A Philistine Screed on Philistinism opens with “a wry line, aimed at the funny bone of the elite”:
“No passion in the world,” H.G. Wells declared, “is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s draft.”
Another witty bit of intellectual condescension:
I remember one snobby professor who described the standards of his university to new faculty members with a practiced line.“The admissions requirements of ____ University,” he liked to intone in comradely fashion, “can be found on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.”
Ostensibly, Carlin Romano is reviewing Frank Furedi’s Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone?: Confronting 21st Century Philistinism, but he has more to say on the topic of Philistines than on the lackluster text. I’d never heard of Hubbard’s The Philistine:
Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915), editor of The Philistine monthly magazine from 1895 to 1915. (At one point it boasted a circulation of more than 100,000 and published such writers as Rudyard Kipling and Stephen Crane.) A soap salesman and state-side admirer of William Morris who started the fabulously successful and semi-communal Roycrofters printing operation in Aurora, N.Y., Hubbard grew wealthy writing and publishing more than seven million, well, philistine words.His aphorisms exuded middle-class, can-do common sense, apotheosized hard work and efficiency, and bristled at preachy promulgation or nit-picking by cultural mandarins. “The world is moving so fast these days,” Hubbard wrote, “that the man who says it can’t be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it.”
“A committee,” he observed, “is a thing which takes a week to do what one good man can do in an hour.” Some credit him with the immortal, “Life is just one damn thing after another.” Hubbard’s business credo proclaimed, “I believe that when I make a sale I make a friend.” Perhaps more tellingly, for the history of philistinism from Arnold to shop-to-drop America today, he asserted, “I believe in sunshine, fresh air, spinach, applesauce, laughter, buttermilk, babies, bombazine, and chiffon, always remembering that the greatest word in the English language is ‘Sufficiency.’”