On Antipodean Anti-Intellectualism

And how our settler-colonial identity makes it different than other places'

Bill Pearson, a decidedly pro-intellectual New Zealand writer.

Antipodean anti-intellectualism has a distinct flavor. It surprised me when I moved to New Zealand: I didn’t expect a country with semi-socialized universities and comparatively good labor laws to be so hostile towards intellectualism. Part of the reason I moved here was because New Zealand’s socialized healthcare and union-protected jobs give me time to write that I didn’t have in the States, where all my work was monitored and timed. I came here thinking lots of people would use their languid afternoons in public sector jobs to read, write, paint, or make music. I was wrong.

A few years ago, a friend who I love dearly and I got into an argument outside a nightclub. We’d had a few drinks, I referenced Goethe to try and explain something I’d been feeling, and her face twisted in irritation. “You’re so pretentious,” she told me. I immediately pushed back. “I explained the quote as I said it. I’m not trying to make anyone feel dumb,” I said. She compromised. “You don’t understand. If you talk like that, people are going to think you’re pretentious,” she said. I told her I didn’t care what people thought about me, and that there was no point bending over backwards to appease people who would never respect me anyway. We didn’t settle the argument. She went back inside, exasperated, and left me with the impression I was out of step with the New Zealand settler-state’s rhythms.

It’s been three years since then and I now think she was trying to warn me. This place is quietly but fiercely anti-intellectual and I’ve been disciplined for it time and time again. I’ve been called “pretentious” by university-educated people for buying $10 tickets to the orchestra, for enjoying art galleries, and for liking nice wine. I’ve been sneered at for citing magazine articles in conversations they’re relevant to, laughed at for enjoying the ballet, and mockingly referred to as a “reader” to mark that I’m different. Very rarely do people realize they’re disciplining me: crossing the line that demarcates mass culture from “pretension” triggers something deep in their unconscious and activates them like sleeper cell agents. It’s been bewildering to experience, though, and I’ve had to develop a sense for who I can and can’t be myself around as a result.

I’ve never tolerated anti-intellectualism. I was born in Brooklyn, New York and raised in the university town of Princeton, New Jersey, which is a rare bubble where youthful intellectualism is encouraged rather than punished. My stepmother once told me that one of my most memorable traits is that I “don’t suffer fools.” My hometown is the inverse of most of the United States, and I didn’t encounter American anti-intellectualism until my teens. I quickly escaped it because my dad paid for a good education at boarding school. I then got a good tertiary education at the University of Pittsburgh. I’m very, very lucky to have had people actively encourage my intellectual pursuits my whole life, and as an ardent communist, I try to do the same for everyone else.

Concurrently, I don’t tolerate people who shame their peers for intellectual pursuits. People who do so strike me as being the same sort as those who’d mock their peers for singing songs, writing poems, or being gay. Anti-intellectualism is universal and I imagine there are people in China who snigger at their peers for poking their heads above the parapet like there are in the U.S. and New Zealand. What differs is whether a culture incentivizes anti-intellectualism or discourages it. New Zealand does the former.

From what I’ve read, New Zealand’s anti-intellectualism is a result of both the imported English class system and the settler-colony’s relationship to the metropole. The first manifestation, the English class system, is easier to see. When someone scoffs “She’s trying to be Picasso, is she?” upon learning their friend has started painting, you can hear the prim, curtain-twitching, stiff-upper lip-evangelizing English person who taught them to talk like that standing in their shadow. In her Bookforum review of Jacqueline Rose’s The Plague: Living Death in Our Times, Sarah Nicole Prickett writes that England’s rigid class system encourages people to punish each other for deviating from the norm. “The classism that seems so native to England... manifests as a distaste for pretense, for striving, even for straying... ‘When you’re born, you’re done for,’” Prickett writes, citing writer Arnold Bennett’s correspondence with writer Hugh Walpole. People punish each other for “striving and straying” so much in New Zealand that it has a local name: “Tall Poppy Syndrome.” It never fails to make me sad when I encounter it in the wild, especially when I see it done to people without my stubbornness and confidence.

The second reason for Antipodean anti-intellectualism, the settler-colony’s relationship to the metropole, seems more complicated. In his 1952 Landfall essay “Fretful Sleepers,” socialist New Zealand author Bill Pearson chalks it up to colonial insecurity about the country’s relationship to England and later America. “Generally, the sense of inferiority makes us all the more determined to enforce the level,” he writes. “We like to be told we are the Dominion most like England, yet an English accent makes us feel we are being imposed on.” English education would’ve triggered that feeling, too. This cultural insecurity results from an insecure national identity, born of the fact that the same people England drove out as starving refugees or cannon fodder also conquered Māori land. Former Green Party MP Catherine Delahunty writes that this colonial seizure brought them “material advantage and spiritual emptiness.” It made for a class of people caught between a parent country that doesn’t love them and a fear of being truly independent, or between memory and desire. At its worst, that insecure settler identity manifests as the Antipodean sneer.

In “Fretful Sleepers,” Pearson writes that the worst kind of New Zealand man “grins rather than smiles,” and that his “most common facial expression is a sneer.” I sometimes see that sneer when it’s gotten too late at the bar and people feel less inhibited. Pearson describes it as the disciplinary mechanism of a man who’s always ready to “warn other comers ‘Don’t go that way, mate.’” In his telling, “that way” is “effeminacy” if you comment on a sunset’s beauty, “bolshiness” if you express left-wing thought, or “anti-social behavior” if you bristle at bullying. I see it as the libidinal pleasure of someone relishing the permission his culture gave him to punish other people. It’s also sometimes the precursor to violence. Every man who’s tried to punch me in this country, usually because I’m talking to a woman they want to fuck, has approached me with that drunken sneer.

I’m very lucky to have intellectual friends here, but I still get sad when I see left-wing people cut each other down to size for reading Dostoevsky or wanting to try new things. At its worst, I view anti-intellectualism as a character flaw comparable to, if not quite as severe as, racism and homophobia. Knowledge can be used just as easily to liberate as to dominate, and the ruling class segregates its children into good schools and defunds public ones because they want us dumb. We don’t need to police each other and help them.

Tāmaki (Auckland) Events

• The Capitol Cinema Film Club is showing Cooley High on Wednesday, July 30 at 8pm. They’ve never shown me a bad movie and you can buy tickets here.

Recommended Reading

• I liked this essay by Kate Wagner on how Wikipedia’s taxonomical layout changed how we interact with information.

• I also liked this other essay by Kate Wagner on how to write essays. She’s been doing a lot of great work lately.

• I liked this essay by Hannah Williams about how Swedish author Gun-Britt Sundström wrote a still pertinent novel on “the marriage question” in 1976.

• I liked this essay by Caitlín Doherty about how Dubai is evil. We have to stop calling pistachio chocolate “Dubai chocolate.” It’s a slave state’s attempt at PR and we don’t need to rehabilitate them because they’re giving us treats.