Welcome to dumb Britain, where anti-intellectualism is on the rise

But recently I’ve been thinking perhaps I am wrong to be wasting my time worrying about these things. Maybe I should stop. I needn’t let them bother me at all. I think perhaps I should just lean totally into anti-intellectualism and embrace my inner bimbo in spite of the demonstrable fact I am a brunette who wears glasses. (The bimbo stereotype did briefly come into fashion again a few years ago when women were self-identifying as such, semi-ironically. And then not ironically at all.)

And anti-intellectualism in general is having a moment. “Intellectuals,” after all, “are pretentious, conceited, effeminate and snobbish; and very likely immoral, dangerous and subversive.” At least, that’s what Richard Hofstadter thinks. The historian’s book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life was published in 1963, but it’s been recirculating due to concerns about the decline of the university and the rise of rightwing populism – and not just in America.

Anti-science conspiracy theories are espoused at the highest level (paracetamol is bad!) and conservative beliefs have pervaded cultural discourse, to disastrous effect. A creeping school of thought, or lack thereof, wants our women in the home as flowy-dressed trad wives, wants our politicians populist, wants our children – of which we should have many – barefoot and unvaccinated. Girlbosses are cringe! Scrap Tony Blair’s old pledge for 50% of young people to go to university, who needs it!

For a while now it has seemed that we have a scepticism of, if not intellect, then overt, pretentious displays of intelligence. We identify tropes of performative smartness and skewer them for our amusement. Last weekend, for example, London’s Soho Square hosted its first Performative Male contest.

Competing men walked pageant-like among the crowds in their best “performative male” costumes. They wore baggy jeans and carried crumpled paperbacks in the back pockets (all the fiction they read must be by women, so Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf feature heavily in the canon of the performative male). They dangled Labubu key chains off APC messenger bags and went on and on about how much they love the singers Clairo and Ethel Cain. Some strummed ukuleles or gave out period care products. The crowd went wild.

The performative male is a costume even when it’s not part of a competition to find London’s best. It’s not about hating smart men but about rolling your eyes at a certain kind of male intellect, which is aloof and chauvinistic and deployed for ulterior sexual purposes, invariably with huge success. The performative male is not an intellectual; he’s a man who says he understands the female condition and the struggles of being a woman – but only if you’ll shag him, of course. Naturally, everyone is sick of this kind of man because at one point in their life they have shagged him and deeply regretted it.

But it’s not just performative horny men we’re sick of. It’s the endless, pointless over-intellectualism of music too. You can see this in the Lacanian deconstructive analysis of Charli XCX lyrics – it’s fine that they’re all about gak and cars, guys, we’re still allowed to enjoy her music even though it’s just about gak and cars – and, let’s be honest, you can always trace this kind of thing back to the main offender: Taylor Swift.

In a radio interview last week, Swift defended the lyrics on her sonically abusive, seemingly ChatGPT-inspired album The Life of a Showgirl, as if mid-acceptance speech for a Pulitzer being snatched from Richard Hofstadter. Explaining her favourite lines on the track Father Figure, in which she sings “I pay the cheque before it kisses the mahogany grain”, Swift details the artfulness of her lyricism to a politely bemused Gok Wan. “That’s my favourite type of writing,” she says. “Where you have to think: ‘Wait, what do those words mean?’” This is surely only dark academia for a person who is suffering from the world’s first and only case of sexually transmitted brain injury.

Swift has built a world, and a billion-dollar empire, off the back of fans dissecting her every word for “Easter eggs” of hidden meanings. Her 12th album led Swifties to an unfortunate realisation: she’s actually not very good at this. Swift is a 35-year-old woman singing about memes, being a daughter and “girlbossing”. She’s not a poetic genius. When the Wizard of Oz-like curtain was pulled back and that awareness hit, the supposed intellectualism of her work started to feel a bit hollow. Or, perhaps, we all started to feel a bit dumb for engaging with it. Swifties presumably began to feel how I felt when I confidently identified Madagascar as Cape Town: bad.

But look, maybe it’s OK to feel dumb sometimes. Maybe it’s OK to feel bad about your intelligence, and how it has been weaponised by billionaires. Or maybe it’s a bad feeling that at least has a useful purpose: the desire to expand your intellectual horizons. There’s a bit of a suspicion about this in both British and Irish culture, I think. In Britain, perhaps you might be accused of getting above yourself. In Ireland, we’d call it “having notions”.

Either way, it’s the idea that wanting to be smarter is embarrassing and egotistical. It doesn’t have to be. We shouldn’t leave intellectualism in the hands of ageing pop girlies, Richard Hofstadter, the performative male and Robert F Kennedy Jr. We can take back control! We can decide we want to make smartness great again! We can learn to read maps!

Illustration by David Foldvari