But it seemed to be degraded by the rise of visual culture and the efforts of elite intellectuals to keep crafting an ever more modern culture that would protect their position and exclude those below them. This book doesn’t clearly determine “what happened” to the autodidactic working-class tradition. The self-taught workers clashed with Marxists and gravitated to their own common sense vision of the good, based on a type of “Practical Christianity” of prudence and good works that they had gleaned from their liberal readings.
It has always been hard for me to understand how people who have the easy opportunity to learn don’t take it. There were many brilliant people who did their best to claim for themselves a part of the wider intellectual world, despite the incredible constraints that fate had placed upon them. It was common for workers at one time to write their own biographies and these ordinary Britishers thus left behind a rich set of accounts about their lives. Miners kept their own mongrel libraries, leaving us behind a record of their interests and reading habits. It was common for a miller or blacksmith to prop a book by their workstation and sneak as many pages as they could of reading a day. I felt a certain sense of identity with the stories collected here since I could recognize many of these ordinary readers as kin. The tradition of the autodidact was strong in the British working class and eventually blossomed into the popular base of the Labor Party. In the past there was a great hunger for literature of all types among miners, colliers, factory workers and many other typically working class professions.
In general this may be true, but as this book shows that is hardly an ineffable condition. Today the white working-class of Western societies is typically stereotyped as being unintellectual.
This book is a resounding case for optimism. The bedrock of conservatism is a fundamental pessimism about the behavior of other people whereas progressivism is based on optimism.
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