A Treatise on Pretentiousness and Politics

With pre-emptive nostalgia already groping our heartstrings, the night of Nov. 4 will mark the end of a long American journey, not to mention the culminating moment of historical necessity. Barring another interference from the Supreme Hoax, there will have been able to have been no other way. I envision a three-minute montage, accompanied by the theme song of Dawson’s Creek, memorializing the whole story. This has been a process full of unexpected twists and turns. It has taught us much about ourselves, and it has answered many of our important questions. What is a wannabe renegade paraplegic? This is one question that has been answered.

A wannabe renegade paraplegic is pretentious. A WRP, as Defense Department junkies like to call them, is pretentious because he is pretending to be a renegade, or a renegade paraplegic. Renegadism and paraplegisy are not states one can sensibly strive to achieve—one is a renegade, or a paraplegic, or not.

But wannabe do-gooders and wannabe intellectuals are not pretentious. Being a do-gooder or an intellectual takes a lot of wanting to be—becoming one of these is an arduous struggle toward an ideal.

The word “pretentious” is thrown around a lot in these parts. The Oxford English Dictionary, every extant copy of which should be incinerated for its pompous British disposition, defines the word as “attempting to impress by affecting greater importance or merit than is actually possessed; making an exaggerated outward display.” Pretentious: faking something considered valuable; showy.

As an exposed MI-6 operative (Misunderstood Intellectual-Six), I have, several times, mostly behind my back, been accused of pretentiousness. (Something has gone awry in the development of a language when too many adjectives derived from nouns develop their own, new, doubly-suffixed, and doubly-abstract nouns; thus the interestingness of pretentiousless prose.) I do not dispute their claim here. But I wonder why we use “pretentious” strictly to describe intellectual pretenders so that the detected theatricality can only be that of depth, complexity, or abstraction.

After all, we value other qualities, like humility, down-to-earthedness, and morality. But the affectation of these usually does not receive the show-stopping label of “pretentious.” People who play up their niceness are “fake.” People who show off compassion are “self-righteous.” There is no apt word for the overactors of fitted-in social awesomeness, even though these are the most unpleasant of all carriers of pretentiousness. What could be more “showily affectatious of importance and merit” than the Facebook album documenting the funness of last weekend’s party?

Only, it seems, a reference in class discussion to a writer not on the reading list. It’s just not fair! I saw one poor soul stoned to death in front of Schermerhorn for bringing up Nietzsche during an Art Hum class on the Parthenon.

Perhaps this is the case because intellect is a highly valued commodity at a university. But this doesn’t fully the answer the question.

“Pretentious” is used to condemn things we do not or cannot understand, such as references to writers we have not read. The word is commonly used to insult abstract art. The rainbow sprinkle bird feces on a welcome mat are, most certainly “pretentious.” But what does pretentious mean here? Well, unable to criticize contemporary art based on standard expectations of what art should be or do or what we believe, the intellectually insecure attack the intentions of the work’s creator instead of the work itself. When we claim the art is pretentious, we mean that the artist didn’t actually feel or think much but wanted to convince us that he did.

The problem is that we are at once highly intimidated by what we don’t understand, and at the same time afraid of concrete truths. Even at liberal universities, people are afraid to believe something nowadays. The common perception today is that an education should train one to think and be open-minded, but that holding any specific belief would be limiting.

Problematic. The point of an education should be more than to develop a super-mind—disciplined, nuanced, “open.” I do not want to end up a more sophisticated sponge than the one I was born. Education should also conclude with some personal understanding of things, so that further thought and action can take place.

Otherwise, we permanently base our judgments on positive or negative intuitions. What we don’t like we call “pretentious”—it is motivated by a desire to showboat. What we do like we call “interesting”—there seems to be some meaning there, but we will not go so far as to define it, let alone to accept or reject it based on its moral assumptions. We have been robbed of the most obvious terms of evaluation: good, bad, right, wrong.

Perhaps this is because of the contemporary emphasis on balance and nuance. Or maybe we’ve just grown stupid. Blame television, with all its ghastly political coverage.
Which is why this is an election we’ll never forget. Obama and McCain—two pretentious-ass WRPs!

Alexi Shaw is a Columbia College senior majoring in Russian literature. Wordpecking runs alternate Fridays. Opinion@columbiaspectator.com