The Poets, the People, and the PrigsA false Poet is easily discovered and Neil Young is no Poet.
By Joseph Mackinnon
February 5, 2022
G.K. Chesterton argued there are three types of people. The first are the People, “the largest and probably the most valuable class.” They are the truckers. They are the frontline workers. They are the diligent and honest people holding our communities together and fixing the tears in our social fabric. They are patriotic and God-fearing mothers and fathers, sons and daughters—those who put food on our tables, gasoline in our cars, and heat into our homes. They fight our wars and keep us safe. They are predominantly the working- and middle-classes.
The second type, according to Chesterton, should be called Poets. “They are a nuisance to their families, but generally speaking, a blessing to mankind.” Unlike those in the next category, Poets rise above the People by understanding them.
By poets, as I have said, I do not mean people who write poetry, or indeed people who write anything. I mean such people as, having culture and imagination, use them to understand and share the feelings of their fellows; as against those who use them to rise to what they call a higher plane.
The third type rises above the People by refusing to understand them. They are the critics, the destroyers, the users—those who diminish the People, suggesting that their “dim, strange preferences are prejudices and superstitions.” Chesterton deemed those intellectuals and technocrats among this allegedly “thoughtful type” “Prigs.” Unlike the People and the Poet, these Prigs are a “blight and a desolation both to their families and also to mankind.”
These three types don’t necessarily align with classes or estates, but rather with vocations and dispositions. The first build the world and maintain it. The second extol the first, helping them to record their dreams and achievements as well as to develop a vocabulary for the world they want. The third have the political, social, and or financial means—or ideological bona fides—to disassociate from the first, and tend to lack the interest to be a party to the second.
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A great example of a recent migration from the second type to the third, made possible by punishment of the first, has been the stuff of many conversations this past week. The migrant: Neil Young. Though The Nation’s John Semley regards him as the “poet of disillusionment,” Young certainly is no longer a Poet. He hasn’t been one for a long time. Now, officially, he is a Prig.
How can we be sure Young has made the journey? First, a Poet is unlikely to seek to “rise to a higher plane” at the expense of the People and certainly not to the satisfaction of the Prigs. Young has done just that, not just in his latest trite and self-interested maneuver, but over the years—protesting clean and ethical Albertan oil, the production of which kept the men of at least two provinces employed; protesting the Dakota Access, again taking food out of working-class families’ mouths, helping hinder energy independence, increasing the price of gas, and keeping the Saudis happy; fear-mongering about gays spreading AIDS in the 1980s (a ploy once used by Dr. Anthony Fauci, albeit in a more determined fashion) and so forth.
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Source:
https://amgreatness.com/2022/02/05/the-poets-the-people-and-the-prigs/
