normie wisdom: 1

First post in a series

When Hugh Trevor-Roper was a young historian he became friends with with the art connoisseur Bernard Berenson. Berenson was fifty years older than Trevor-Roper, and rarely left his home outside Florence, so Trevor-Roper enlivened his octogenarian friend’s dull days with maliciously gossipy letters, especially about his colleagues at Oxford. Here is what he had to say (on 18 January 1951) about C.S. Lewis:

Do you know C.S. Lewis? In case you don’t, let me offer a brief character-sketch. Envisage (if you can) a man who combines the face and figure of a hog-reever or earth-stopper with the mind and thought of a Desert Father of the fifth century, preoccupied with meditations of inelegant theological obscenity; a powerful mind warped by erudite philistinism, blackened by systematic bigotry, and directed by a positive detestation of such profane frivolities as art, literature, and, of course, poetry; a purple-faced bachelor and misogynist, living alone in rooms of inconceivable hideousness, secretly consuming vast quantities of his favorite dish, beefsteak-and-kidney pudding; periodically trembling at the mere apprehension of a feminine footfall; and all the while distilling his morbid and illiberal thoughts into volumes of best-selling prurient religiosity and such reactionary nihilism as is indicated by the gleeful title, The Abolition of Man.

The first thing to say about this is that it’s very funny. The second thing to say is that it makes no pretense to accuracy. I’m sure Trevor-Roper knew perfectly well that The Abolition of Man is not what Lewis hopes for but what he fears, and that he does not detest literature and poetry but rather adores them. Old Hughie’s having his bit of fun.

Still, there’s no doubt that the letter reflects Trevor-Roper’s actual attitude towards Lewis, and I want to zero in on the key phrase: “a powerful mind warped by erudite philistinism.” It’s a double judgment: he detests Lewis as a philistine – but he doesn’t hesitate to credit him with “a powerful mind.” I think that’s very important, not just for understanding how Trevor Roper thought but for understanding how the intelligentsia, especially within the academy, has been orienting itself to the world for the past hundred years or so.

For Trevor-Roper, the problem with Lewis isn’t that he stupid. Trevor-Roper is perfectly aware of Lewis’s exceptional intelligence, and if pressed he might even have acknowledged that Lewis was more intelligent than he himself – certainly more profoundly learned. What Trevor-Roper despises is Lewis’s aesthetic and emotional response to the world, his moral taste – in a word, his affections, in the Augustinian and Jonathan-Edwardsian sense. Trevor-Roper was appalled by Lewis because Lewis showed that a person could be prodigiously intelligent and nevertheless in other respects be – well, a normie.

I’m going to use that as a technical term here: a normie is someone whose responses to the world, whose affections, are close to those of the average person. This is not the only way it’s used, of course: in Angela Nagle’s 2017 book Kill All Normies normies are essentially political centrists, people who accept the status quo rather than embracing revolutionary change from the right or the left. But I think a more accurate sense of the word’s connotations is outlined in a post on the Merriam-Webster “Words We’re Watching” blog that wrestles with it: “The term normie has emerged as both a noun and an adjective referring to one whose tastes, lifestyle, habits, and attitude are mainstream and far from the cutting edge, or a person who is otherwise not notable or remarkable” – but then, at the end of the post, there’s an acknowledgment that “the word has lately flattened out and is now occasionally embraced as a term of ironic self-mockery. The emergence of the term normcore, which evokes a fashion style noted for being deliberately bland and unremarkable, might have helped to neutralize normie and bring the word back into the realm of cool — however that adds up.”

A rather hand-wavy conclusion. But in essence: “Normie” began as a term of disparagement but has been claimed by (a) the committed ironists and (b) the very people against which it was originally deployed – a relatively common event in the history of disparagement, as illustrated by the history of such words as “Methodist” and “Quaker.”

But whether you use the word in a pejorative or a commendatory sense, it’s important to recognize that normieness is a matter of “tastes, lifestyle, habits, and attitude” – or, as I prefer, affections – rather than intelligence. It is hard for people who disparage normies to keep this in mind, and maybe even for the rest of us. To stick with the Inklings for a moment: early in his wonderful book about Tolkien, The Road to Middle-Earth, Tom Shippey makes the offhand comment that “Tolkien’s mind was one of unmatchable subtlety, not without a streak of deliberate guile.” When I first read those words I was somewhat taken aback, because I was not accustomed to thinking of Tolkien’s mind as a subtle one. But the more I reflected on it the more convinced I became that Shippey is correct: Tolkien’s mind is exceptionally subtle, though his tastes and affections are simple – hobbitlike, as he himself often said: he once wrote in a letter, “I am in fact a Hobbit (in all but size).”

My initial reflexive skepticism about Shippey’s claim suggests a deeply-buried sense that the normie is unreflective in comparison to the person who takes a more adversarial attitude towards the conventional; an unfortunate assumption for me to be making, since I am pretty much a normie myself – but perhaps an understandable one, since I am a scholar of modernism, and modernism is essentially, as Paul Fussell pointed out many years ago, adversarial to the norm. So all the more credit to Hugh Trevor-Roper for managing to despise Lewis as a normie while crediting him with a powerful mind.

But the specific term that Trevor-Roper uses to describe Lewis’s orientation is not “normie” but rather “philistinism.” We’ll get into that in the next post in this series (whenever that may be).