Intellectuals - unite!

Nothing about popular culture these days encourages anyone to be smart. In fact, quite the opposite - turn on the TV. What do you see? I'm quite confident that what you are now looking at is an overweight teenage girl who looks as though she was raised by savages in post-Stalinist Russia. The chances are she is either attempting to sing to a panel of overpaid, self-important egoists or she is trying her hand at answering some fairly basic questions in order to win money.

Inevitably, she fails at the first hurdle. Her voice is no better than that of a donkey and her general knowledge roughly equivalent to that of a mountain goat. 

You would expect, then, that she would be laughed off the stage for thinking that Shakespeare wrote Eastenders, and that her woeful ignorance would be displayed to the rest of the civilised world so we know how fortunate we are. Except you don't expect, that, do you?

Not only are these people pitied by the audiences, but they seem to be more popular than TV personalities or indeed anyone who appears on TV who might actually know who Chaucer was. We are forever being told that television and popular culture reflects contemporary society. If this is the case, what a terrible world we live in.

The vast majority of the population must be thicker than Fernando Alonso's neck and ruder than a pig's fart at a wedding. But this is not the worst part: popular culture and the people it reflects actively revel in their ignorance. They oppose and ridicule anything that could be linked to the word 'intellectual'.

If you have a modicum of common sense or general knowledge; know how to pronounce the letter 'h'; were born into a family that does not live in a ghetto or spend most of its time in prison or simply wear a suit and a tie, the chances are in the last 10 years that if you have visited a town centre or somewhere similar, you will have felt completely unwelcome or out of place.

Hundreds of years ago, you could expect the same. Imagine how Shakespeare felt, writing his great plays while thousands of slack-jawed, dribbling peasants threatened to burn him if he so much as questioned any of the 'knowledge' religion provided. 

Of course, during the Enlightenment, it was different. There was such a sense of freedom after at least a thousand years of oppression directed squarely at the acquisition of knowledge. Nobody was ashamed to be an academic - they were looked up to; they were making progress for society.

Plainly, as we are currently in the kind of social climate that favours the ignorant and the paranoid, a new Enlightenment period must be started. With all of the problems in the world we have (renewable energy, dealing with climate change, Justin Bieber - to name but a few) surely this would be more useful now than ever before?

While we await the courage to attempt this, don't be ashamed to be an academic, or an intellectual, or whatever you want to call yourself. Philosophise. Criticise. Ponder things. Do anything other than going to the cinema and watching dull, unchallenging, naive crap like Twilight. 

Your brain may be crying out for mercy after 10 years or so of popular culture in which Vicky Pollard lookalikes contest to see who knows the least, but hold on: the world will need our brains soon.