"Flippancy, the most hopeless form of intellectual vice"
About this Quote
Gissing goes for the throat with a Victorian moralist's precision: flippancy is not just bad manners, it's a dead-end ideology. Calling it "the most hopeless form of intellectual vice" frames thoughtlessness as something more corrosive than ignorance. Ignorance can be remedied; even cruelty can be confronted. Flippancy is slipperier. It treats seriousness as naivete, and it turns every claim into a punchline before it can be tested.
The word "hopeless" is the tell. Gissing isn't merely annoyed by jokes; he's diagnosing a posture that immunizes itself against learning. Flippancy signals sophistication while refusing the risks that come with conviction: being wrong, being moved, being obligated. It's the vice of the clever person who wants the social rewards of intelligence without the ethical labor of attention. In that sense it's parasitic: it feeds on ideas (and other people's earnestness) but won't invest in them.
As a novelist who chronicled the brutal economics of respectability and the humiliations of cultural striving, Gissing would have seen flippancy as a class weapon as much as a personal failing. The salon quip, the knowing sneer, the breezy dismissal of "sentiment" all let the comfortable keep suffering at arm's length. His line anticipates a modern media ecology where irony is both shield and currency. When everything is treated as content, flippancy becomes a style of dominance: you can always retreat to "I was kidding" and never have to reckon with what you implied. Gissing's sting is that this isn't lightness; it's evasion dressed up as wit.
The word "hopeless" is the tell. Gissing isn't merely annoyed by jokes; he's diagnosing a posture that immunizes itself against learning. Flippancy signals sophistication while refusing the risks that come with conviction: being wrong, being moved, being obligated. It's the vice of the clever person who wants the social rewards of intelligence without the ethical labor of attention. In that sense it's parasitic: it feeds on ideas (and other people's earnestness) but won't invest in them.
As a novelist who chronicled the brutal economics of respectability and the humiliations of cultural striving, Gissing would have seen flippancy as a class weapon as much as a personal failing. The salon quip, the knowing sneer, the breezy dismissal of "sentiment" all let the comfortable keep suffering at arm's length. His line anticipates a modern media ecology where irony is both shield and currency. When everything is treated as content, flippancy becomes a style of dominance: you can always retreat to "I was kidding" and never have to reckon with what you implied. Gissing's sting is that this isn't lightness; it's evasion dressed up as wit.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
|---|
More Quotes by George
Add to List
