Denis Dutton was a lecturer for a first-year Philosophy course I took over 20 years ago at the University of Canterbury. At the time I was fascinated by his lecture style (“Aristotle was the last person who knew everything”, or equivalent turn of phrase, is what I recall), as well as his very peculiar pronunciation of the word “character” (it sounded like “caric-chuh”). Years later I found out that there was more to him when he started the Arts and Letters Daily website, which he still edits, though it is now owned by the Chronicle of Higher Education.

I still read A&LD frequently. There is a clear slant toward ideas that go against conventional wisdom, and particularly those that ridicule the excesses of “postmodern” (for want of a better word) thinkers in the humanities. Of course, many of the articles are elegant time-wasters, but the best ones are really worth reading.

He has just published an essay on elitism, which discusses what evolutionary psychology has to say about our anti-elitist instincts. After discussing hunter-gatherer group organization and zero-sum economics in the distant past, he says

“It is part of our Pleistocene inheritance that many people will resent the elitist values they associate with the rich, whether it’s the opera, chardonnay, gallery openings, being able to distinguish between words such as criterion and criteria, using apostrophes properly or spouting an apposite quote from Shakespeare off the top of your head.”

I find the evolutionary stuff interesting, but for the purposes of this post I want to focus on the last point. The key point for me is that one should not throw the baby (higher culture and luxuries) out with the bathwater (rich and powerful rulers). The early trade unions and worker organizations represented people who worked in factories and were denied proper education. They aimed to offer these people an expanded mind and appreciation of things normally only available to the rich, such as poetry, opera, philosophy, etc. This was hundreds of years ago, and we are all now (in the “first world”) essentially at least as rich as kings were back then. Yet how many people, despite all their leisure, connect with the higher elements of our culture today? Far too few, I venture to say, though I don’t have clear proof.

The rich and powerful have done terrible things in the past, but they have always patronized great artists and thinkers. The products of that sponsorship are now available to us all as a result of great struggles. I think we should be thankful that we live now, and take advantage of these hard-won fruits. But I am afraid that too few people are doing so. There are a lot of distractions in the modern world, like “reality TV” and media-fuelled celebrity obsession. And I do detect, at least in the Anglosphere, a real dumbing down of public discourse, as exemplified by careless use of language. Politicians seem to think nothing of cavorting onstage to Rolling Stones music, but Mozart or opera seem impossible. I guess politicians don’t want to be seen as “elitist”. But having sympathy for the masses does not mean we have to share all their interests, surely. I come from a working-class background and am the first person ever in my family tree to go to university, so I have no time for hereditary privilege or the feelings of superiority of the idle rich. That is not the same as wanting to reject all the good things that a privileged upbringing can yield.