What is the ‘great divide’ in British and other nations’ politics just now? It used to be Catholic vs. Protestant; then Monarchical vs. Republican; then Capitalist vs. Socialist – with doubtless other lesser ‘divides’ in between. You were either on the one side, or on the other; the notion of a ‘divide’ being symbolised, in the British case, by the adversarial seating arrangement of the House of Commons. (Other nations’ parliaments are generally U-shaped, allowing for gradations of opinion.) Today the major ‘divide’ in Britain could be Brexiter vs. Remainer/Rejoiner; but that one may be short-lived. The ‘Élite’ vs. the ‘common people’ is a more constant one; but with élitists changing their clothes – and even their shapes – for every generation. The idea of ‘wokery’ is being currently offered up as a crucial touch-stone, and one that British Conservatives are anxious to exploit; but with the disadvantages that (a) it is difficult to pin down, and (b) few people on the ‘woke’ side define themselves as such. The word is much more generally used as a vague insult.

Which brings us on to what may be a more crucial divide in British and American society and politics, but one that we ‘intellectuals’ are highly nervous of expressing. That’s the one based on ‘intelligence’: with populations crucially divided between the wise and the stupid; or, to put it less crudely – and surely more justifiably – depending on their levels and types of education. I’ve quoted in an earlier blog (https://bernardjporter.com/2023/09/19/books-and-politics/) Rory Stewart’s observation – Stewart was a Conservative MP, but one of the better ones – that ‘campaigning… in Cumbria, I began to notice that if a house was filled with books, the occupants would not be voting Conservative’. That almost says it all. Except that even well-educated Tories, however much they might disagree with the prejudices of the hoi polloi (yes, I know that the hoi means the, so it’s superfluous there: but then I’m one of those élitists), can still, if they are really clever, and unprincipled to boot, work on those prejudices to garner support among the less educated for their own political ends. Look at the lies about the EU that Boris Johnson the journalist used to churn out in his role as Brussels correspondent of the Daily Telegraph in the 1990s. That’s assuming that he didn’t really believe them. (Unless an Eton education means nothing at all.)

But of course we can’t say this, from our rarified intellectual height, for fear of further stoking the anti-intellectualist prejudice that lies on the other side of the ‘divide’, and so weakening our cause. We know from social surveys that voting in the 2016 ‘Brexit’ referendum did depend to a large extent on levels of education, with the university-educated being far more likely to vote to remain in the EU than those with shorter educations (https://www.statista.com/statistics/572613/brexit-votes-by-education/). That was certainly a factor. But we can’t mention it. It’s almost the opinion – stupidity – that (to misquote Oscar Wilde’s lover) ‘dare not speak its name’.

And nor should we. We can’t infer from this that less-educated Brexit voters were simply stupid. Education doesn’t necessarily guarantee greater intelligence; only (in most cases) superior knowledge. What we might see as ‘stupidity’ covers a range of conditions. One of them is vulnerability to propaganda, which might be due more to the propagandists’ skills, and to the agencies they can rely on to spread their versions of events, than to one’s own mental deficiencies. In Britain the ownership of the Press was obviously a big factor in the dissemination of anti-EU views in the years before 2016. If your only sources of national news then were the Daily Mail, Express, Telegraph or the Sun, as they were for many people, it will have been difficult for them to come to alternative views.

That may have been aggravated by the failures of education, in many schools and colleges, to inculcate critical thinking in their pupils, as distinct from mere ‘knowledge’. Classes in critical thinking could do an awful lot to train up a thoughtful democracy. My own subject of History is particularly conducive to this approach. But there are others. One of my children was taught this in her Australian school by analysing and comparing one day’s newspaper reports of the same event. How much of this sort of thing goes on in British or American schools? (I have no means of knowing.) It could narrow the unfortunate ‘divide’ between the so-called intelligent and the apparently stupid.

Of course this is not meant to imply that all Brexiters, or Conservatives, or Republicans, are presently stupid. Or that all of us on the other side are brighter than them. Many of our opinions are ‘stupid’ as well: much ‘wokery’ for example. And there are rational and critical versions of Conservatism and Republicanism around. It’s just that the ‘stupid’ – or uncritical – side of the ‘great divide’ seems so dominant today. And mainly on the Right.