"The supreme vice is shallowness"

I read De Profundis by Oscar Wilde over the weekend. It's had quite a disproportionate effect on me. I don't suppose I'm the only person who didn't know beforehand that it is in effect a long, long letter of reproach and admonishment from Wilde, imprisoned in Reading Gaol, to Lord Alfred Douglas, known forever to anyone who knows anything about Wilde as Bosie. Bosie would have been unknown after his death were in not for his tragic love affair with one of literature's great geniuses (or should that be genii?)

"The supreme vice is shallowness" Wilde says on more than one occasion, as he lambasts Bosie for behaviour which, when one reads it, makes one wonder how he can ever have loved him. Tempers, sulks, cruelty, neglect seem to be according to this account, what characterised Bosie's behaviour towards his older lover. Wilde quotes Bosie as saying to him in a letter "When you are not on your pedestal you cease to be interesting." This is a young man enjoying the fruits of another's genius. Wilde repeatedly refers to his own genius, and to his own Life and Art with capital letters. It is a resolutely unfunny manuscript, devoid of bons mots or witticism, and comes from the heart of a desperately disappointed and confused man.

Shallowness is what the unenlightened might say is what lies at the heart of Wilde's brilliant writing. But it is shallowness as a thin layer on the surface of fanged social satire and comedies of manners. It is a shallowness that characterises the poetry of a less talented poet than himself as shallow. Were Wilde to see the shallowness which we observe now he ould spin in his grave.

Shallowness is what characterises quite a hefty slice of what passes for modern society. It derives from an almost vituperative refusal to consider things in any depth at all. It is a shallowness that tells schools that they must teach that Bullying Is Wrong; that they Shouldn't take Drugs, that Shakespeare is not so important to study and that perhaps other reading materials, like comics, should have their place on the English curriculum. It is shallowness as quite mind-exploding intellectual laziness which says that anything difficult should be dropped from the National Curriculum, and that fails to link the stepping away from intellectual rigour to the pettiness and ignorance of practically everyone in public life, from our top politicians to the appalling woman at passport control who thinks she has achieved something by putting on a uniform and being gioven tiny, unimportant powers.

It is demonstrated by smooth language which, on close analysis, either takes complex concepts and scientifically reduces them to a sheer gloss with an obvious right answer and wrong answer (Drugs are Wrong, Mums working is Right), or elevates the simplistic to something grandiose (Losing weight - eat less, move more, for God's sake. Practically every work of modern art which fetches large amounts at auction.). Look at the whole of the American election campaign. Never has so little been said by so few to so many,and never have so few swallowed it without challenge. I read today that the Republican campaign managers are salivating at the prospect of Sarah Palin's pregnant teenage daughter marrying her self-proclaimed redneck boyfriend, so sure are they that this grubby union will put them ahead in the polls for a week.

I coud go on for weeks, but I am today so sad at the lack of thought in most people's life. Thinking sets you free - the ability to disagree and debate with one another without taking offence or killing each other characterise us as sentient beings separate from our aniumal friends. Reason is what makes us human, and reason is being systematically whittled away to the point where if you diasagree with me you feel quite entitled to stab me, or insult me or lob a bomb into my home.

As some readers know, I think that if we taught kids to think for themselves we would have less violence, and fewer teenage mums, we woud have young people facing the future and embrace challenge and we would have a better educated workforce and a more civilised nation.

Rant over. I am sick at heart.