ONE of the intriguing developments in contemporary debate is the way that people expressing disdain and disgust seem so much more confident and fearless of contradiction than those daring to concede an interest.
This was never more evident in these particular columns in recent months than with the fierce debate about singer Taylor Swift, with those dismissing her as a talentless screecher and decrying her songs as banal, shallow pop, feeling utterly confident that they are unassailable in their condemnation. By contrast, those who do enjoy her music, may well feel browbeaten into silence by the tidal wave of sneering and dismissal. Why has this resort to the negative become so popular?
In decades and centuries past, people were often defined by what they made. Surnames such as Smith and Carpenter directly reflected this identification process. But these days people are defined more by what they own than by what they make, if indeed they make anything. Which is another way of saying they are defined by what they choose to buy. In other words, they are defined by their taste. And since taste is so closely aligned with status, it becomes very important to display the right level of taste.
The importance of this display becomes even more critical in online environments, where nobody actually knows the real you and has therefore only your statements of opinion by which to make any judgement about your tastes and thus, by implication, your status.
In this game of shadows, images and peacock displays, it is undeniable that it is a great deal more risky to praise something than it is to castigate it as being without merit. Since the common assumption is that high-status people have more refined tastes, it is accepted without argument that such people are bound to judge more things to be lacking and inadequate than those on which they express approval, a literal ‘pyramid effect’. In the media, the careers of arts and culture critics are almost entirely based on supplying succour and reassurance to help with this insecurity.
At its extreme, it may be considered that daring to admit to liking anything risks being judged as being undiscerning, a suggestible epsilon, easily persuaded by marketing and peer-pressure. In other words a weak, low-status individual. Because of this risk, it has come to be recognised as emotionally much ‘safer’ to decry something as fit only for morons. Given the power of this preconception, it’s easy to make the assumption that such uncompromising castigations must have emanated from a discerning, high status individual.
So, the message is clear and well-understood. If you want to improve the chances of being regarded by your peers as a high-status individual, be savage and unsparing in your dismissal of popular phenomena. But ironically, the reality could well be that what might appear superficially as forthright and fearless is, under all the show and blather, actually nothing more than a timorous attempt to mask class insecurity.
