He could be any American Conservative Southern God-fearing Christian…….Philip Larkin, inveighing against the “Europeanized” cultural elites of the 30s and 40s. I quote:
“I HATE anyone who does anything unusual at all, whether it is make a lot of MONEY or dress in silly CLOTHES or read books of foreign WORDS or know a lot about anything or play any musical INSTRUMENT… or pretend they believe anything out of the ordinary that requires a lot of courage, or a lot of generosity, or a lot of [self-control] to believe it – BECAUSE THEY ARE USUALLY SUCH SODDING NASTY PEOPLE THAT I KNOW IT IS 1000-1 THAT THEY ARE SHOWING OFF – and they don’t know it, but I know it."
He was one of a new breed of people to whom we owe the Know-Nothing, anti-intellectual attitudes now current, where anything polite, considerate, elegant, civilized or kind is regarded with suspicion; where ignorance is worn as a badge, and it is prefereable for the British troops, recently seized by Iran, to have "fought back" and started the next war. Pathetic and puerile, the bully rules. Epicureans are quite the opposite, or should be. What is notable about Larkin is that he was in his turn part of the "cultural elite" of the 50s and 60’s and was part of a group who were SODDING NASTY.
The arrogance is breath-taking. “They” are “showing off . . .and I know it,” asserts the pathetic Larkin. Remember — the deepest part of Dante’s hell was reserved for the sin of intellectual arrogance. If there were a hell, of course.