On Classism

Dear Michelle,

One of the things that most upsets me is the way that people view and treat the poor. The situation has existed for as long as society has included enough opportunities for a significant gulf between the rich and the poor. Those who have little in the way of income and property are viewed as detestable by those who live lives of luxury. They are often regarded as savage, uncouth, and barbaric.

However, it is important to remember that they are still human. It is true that children learn what they live, and anyone who grew up in a poverty-stricken environment would turn out similarly. I once attended a seminar in which the speaker described the differences between lower-, middle-, and upper-class society. It wasn't something I'd thought of before, but there are certain things that you only learn to do by being part of a specific social class. For example, upper class people generally know how to manage servants, organise social functions like charity balls, and influence politicians. Middle class people are more likely to know how to balance a checkbook, function in parent-teacher associations, and plan errands around children's activities. Lower class people often gain the skills of finding free food, hiding from police, and navigating welfare bureaucracies.

The reason this is true is because people have no need (or no opportunity) to practise the skills of the other classes. In a nutshell, the reason that poor people act "uncivilised" is because it is necessary for their survival. I was once told that the reason that lower class citizens have such a pathological obsession with respect is because it's the one thing they have that they don't need to pay for. It doesn't matter what car you drive if your neighbours know not to mess with you.

The point is that while the behaviour of the poor people is sometimes unpleasant, it's no reason to discriminate against them, and I see this sort of bigotry often. It makes me sick, and I hope very much that you never succumb to the sort of elitist attitudes often held by the well-off.

On bigotry

Dear Michelle,

One of the most important things to me is that you do not grow up harbouring hatred towards other people. You will find many types of prejudice in this world, based on anything from ethnicity to gender to religion to nationality to wealth. This is the result of the human condition, as we are, underneath all the pretense and self-deception, still animals. We are exceptionally intelligent animals, being far more developed than other species but we are still animals.

A result of this fact is that we still have those animal instincts that we must work very hard to overcome. One of the instincts ingrained into us is a sense of selfishness. This has always been necessary, to an extent, for survival. But in the complicated world we have developed, it can lead to all sorts of conflict.

It is natural for people to see themselves as superiour. This often gets taken to extremes, and develops to the point of hatred for anyone who is different. Such hatred manifests as bigotry, which can be directed towards any number of targets. In our culture, the most prominent examples of this include the racism directed towards African Americans as a result of the slave trade, the slaughter of Jews in the Holocaust, and the disenfranchisement of women as a result of Victorian attitudes. Other less well-known examples include the treatment of the poor (especially during the Industrial Revolution, but even today), the interment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, and the mass deportations of Mexican-Americans during the 1930s.

It even manifests in smaller ways. Citizens of one state in America will develop intense, unthinking hatred for another state. Oklahomans and Texans hold a deep rivalry for one another, as do people from Michigan versus Ohio. It seems to me that the closer a group of people is to someone, the more that person will value the group. That is, a person may defend his family against others in his city, but defend the city against those from other towns, and again prefers his state to other states, but his country over other countries. Likewise, someone of Indian descent supports other Indians against those from different ethnicities. And so on.

My point is, there is no longer a need for this. Bigotry is an outmoded concept that we, as a species, have yet to give up. But if there's one thing that I want you to learn as you grow, it's that all people are worthwhile, and if you do decide to hate anyone, that you do it for who that specific person is, rather than where he was born, or what religion he follows, or what ethnicity he belongs to, or how much money he makes, or any other specious criteria.