Actor Simon Pegg may have thought he was making an original statement when he lamented to Radio Times that modern science fiction and comic books are “childish” and that we’re all on the way to becoming so infantilized and dumbed down we can’t think about anything serious, as reported by i09, but his statements are just the latest variation of cultural snobbery masquerading as concern for the impending downfall of society. (For a primer, see BookRiot’s translations of “Shit Book Snobs Say”).

i09 does a great job of defending the nuances of comics and science fiction, but this issue crops up every few months and isn’t specific to those fields. I don’t need to know much about superheroes to relate, because I do read two genres that are often seen as just as deplorable, ruinous and facile: romance and young adult. In the wake of the success of “Fifty Shades of Grey,” it’s become almost obligatory for any respectable publication to offer simultaneous awe at its commercial success while finding even faint praise too kind.

Pegg’s comments arrive just a few months after author Jonathan Franzen told literary journal Booth, “Most of what people read, if you go to the bookshelf in the airport convenience store and look at what’s there, even if it doesn’t have a YA on the spine, is YA in its moral simplicity. People don’t want moral complexity. Moral complexity is a luxury.” The truth is, there’s nothing more childish or morally simplistic than trying to tell other people what forms of pop culture they should be consuming, as if their appreciation of entertainment should be predicated on someone else’s taste—because that sounds like the height of adulthood, doesn’t it?

Yet apparently it makes Pegg and Franzen feel better about themselves to look down upon the masses reading their preferred books or movies or TV shows, ones that may or may not make us think about, as Pegg put it, “real-world issues.” It’s elitism plain and simple, dressed up to seem like it’s furthering a greater cause. Whatever the supposed motivation, there’s no disguising that their essential argument boils down to: I don’t like what other people are reading or watching; my choices are better, not just for me, but for everyone else.

Thankfully, there’s been a backlash against this kind of hysterical hierarchy as readers and fans of all sorts of genres are banding together and proudly declaring their interests, regardless of what the naysayers think. During the recent #IReadYA hashtag on Twitter, YA author Maureen Johnson tweeted, “#IreadYA also because annoying literary snobs is a lot of fun, and that kind of fun should not be underrated.”

Former literary snobs are seeing the error of their ways (take note, Pegg and Franzen). Professor James W. Hall, author of “Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century’s Biggest Bestsellers,” explored how he learned to love bestsellers by teaching them in the classroom.

“I was so dedicated to spreading the gospel of high road literary values that, on a whim, in 1984 I designed a course featuring the most popular American bestsellers of all time, with the sole intention of showing their inferiority to the literary canon.  A semester of snark is what I had in mind… As you might guess, that’s not exactly how it panned out. Instead, I was gobsmacked by the likes of Scarlett O’Hara and Allison McKenzie (the protagonist of ‘Peyton Place.’) I was awed by what these, and other popular novels had to offer, their sweeping panoramas, their density of factual information, their emotional intensity and raw power…In that semester the passion for reading I’d once had as a kid and lost in the years of academic study was rekindled, and suddenly I began to question many of my long-held assumptions about ‘literature.’”