Anti-austerity protest in Spain; Dominique Faget AFP/Getty Image 

Perhaps it is one of the less obvious consequences of the credentialism which is the bane of our era that even quite ordinary people seem to have been persuaded that, in order to be taken seriously, they must think and talk and write like intellectuals. Every self-respecting media commentator, for example, now approaches the news as the Doctor in Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck does the symptoms of his eponymous patient: as redundant confirmation of his pre-conceived diagnosis. “Oh! meine Theorie!” he cries triumphantly. Nor, in the present case, is it just the media pundit’s own intellectual vanity to which we owe his theory. Those he writes for expect it of him. Along with the news, they want some explanation of why things happen and what they mean at the same time. And, as such theories tend to fall into one of two broad classifications more or less corresponding to conservative and progressive political tendencies, all this theorizing tends to increase the already existing tendency for the media to fragment along partisan lines.

That, in itself, might not be so bad, but the increasing moralization of partisanship over the past half-century or so has made its own baneful contribution to the process. That is, the belief on both sides that the political struggle is not just between different political philosophies or visions of the good society but between right and wrong or even good and evil