Martin Amis was the antidote to Twitter, Facebook and Google

The author’s caustic intolerance of stupidity did not make him any friends, and he was long criticised for it, but Martin Amis had a point.

Martin Amis. His patrician snarl made his observations so entertainingly obnoxious.

It’s the patrician snarl that makes the observation so entertainingly obnoxious. “There is,” Martin Amis drawls, “a great convulsion of stupidity happening in the world.” The problem, he suggests, is “mostly to do with television”. The comments were made in a 1985 interview with Germaine Greer, which was shown (ironically enough) on television. More than one friend sent it to me in the aftermath of Amis’s death 10 days ago.

That accent. That opinion. Neither is suitable for public broadcast in the 21st century. The modern sensibility – nervously attuned to questions of privilege, suspicious of cultural hierarchy – recoils from such elitism. It is no longer the done thing for writers to go on television to make unflattering pronouncements about the low intelligence of the general public. A victory for politeness in an otherwise degraded public discourse – but also a kind of loss. Bear with me.

Amis was correct about the convulsions of stupidity he sensed in the culture. He was also (obviously) intelligent enough to see that he was not the first person to feel that way. “All writers think the world is reaching its nadir. This age will be lamented like the last,” he told Greer. The “moronic inferno” of “mass, gross, ever-distracting human infamy”, Amis wrote elsewhere, “is global and probably eternal”. Society is always being convulsed with stupidity because stupidity is the greater portion of human nature. What changes is whether anybody is brave enough to point this out.

British author and novelist Martin Amis in 2010.

That unusually thankless task has generally fallen to a certain kind of elitist writer. For most of modern history, the intellectual snob has played a crucial and underappreciated role in cultural life – despising the public, goading the public, whingeing about the public. But also, I think, improving us.

“How stupid people are, how dimwitted,” complained that noble enemy of bourgeois witlessness, novelist Gustave Flaubert. Such was the vehemence of his campaign against mediocrity that he came to believe his intolerance of stupidity amounted to a mental disorder, a kind of “dementia”. A whole vicious and despairing tradition of English satire, from Alexander Pope to Evelyn Waugh, is founded on the fear that the forces of idiocy are overwhelming the fragile bastions of culture and good sense.

Such elitism is eminently capable of being mad and unpleasant. It is very often wrongheaded. Amis’s suggestion, floated in a 2017 interview, that the rise of Donald Trump might be successfully combated by wider public familiarity with Ovid’s Metamorphoses was impractical. But one does not have to believe these scoffing highbrows are nice or even correct to believe they can usefully serve society.

Martin Amis at an event [prior to the Edinburgh International Book Festival in 2014. {octure: Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert/Getty Images

All ages have their idiocies, their bovine pieties. People could always be reading more. It takes some courage to point this out. The forces of human stupidity are powerful and the few men and women brave enough to face them must be caustic in their opposition.

Such snobs provoke and irritate but they can also rouse and inspire – as the tributes to Amis published after his death showed. To feel uneasy that one is not reading enough or thinking seriously enough? Well, it is a fruitful and improving unease. Sometimes we have to be stung into improvement.

No writer today is willing to take to the public broadcasters to chastise society for its stupidities with anything approaching Amisian vigour. An age of populism and smartphone addiction is hardly lacking in targets for enlightened censure. Perhaps Amis, who was hounded from public life for his haughty superiority, is a cautionary tale. But our egalitarian age demands friendly condescension from its public intellectuals.

There is an important hypocrisy here. In politics we deplore the man who appeals to the lowest instinct of the crowd and call him a demagogue. In culture, we praise him and call him “relatable”. In politics, the man who takes virtuous but unpopular positions is principled. In culture he is a prig. But the elitist is very often a better friend of the ordinary person than the friendly daytime TV presenter.

Martin Amis. No writer today is willing to take to the public broadcasters to chastise society for its stupidities with anything approaching Amisian vigour. Picture: Leonardo Cendamo/Getty Images

He wants something better for the ordinary person. The TV presenter merely wants his cash. We must never forget that the people who would most like us to be stupid are the executives of Twitter, Facebook, Google and Amazon.

Snobs are rarely nice people. The role requires a certain arrogance and in some cases a positively psychopathic indifference to public opinion. Waugh was not a pleasant man. Neither was Flaubert. Amis’s own life was hardly an essay in intellectual humility and sexual continence. But following a week of headlines about the death of Rolf Harris, we might also recall that there is often something sinister about the light entertainer.

I fear I have made the role of the intellectual seem inevitably rather cruel and mean.

WH Auden made the case more beautifully and more positively than I am able to in a poem addressed to his friend, writer Christopher Isherwood:

“So in this hour of crisis and dismay

What better than your strict and adult pen

Can warn us from the colours and the consolations,

The showy arid works … ”

In our own hour of crisis and dismay, we need a strict and adult pen more keenly than ever – however harsh its censures.

THE TIMES