Why are most Humanities academics pro-lockdown? (VI)

Snobbery.

Academia is your archetypical middle-class profession; not as well-paid as medicine or law, but clearly the middle classes at some point needed some kind of artefact to perpetuate themselves, and that artefact was universities. There is a lot of talk now about how the old class system doesn’t really apply anymore, but even if you admit that a significant part of academic workers are now part of the precariat and their social class has diminished, it still retains many of the features of the middle class. Or, to put it that way: working class it isn’t.

The middle class has historically gone to great lengths to differentiate itself from the working class — with greater keenness and anxiety, I might add, in the case of those who emerged from the working class themselves and who therefore need to establish themselves as members of the middle class with more urgency. The poor have a funny smell, have too many children, are too loud, are infectious (see where this is going already?), are too thin, are too obese, etc.

With present-day academics, of course — especially in the Humanities—, the problem is that their identity is also built around being left-wing, and therefore caring for the working classes (or caring more than the Tories/Republicans). So we’ve got a bit of a conundrum here: how can we trash the working class while simultaneously pretend to care about them?

In normal times, there are ways. I have already spoken here about “luxury beliefs”. Every now and then we have your disgruntled academic complaining that some servant or another (porter, air stewardness) hasn’t addressed them as doctor BECAUSE I WORKED SO HARD FOR MY PHD (the catch here is that the person doing the complaining needs to be female, or non-white, or both, so that the whole thing is framed as “why do cishet white males get addressed properly while I don’t”. But make no mistake, the issue here is with the servant who has failed to greet their master properly). But, of course, the pandemic response has opened a new world of possibilities for trashing the working class and their appalling behaviours.

I don’t think it will be particularly original or revolutionary to say that, generally speaking, the middle classes have been more strict about respecting NPIs than the working class. Some reasons for that are eminently pragmatic: to repeat an argument that has been made ad nauseam, staying at home is perfectly fine if you live in a large house with a garden, not so much if you live in a two-bedroom flat with three kids. The working classes do not typically need to virtue-signal so much along the “caring” or “modern” axis that I have discussed before. A more audacious take is that experience of hardship might have made the working classes better at assessing risk: what is Covid if you at already at increased risk of heart disease, cancer, perhaps even crime and violence, etc.?

Humanities academics, normally so sensitive to these things, now resort to labelling those who do not respect NPIs as much as they do as “covidiots”. True, some of them show a bit of self-awareness, but it tends to be misdirected: “If only the government paid everyone to stay at home!” (wrings hands). This fails to consider that maybe paying away the human impulse for socialization is going to be difficult (so again this is humanists ignoring the basics of human nature), particularly if we bear in mind how this socialization happens in different social classes. If you are an A&H academic you can probably get quite a lot of connection with and validation from your peers by virtue-signalling on social media or internally with your colleagues, but many working class people don’t have neither the technological savviness nor the incentives to do so, so they might prefer to go to a party instead. Which honestly I’d prefer too.

Now it’s not so surprising anymore, but back in the spring it was amusing yet depressing at the same time to see so many academic colleagues — all Labour or otherwise left-wing voters, all Remainers, all union members — having a go at working class people again and again and again. Crowding in parks and drinking beer; daring to sit on the beach; going to pubs on the day they opened (remember the massacre that was supposedly going to happen two or three weeks later? No, me neither); going to shops; daring walking less than 2m away from them WITHOUT STEPPING ASIDE YOU PEASANT (real example); going on holidays to Benidorm and the like. Almost as if that class hatred was there waiting for a suitable channel to get out. Which it probably was.

A key factor in here is that A&H academics are not, as a norm, materialistic, in the sense that the working classes sometimes are: many academics could spend months without buying clothes or having their hair done (in fact, for many it might be a relief), most don’t really place much of a value on cars or furniture, many would be happy with a semi-budget holiday in a European capital or somewhere isolated as opposed to going to Tenerife, etc. So A&H academics clamour about giving up all of those things, “sacrificing”, for the common good, when in reality, for most of them giving up these things is a very small sacrifice, or none at all.

Now, imagine (and this is purely scifi territory) that for some reason we had a virus that could be stopped if we all gave up luxury beliefs, virtue-signalling and constant posturing about always being on the right side of history. I have a sense that A&H academics wouldn’t be so keen on this one.