the real shit goes down, there’s only one guy you want around. Once again, the primal, “natural” persona wins out over the modern, reflective soul.

There’s been precious little to counter this narrative. Sure, the cerebrally unchallenged have mounted mini-fightbacks in the films of John Hughes (The Breakfast Club, Weird Science) and more recently under the direction of Judd Apatow, and the words “geek” and “nerd” have been somewhat reclaimed, thanks in part to the terrifying success of the Silicon Valley tech elite. But even today, the stereotypical image of the educated person is of a friendless introvert who, while gifted in one department, can’t win an arm-wrestle, change a lightbulb, or get laid in a Bangkok brothel.

For every Good Will Hunting, there are 100 Ethan Hunts; for every Dead Poets Society, 50 Fight Clubs. Given the bombardment of negative stereotypes around learning and diligence, it’s no wonder a good 75% of my male peers spent most of their schooldays twanging the girls’ bra-straps and carving FUCK into their desks instead of developing their mental abilities. Nor is it a huge surprise when the likes of Nigel Farage waves away 60 years of universally accepted medical research to insist that smoking is perfectly safe. (Here, Nige, have another. Go on, be a devil.)

Some will protest that art imitates life rather than shaping it. This is true, but in reflecting stereotypes, culture also reinforces them. And when our stories offer so few positive role models of a particular type, what hope is there that things will change?

Coming up: how does an intellectual David take on Goliath?

The new age of unreason

In our new reality, the views of a West Ham fan who left school at 15 are deemed as valid as those of a politics professor at LSE

(Fair warning: there’s a lot of ground to cover on this subject, so this will be the first in a mini-series.)

In 415AD, a band of thugs dragged the mathematician, astronomer and Neoplatonist philosopher Hypatia from her carriage and took her to a nearby church, where they stripped her naked, battered her to death with roof tiles, dismembered her and set the body parts on fire.

During the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39, the majority of the 200,000 Spanish civilians killed were members of the intelligentsia, as were most of the victims of the “killing fields” of Cambodia in the late 1970s. In the months after the invasion of Poland that triggered the second world war, the Nazis captured and killed around 100,000 Poles, 61,000 of whom were academics, priests, lawyers and doctors, in a secret cleansing operation codenamed Intelligenzaktion.

On his accession to power in Iran in 1979, the Ayatollah Khomeini closed all universities and either executed or drove out most of the country’s intellectuals. In 2001, the Taliban planted and detonated explosives to destroy the Buddhas of Bamiyan, giant sandstone sculptures in the Hazarajat region of Afghanistan dating from the 6th century.

And in a history lesson at Ridgeway School in Swindon in 1982, Gavin McCracken pulled a wad of mucus from his nostril, rolled the sticky residue into a ball, and flicked it at the back of Andy Bodle’s head after the latter raised his hand to answer the teacher’s question.

All right, so it’s not exactly the martyrdom of Hypatia, but there’s a direct line connecting 5th-century Alexandria to Gavin McCracken’s bogie. Humanity has a long and inglorious history of persecuting its brighter minds and vandalising its culture, and if the last couple of years are any guide, it’s far from done yet.

“You know, I’ve always wanted to say this – I’ve never said this before – with all the talking we all do, all of these experts, ‘Oh we need an expert’ – the experts are terrible!” – Donald Trump, Wisconsin campaign rally, April 2016

Once again it has become fashionable, particularly on the right, to call expert opinion into question, to criticise judges and academics as “out of touch”, and to prize “real men” and “common sense” over rational inquiry. Suddenly, after years of rational debate, climate change deniers are back on an equal footing with climate scientists. Michael Gove is blithely declaring that we’ve “had enough of experts”.

And a serving British MP thinks this is a perfectly reasonable reply to an economist on Twitter:

Marcus Fysh tweet — Bah, facts. Who needs ’em?

It seems at first sight that in the space of a few short months, someone – this is not the place to speculate as to who – has begun to shape a reality in which “overeducated” is routinely deployed as a term of abuse, in which the complexity of a trade arrangement is considered sufficient grounds for binning it, and in which the views of a West Ham fan who left school at 15 are deemed as valid as those of a politics professor at LSE.

After years of relative peace, harmony and prosperity, a good chunk of the populace suddenly seems hellbent on dragging us back to the Byzantine era. But is this really an overnight development?

In his Pulitzer-winning book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, historian Richard Hofstadter charts the history of the relationship between his country and its intellectual class. For Hofstadter, writing in 1963, the most recent outbreak of boffin-bashing was the period of 1947-56, when the erudite Democrat Adlai Stevenson lost out twice to man-of-action Dwight Eisenhower in the presidential elections, and Joseph McCarthy’s Communist hysteria was at its vindictive height.

Hofstadter concludes that backlashes against the highly educated are cyclical, usually coming when times are economically or otherwise tough, after extended periods of liberal governance, and usually led by the church, business interests, and those on the right of the political spectrum. (I’ll be returning to Hofstadter a lot, as the parallels between what he describes and our present troubles are consistently alarming.)

Hofstadter’s focus was exclusively on the US, through the lenses of politics, business, religion and education. One area he didn’t really touch on was language, which turns out to be just as enlightening.

Insults for the intelligent have always been with us – “know-it-all”, “clever clogs”, “smart alec”, “swot” – but the end of the second world war and the start of the cold war saw a veritable deluge of new terms. “Square”, in the sense of “boringly old-fashioned or conventional person”, which soon morphed into a synonym for “swot”, is first attested in 1944. “Boffin” arrived in 1945. These were swiftly followed by “geek” (1946), “nerd” (1951), “dork” (1967), “dweeb” and “pointy-headed” (1968) and “anorak” (1984). “Egghead” seems to have been coined around 1907, but only really gained currency in the early 50s.

It’s true that some of these slurs have lost their force over time, some have been at least partially reclaimed (geek, nerd), and others (“pointy-headed”) have disappeared altogether. Nonetheless, those who once might have reached for a word to torment their diligent classmates with are now spoilt for choice.

We’re already beyond ideal blog post length, so I’ll pause here. That’s some of the background to emergence of this brave, stupid new world. In the next few posts, I’ll consider how this came about, why it came about, what the enemies of reason propose to replace it with, and whether there’s anything we can do about it.

The University of Life: A Prospectus

At UoL, we believe the only letters you need after your name are the initials of your football team

Early adulthood should be an eye-opening, mind-blowing time; a time of exploration, of testing limits, of finding out who you are and what you can do. Last year, 49% of young British people chose to do this in so-called “higher education”. But the overwhelming majority – 51% – still believe the best place to start their journey is here, at the University of Life.

At UoL, you’ll learn the value of hard work. Of straight talking. Of family. Of community. And, in the absence of any achievements of your own to build your identity around, of blind, belligerent nationalism.

Fees

… and what’s more, you’ll learn all this for nothing. That’s right – here at UoL, our fees are the lowest in the land, at precisely zero! No overdrafts, no debt repayments hanging over you for decades. (Some will try to argue that the £400,000 less you’ll earn over a lifetime than regular graduates partially offsets this saving, but to them we say, “Shut up!”)

The Place

The beauty of the University of Life is that you’re not tied to any one campus or cluster of hideous redbrick buildings. The UoL is anywhere and everywhere! (Although in practice, since you have no set lectures to attend, tutors to present essays to or exams to sit, and since you’ve never picked up any knowledge of the outside world and thus been motivated to explore it, you’ll probably just stay in the same poxy, fake-Mulberry, five-shots-for-a-fiver, WITH-SHANE-RICHIE-AS-BUTTONS! town where you grew up.)

Pub brawl — We encourage our students to let off a bit of steam now and then.

The Digs

Why put up with a pokey, draughty, dingy, noisy, single-bed hovel in a hall of residence? Save yourself the earache and ballache by continuing to live with your parents until you’re 26!

No rent, no bills, plus the added bonus of a personal chef and laundry service, and a neverending flow of free advice on your every life choice, from people who know a thing or two*!

*Sometimes as many as three.

The People

At most universities, you’ll meet vast numbers of people from all sorts of places and backgrounds, with diverse religious beliefs, lifestyles and political views. But come on, who wants to put themselves through that rigmarole? You’re much better off sticking with the crowd you went to school with, plus maybe a couple of blokes from the warehouse.

Forget rarefied conversations with curious minds about religion, philosophy and politics. What’s wrong with bantz about the transfer window and the fucking lungs on that?

You’ll never have to bother learning how to structure a logical argument or express yourself clearly and cogently. Just run with whatever half-formed thought pops into your head. Whoever needed to be able to organise their thoughts, or critically analyse newspaper headlines or politicians’ soundbites anyway? It’s not as if the government will ever ask you to make any crucial decisions on the country’s political and economic future!

Sure, if you want to hobnob with toffee-nosed twats called Caoimhe and Olivia and Tariq, go to Durham or Edinburgh or York. But if you want the real low-down, come and mix it up with good, real, honest, hardworking people like Terry and Barry and Mick. (The only toffee-nosed twats you should ever have dealings with are the ones who graduate, become far-right politicians, and swear on their fob watches that they’re “men of the people”. Them, you unquestioningly vote for.)

Keeping in touch with his plebeian side … Jacob Rees-Mogg and issue

(Girls, this goes double for you, because participation in higher education among women is so high now that the sex ratio at the University of Life is, shall we say, skewed in your favour. So step right up and take advantage of all those free and single Terrys, Barrys and Micks! Please.)

The Facilities

So you may not have access to world-class collections of books in calm, comfortable surroundings, but when it comes to reading, who could ask for a better setting than the public library? If yours hasn’t closed down, that is. And anyway, duh, internet!

UoL may not boast hundreds of clubs and societies to cater for every interest situated conveniently on your doorstep, or thousands of people of a similar age to pursue those interests with, but there’s probably a choir or a winemaking club or something somewhere near you! Use your bloody initiative!

And while regular universities may offer unparalleled sport and leisure facilities, the big, wide world has plenty to offer too. There’s darts and pool and Sunday kickabouts and probably at least an hour a week when the council pool isn’t given over to screaming, pissing kids or fucking aquarobics. Besides, after a lifetime of carrying round that sequoia-sized chip on your shoulder, you’ll be as strong as an ox!

The Courses

Here at UoL, people are your books, the streets are your lecture halls, and the world is your campus. We teach armchair expertise in just about every subject you can imagine, but we specialise in the following subjects:

Cod philosophy
Sports appreciation
Media studies (esp the Sun, Mail, Express, ITV)
Hagiography (of football players, pop stars and YouTubers)
Sophistry
Sociopathy
Modern languages (Gibberish, Utter Bullshit and Cant)
Law (circumventing)

Rest assured – no one will ever lecture you at the Uni of Life!

The Prospects

You never really graduate from UoL, of course, because there are no exams and no degree certificates and, well, no structure, feedback or development of any sort. But that’s not to say you’ll go home empty-handed!

Most of our students go on to become extraordinarily proficient in their chosen skills. Mainly because once they’ve landed one job, it’s almost impossible for them to switch careers or get promoted.

The Alumni

We’re proud to have been the training ground for a huge number of the most famous and powerful figures in public life. Our most prominent graduates include:

Simon Cowell
Zoella
Zac Goldsmith MP
Robert Maxwell
Sir Jimmy Savile OBE, KCSG
Peter Sutcliffe, aka the Yorkshire Ripper
Myra Hindley
Thomas Hamilton, Dunblane mass killer
Adolf Hitler
Jim Davidson

Choose freedom. Choose independence. Choose simplicity and familiarity. Choose reductive, black-and-white thinking. Choose simple solutions, even though, being simple, they’ve been tried a million times before and never once worked. Choose the same pub every Friday and the same Chinese every other Thursday. Choose a stag do in Riga before you turn 28. Choose staring blankly at your phone over the dinner table because you ran out of things to talk about years ago.

Choose the University of Life.