I love Stephen Fry
"In America, the Right routinely calls Obama a member of the ‘liberal elite’ - it is hard to know quite how this rhetorical distortion first got into the political vocabulary. America has a self-made myth of plain-speaking wiseacre folk which deprecates complexity, ambiguity, difficulty and nuance. There is a long-held distrust in the United States of verbal fluency, wide reading, historical knowledge, interest in the arts or intellectual curiosity. All those things seem more often than is comfortable to dispose people towards agnosticism and liberalism, therefore they are characterised as urban, un-American, European and ‘elitist’. It is hard not to wonder if the ideal American citizen is no more than a god-fearing, family consumer who never questions that while bankers and financiers may be sophisticated and clever and educated and wise, anyone else with those qualities should be religiously tarred and righteously feathered.
"When I was growing up ‘elitism’ was a word sneered from the lips of the Left, now it is sneered from the lips of the Right. The sneering was ugly then and it is ugly now. Knowledge, science, understanding, literacy and curiosity are absolute goods and to hell with anyone who tries to follow that American habit here and attempts to construct a discourse in which only a despised liberal elite are interested in science, the arts, history and ideas. Such wickedness reminds one of those who opposed Education For All at the end of the nineteenth century. All knowledge should be free and available and all people should be encouraged to acquire it. It will not necessarily lead to liberalism, but it will lead to understanding and a desire for openness and decent, non-tribalist exchanges of the kind that can only enrich our democracy."
In honor of Star Wars day, May the fourth be with you, Stephen Fry! <3
"When I was growing up ‘elitism’ was a word sneered from the lips of the Left, now it is sneered from the lips of the Right. The sneering was ugly then and it is ugly now. Knowledge, science, understanding, literacy and curiosity are absolute goods and to hell with anyone who tries to follow that American habit here and attempts to construct a discourse in which only a despised liberal elite are interested in science, the arts, history and ideas. Such wickedness reminds one of those who opposed Education For All at the end of the nineteenth century. All knowledge should be free and available and all people should be encouraged to acquire it. It will not necessarily lead to liberalism, but it will lead to understanding and a desire for openness and decent, non-tribalist exchanges of the kind that can only enrich our democracy."
In honor of Star Wars day, May the fourth be with you, Stephen Fry! <3