In 1986 the late Martin Amis published a book of essays called The Moronic Inferno – a title he had borrowed from the writers Saul Bellow and Wyndham Lewis. The essays focused on Amis’s dim view of culture in the USA. These aspects of American life have long since crossed the pond, and we are all now living in a Moronic Inferno – a veritable cauldron of cretinism and ignorance.
Our public discourse is more concerned with the career of a superannuated slapheaded former market trader
At the time of writing this piece, the lead story on national news bulletins for five whole days has been not Gaza, Syria or the Donbas, still less the plight of farmers or the elderly, but the travails of a BBC television ‘celebrity’ named Gregg Wallace. As readers of Spectator Life are doubtless too discerning to be familiar with Mr Wallace’s programmes, I should perhaps explain that he hosts a show called Master Chef, in which contestants compete to prepare and serve up toothsome recipes for Wallace’s delectation and judgment.
Wallace is accused of a series of indelicacies with women contestants, including reportedly making lewd and demeaning comments, boasting of his sexual prowess, and parading naked with his genitals concealed by a sock. He compounded his original offence at the weekend by posting an unwise comment on social media, charging his accusers with being a ‘handful of middle-class women of a certain age’. Though he has now apologised for that post, blaming it on the state of his mental health (of course), it looks very much as though his TV career will go the way of the disgraced Huw Edwards.
But my point is not the particular rights and wrongs of Wallace’s downfall. It is rather the obsessive preoccupation of our media with his sad case. At a time when the world is in a more perilous state than at any moment since the second world war, with ongoing conflicts in Ukraine, the Middle East and Sudan, and emboldened dictators in China, Russia, North Korea and Iran challenging and undermining the West, and with our economies teetering on the brink, our public discourse is more concerned with the career of a superannuated slapheaded former market trader and greengrocer who talks and behaves as what he is: a former Cockney barrow boy who learned his language and comportment in circa 1970.
Wallace and his ilk have steadily trivialised our culture. This war against intelligence has completely taken over the dying embers of our civilisation, and wokery now holds the whip hand over the commanding heights of our life. Politics, the internet, the arts, science, the media, academia, advertising, and even such once-revered institutions as the police, the judiciary and the armed forces have collapsed into the abyss. All are now more concerned with appearance than they are with grim reality.
As a historian, I cannot resist comparing the figures we respected in the past with those that we admire and emulate today. Can anyone imagine a Dickens, a Churchill, an Attlee or even an Olivier or Noël Coward behaving like capering fools in public as those who we revere today? Dignity and gravitas have departed, leaving behind trivia like sawdust swept from the stage at the end of a show.
At the risk of sounding like a disgusted retired colonel complaining to the Daily Telegraph from Tunbridge Wells, I first noticed the cult of the moron when society went into ecstasy over the absurd figure of the late Michael Jackson. That such a clearly disturbed and ludicrous figure, who was more in need of medical help than hero worship, should become the object of a quasi-religious mass devotion was a sign that society was somewhat sick.
Things have deteriorated at a dizzying pace since Jackson’s demise. We appear more concerned than ever with intently gazing into our own navels and fawning over our moronic heroes with vacuous grins pasted on our faces than we are about the very real threats to what is left of our way of life. The Gregg Wallace affair, in all its inane idiocy, is a storm warning disguised as a passing breeze.
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