Not so many years ago, at an international conference, I had to take a colleague aside who was from the Home Counties around London. At this and other conferences, the first greeting to my wife and me was usually in a parody of a northern accent—“Eeh by gum. Ecky thump! Ello luv!” My colleague didn’t mean any harm, of course, and is a good friend to this day. But in England, I responded, a couple of years before Brexit and Trump, why were the northern white working class in this person’s and others’ comments still fair game as the last acceptable prejudice of middle-class intellectuals and elites?50
In classical literature, apart from the windswept romance of Emily Brontë on the blasted heaths of Wuthering Heights, northern England has been either neglected altogether or portrayed as a grime-ridden world of pitiable monotony. This is how Charles Dickens depicted the Lancashire town of Preston, near to where my wife, Pauline, and her family come from, when he visited it in 1854:
It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but, as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled…. It contained several large streets all very like one another … inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next…. You saw nothing … but what was severely workful.51
In the Depression of the 1930s, privately educated George Orwell indulged his acquired socialism by spending several weeks in the lodging houses of Northwest England to write The Road to Wigan Pier.52 With graphic depictions of working-class poverty in settings such as tripe shops and mining communities, Orwell had what one of his biographers, Thomas Ricks, described as an olfactory obsession.53 Compared to his own fortunate distinction, the working classes, like the “natives” of the Indian subcontinent where Orwell started his colonial career, were disgusting. They stank.
Socially successful individuals often have either inherited or acquired what the late French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu termed distinction—the “pure taste” that enables a person to see him- or herself as separate, or distinct, and able to determine what should be refused or avoided.54 In his book The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith—better known as the author of The Wealth of Nations—explained and approved of this sense of taste:
It is the acute and delicate discernment of the man of taste, who distinguishes the minute, and scarce perceptible differences of beauty and deformity … who excites our admiration, and seems to deserve our applause; and upon this foundation is grounded the greater part of the praise which is bestowed upon what are called the intellectual virtues.55
Wherever they are on the political spectrum, those who have distinction set the very standards of disgust, deciding what people should reject or find repulsive: “the tawdry, the cheap, the fulsome.”56
Those who are socially unsuccessful, or fail to possess distinction, can then turn into the objects of others’ disgust. According to Charles Darwin, in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, disgust “refers to something revolting, primarily in relation to the sense of taste as actually perceived or vividly imagined.”57 In its simplest sense, Darwin observed, disgust means “offensive to the taste.”58 Disgust is an elementary as well as an alimentary emotion. It makes the nose turn up and the lip curl.59
Disgust is also a moral emotion, as Darwin himself acknowledged when he commented how disgusted he felt when he was in Tierra del Fuego and “a native” touched his food. People and objects can be the source of our disgust. And in our reactions to people who disgust us, “we seem thus to say to the despised person that he smells offensively” [italics added for emphasis].60 People disgust us not only when they are grotesque but when their actions seem vulgar or cheap, when they fail to possess discernment and appear to embody all that is indelicate and obscene.61
Disgust and distinction, then, are the emotions of social exclusion—the means by which people may shrink from those who are disabled or express contempt for those whose race, ethnicity, or social class is different from their own.62
Distinction recoils when presented with expressive emotionality, labelling it as gauche or trash. Those few of us who somehow manage to achieve social mobility while hanging on to our own emotionality often report feeling out of place in our education and our lives. Profound depictions of this dilemma can be found in Strangers in Paradise, a collection of autobiographies of people from working-class backgrounds who went on to teach and work in the university setting. These narratives reveal that no matter what these individuals achieve, or how successful they become, even when they are presidents or vice chancellors of universities, they still feel like imposters who don’t belong.63 Often, this is because of their language; their “vulgar” speech, as others interpret it; their emotionality and direct manner of communication; and their lack of restrained humility, which, they find, embarrasses, offends, or disgusts their colleagues.64
I am definitely amongst them. For more than fifteen years, Boston College has been extremely supportive of me. I could scarcely have asked for more, and I remain one of its biggest supporters. But one thing I have never got the hang of is quiet humility. If you are congratulated on your achievements, what you are supposed to say is “It wasn’t me, really; it was all the others.” Most do say something like this. Many even mean it. Where I grew up, however, humility was a tool of oppression to keep the accomplishments and aspirations of the poor down. We were proud of what we could do against the odds. We were underdogs. We were not deferential. We were defiant. We celebrated every victory against authority, adversity, and exclusion. We trumpeted our own and one another’s achievements gloriously. It’s one thing to choose poverty or humility. It’s another thing altogether to have it thrust upon you.
My northern exposure has given me a lot professionally. It’s made me outwardly animated and inwardly grounded. It’s affected my habits and my hobbies of engaging in popular culture, which often help me establish a connection with teachers—many of whom also came up from the working class. But it’s also put me at a distance, sometimes, from my colleagues in the academy. Take TV as an example. I have good friends and colleagues in U.S. universities who will watch little else than American public broadcast TV that is viewed by around only 2 per cent of the U.S. population. There are other academics who proudly possess no TV at all. I can and do watch the costume dramas and intellectually oriented programmes of my academic peers, but especially when I am travelling and doing a bit of casual hotel viewing, I will, without a shred of guilt or irony, also watch many things that are part of popular culture—Deadliest Catch, Ice Road Truckers, Strictly Come Dancing, The Bachelor, Naked and Afraid, The Amazing Race, Eurovision Song Contest, anything with Bear Grylls, and all kinds of sitcoms. I do draw the line at Keeping Up With the Kardashians, however (even though I once found myself with Kim Kardashian in a casino elevator in Australia!). I love karaoke and a chance to belt out “Sympathy for the Devil” or “Total Eclipse of the Heart”! On a good night, I bowl better than 160, and I can usually hold my own in a game of pool in almost any bar in town (though it has nearly got me into trouble on more than one occasion).
I love these things about popular culture not because I am curious about them from an anthropological distance