by Andrew Wallace
THANKS
for Mr Pattison’s reply on my article which raises some interesting
issues, particularly concerning what he considers to be my penchant
for ‘pretentious academic verbiage’ along with the social
philosopher David Selbourne whose writings I drew upon.
His
beef at the outset seems to be with my perceived stylistic
idiosyncrasies and resort to pedantry, which he considers ‘barely
comprehensible to most people’. This seems to be an ad hominem
attack and a disingenuous slice of anti-intellectualism. Northern
Voices amongst other things is a forum for literate and stimulating
thought-pieces of various complexity and for employing a ‘highbrow’
discourse I make no apologies. I suggest my vocabulary is hardly a
radical departure from the general tenor and house style of NV.
Leftists
struggle to push this faux anti-intellectualism because it is so
obviously built on contradiction. Leftists are often the chattering
classes incarnate. Only in the discredited regimes of ‘actually
existing socialism’ did intellectuals face real persecution, but of
course those societies had a very different dynamic in contrast to
their Western European counterparts.
However
even thinkers like Selbourne has taken issue with the
“incomprehensible scholasticism, emanating from the nether darkness
of academia where nothing grows”, so it seems a certain
‘anti-intellectual intellectualism’ is justified. Certainly
Selbourne and other writers of his ilk have largely avoided the dense
impenetrable obscurantism of post-modernism that was so successfully
lampooned and deservedly so in the Sokal Affair. So Selbourne might
be galled to learn his former student accuse him of
this very vice that has been so assiduously critiqued in his life
work.
Dan
Fox seems to have the measure of this ‘Prolier-than-thou’
trolling in his book (see below) even references Orwell’s ‘Politics
and the English Language’ –
' “pretentiousness”
is the put-down of choice for a certain sort of bluff,
meat-and-potatoes Englishman who distrusts foreign words and
complicated ideas'.
I
do plead guilty to neglecting the newer, more ‘liberal’ cohort of
the working class as depicted by Guy Standing in his work on the
Precariat. My admittedly non-scientific anecdotal observations are
largely based on the older, traditional working class, based around
the factories and textile mills that gave brief sustenance in the
post war era.
Working
class autodidacts are often deeply impressive and imposing figures,
yet their comparative rarity makes them extra-ordinary individuals
and a far cry from being representative of the working class.
Regards
Andrew
Wallace
References
How
the left was lost: the need to relearn what true progress means,
New Statesman, 24.07.14. – David Selbourne
Pretentiousness
by Dan Fox – (11.02.16.) Guardian review by Steven Poole
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