Higher Ground

On Twitter last week, following the death of the Queen, Jeremy Clarkson wrote “One of the things I’ve noticed in these last few hours is that so very many people on Twitter are truly awful human beings.” Shortly afterwards he followed this with “Twitter is a handy and constant reminder that socialists are disgusting people.” As most of you will be aware I have been permanently suspended from that platform for expressing opinions and airing quips which did not go down well with the righteous minds of the brave new world.

It has long been known that left-wingers, who get to set the agenda, tend to be more highly educated than right-wingers, who merely win the spoils. In a typically lazy, left-wing manner, education is equated to intelligence, whilst success, often earned by sheer hard work, is seen as somehow linked to being less well intellectually equipped. And it is true that many wealthy winners in life practically gloat about their lack of education not holding them back.

Clarkson himself reminds school leavers annually that he was not a high achiever. This year it took the form of a tweet from a luxury yacht: “Don’t worry if your A level results are disappointing. I got a C and 2 Us and I’m currently holidaying on this boat.” And in this example pithily puts down the notion that education is the pinnacle of human achievement; you can’t feed your family with degrees and diplomas.

Educational success, in many ways, is just a measure of how readily one is able to absorb a particular narrative and follow it to a conclusion, regardless of its value outside the classroom. Whereas your normal, everyday entrepreneur tends to get easily bored and forever seek new ideas to exploit. A lesson not quickly grasped may benefit from greater application and more diligent studying, but may also be not worth learning in the end.

Perhaps this is why academics, in the pursuit of knowledge for the sake of knowledge can also be susceptible to inhaling the heady vapours of ideology; in the past religious, in the present political. And while the duffers, the also-rans in the A* stakes, are busy taking any job that pays the rent, their learned contemporaries pursue avenues which lead to long decades in disciplines of little real value to the world.

Once, universities thrived on offering valuable sciences and engineering, medicine and management, but in recent decades the humanities have become the academic vehicles of choice for those who probably ought never to have gone on to higher education. This recent Spectator article suggests it might be time to turn the tide. 

For my part I have seen the declaration time and time again that those on the left are more intelligent than those on the right. But this claim, it seems to me, relies on a particular definition of intelligence and one characterised by an occasional inability to be mentally agile, to think outside the box, to adapt and thrive. Instead it relies on the dogmatic clinging to tired old tropes, reinforcing groupthink and trotting out long-established arguments.

Much like religion, if you need an origin story and enforcers, with scholars forever justifying the improbable; if you need to keep on developing your themes and reminding people of why they joined your movement; if you need threats of excommunication – or as we now call it ‘de-platforming’ – maybe this is less a sign of intelligence than indoctrination.

Meanwhile those you despise, those lower orders of the right, own the houses you rent, the businesses you work for, and run the country you so regularly disparage. They get up in the morning and go to productive work to create the world you live in. The left may think they occupy the intellectual high ground. The right are happy to let them believe that. Does ‘educated’ really mean ‘intelligent’ in this universe?

She sold my brain!

How lucky I was to be born before Margaret Thatcher privatised all the intelligence. This week I was unfortunate to have watched Question Time, the Andrew Marr Show, Sunday Politics and The Big Questions, all of them on the BBC. I've also listened to the radio and watched television and there has only been one news item of significance. (I shudder to think what is going on behind the smokescreen.) 

On audience participation shows every quiet tribute to Mrs Thatcher was met with animal howls of unintelligent, unthinking, jingoistic rage. “Thatcher killed my father!” yelled one, “Thatcher ripped the heart out of my community!” chorused many and then the inevitable simple untruths; she did this, she did that, as if she was an omnipotent and omnipresent deity, individually conferring the curse as people slept in their beds.

Spoken with such certainty and repeated so often, often by mere children, such claims take on the mantle of truth, where no such truth exists. While the pro-Thatcher voices have been steady and measured, often with a balancing statement that the speaker didn’t necessarily agree with everything she did, the voices on the hating left all speak with one illogical, bitter tongue. 

Every Anti-Thatcher voice sounds like the chants of a brainwashing cult. It’s as if the Moonies invaded and took away their ability to think, to reason and more importantly their natural human ability to adapt and survive. For, while Mrs T may have prescribed the bitter medicine, the alternatives could have been so very much worse. What news of the turnip harvest, comrade? And a whole generation later (two in some communities) what's the point of blaming your life chances on events you can never change?

They say there are lies, damned lies and statistics. To that we should add Thatcher fantasies. For, much of the Left’s hatred of Margaret is based on falsehoods and those with most to gain from the useful idiots repeating the agitprop know this well. The best moment of my television viewing was watching the odious Neil Kinnock squirming in the Martin Durkin documentary when confronted with the simple truth that she left the country as a whole very much better off than when she found it. 

Kinnock may look stupid and sound stupid, but he’s made a lot of money by knowing exactly which master to serve. When he had the opportunity to redeem himself by admitting that undeniable fact he found he just couldn't bring himself to do it. In the face of logic and simple truth he had the physiognomy of a pug licking piss off a nettle. It was hilarious. 

Pre and post Thatcher era brain scans

And then the big battle line was drawn between two mediocre songs, neither of which meant what their supporters wanted them to mean. It’s like the country has collectively lost its ability to make up its own mind. I blame Thatcher; she sold off all the brains. Probably.