The Ontological Persistence of the Common Idiot: A Nietzschean, Freudian, Marxian, Chaplinesque and Benny-Hillian Phenomenology of Woodhouse, Leeds

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I began my investigation, as all serious intellectual investigations should begin, by walking down Woodhouse Lane. I did not carry a clipboard. I did not consult a committee. I did not require a grant from a university department specialising in telling people things they already knew. I simply walked, observed and thought. And almost immediately I became aware that beneath the buildings, the students, the traffic and the general movement of human beings lay a phenomenon of extraordinary persistence: the common idiot.

This is the great intellectual oversight of Woodhouse. Everyone has concentrated on buildings, class, education, architecture, social change and the gradual transformation of the area, while almost nobody has considered the one constant capable of surviving all of them. Marx might have recognised the importance of class, and there is certainly enough human material in Woodhouse to keep a Marxist occupied for several lifetimes, but Marx failed to identify the deeper economic unit of Woodhouse: the idiot. The old industrial idiot could be found among the terraces and workshops, while the modern idiot emerges from entirely different circumstances, sometimes carrying a university degree and occasionally discussing capitalism while simultaneously having no idea where he has put his keys.

Then came the university, and with it the great transformation. The streets changed, the population changed, the intellectual atmosphere changed and, one might reasonably assume, the idiot would have been displaced by education. This assumption demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of both education and idiots. Freud would have looked into the unconscious, Nietzsche into the abyss and the possibility of the Übermensch, Marx into class, Chaplin into the absurdity of modern existence and Benny Hill, with considerably less philosophical pretension, into the spectacle of people running around. Yet none of them, as far as I am aware, thought to walk down Woodhouse Lane and consider what happens when the common idiot encounters higher education.

The answer is fascinating. The idiot adapts.

The common idiot is, in this respect, rather like an engineering brick: hard, dense, durable and astonishingly resistant to alteration. Buildings can be demolished, streets redeveloped, ideologies abandoned and populations transformed, but the essential density remains. Attempts to remove the idiot merely cause the idiot to relocate. Like a flea, it changes hosts. Like an amoeba, it changes shape according to its environment while somehow preserving the same fundamental intellectual structure.

And this is where the genius of Woodhouse becomes apparent. The idiot is not confined to one class, one occupation, one generation or one appearance. He exists, certainly, but so does she. The phenomenon can be gay, lesbian, transgender or heterosexual; religious or secular; liberal or conservative; a white woman, a black man, a Bengali, a Pakistani. It can be a student or a teacher, a resident or a visitor, somebody with a degree or somebody who regards the acquisition of knowledge as a personal insult. The point is not that any particular group is stupid. The point is far more devastating: idiocy respects no demographic boundary whatsoever.

And so I continued my walk, increasingly conscious that I was witnessing something that generations of intellectuals had somehow failed to isolate. Historians had examined the past, sociologists had examined society, philosophers had examined existence and planners had examined the physical environment, yet somehow the obvious subject had remained almost completely unexamined. They had looked at Woodhouse. I had looked at the people in Woodhouse.

Who, then, possesses the intellectual fortitude of mind to see all this? Who has the philosophical stamina to recognise the persistence of the common idiot through industrial decline, redevelopment, demographic change, higher education and the endlessly shifting cultural landscape of modern Leeds?

Me.

I alone, apparently, had possessed the supreme intellectual capacity to notice what was standing, walking, studying, teaching, shouting, arguing, wandering and occasionally running around directly in front of everyone else. I had walked through Woodhouse and discovered its deepest philosophical truth.

Everyone else saw Woodhouse.

I saw the idiot.