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fpbWarning: practically every LJer who comes to the end of this article is likely to find it very offensive.
The social power of the intellectual-worker class grows out of three specific features. Of one of them I have already spoken: their tendency to focus their social life on their fellow intellectuals, and to value their opinion. Compared to the conversation of an "outsider", that of a man of one's own trade always has a perceptivity, a direct relevance to and understanding of one's own condition, that others achieve only by chance or exceptional talent. And, by the same token, the praise of a member of one's own world is worth more than that of fifty outsiders, even if those outsiders should happen to be your own public. This tends to create a social group which is very cohesive, extraordinarily cohesive, in ideas, views, understanding and experience. Their views spring from the same peculiar experiences and tend to confirm each other.
The second important feature is their near-monopoly over communication in society. The very being of the intellectual-worker class is in the many different forms of communication that a modern society develops: it is in order to service press and publishing, showbusiness and advertising, that the intellectual-worker class comes into being. Therefore, these mass media, which are supposed to be the medium by which the whole of a society reflects on itself, immediately tend to acquire a particular tone, reflecting a particular experience, which is not that of the whole of society, but only of the class that works on them.
The third feature is the complete confidence of the intellectual-worker class in the world-view they have thus developped. It is not only the case that their experiences reinforce each other, but that they are, by and at large, conscious of working with their minds. They therefore conceive their views and experiences to be particularly reasonable and rational. They quickly develop a missionary urge to spread them around.
The end result of this is a formidable, phalanx-like appearance before the rest of the world. The intellectual worker class moves in a compact, unbroken formation, "as terrible as an army with banners". The ordinary person finds that they neither respect nor understand his/her views and experiences, and that they are all too ready to dictate their own standards of value and reason on the rest of the world. They do not think that is what they are doing; they find whatever they do rational and obvious and normative; they certainly have no idea that there is anything oppressive about it. It is just the way normal people do things.
Indeed, many of them began their adult lives by escaping working-class, middle-class, even upper-class homes in favour of the intellectual-worker-class milieu; and therefore, by a sort of invalid but terribly convincing mood - a mood, not a reasoning - they come to feel that the intellectual-worker mindset is the adult mindset. It has represented adulthood in their lives, and in the lives of their friends and colleagues; therefore it stands for adulthood in all lives. They may even think of their parents and relatives back home with affection; but it is the affection you would give to a backward or ignorant person, someone who has never won through to adulthood - an affection that involves a full measure of contempt.
The result of this attitude and mood is that mentalities that do not adhere to the intellectual-worker standard are unthinkingly, carelessly treated with contempt. It is not something that they even think about, and certainly they would rebel if charged with it. They did rebel, when, in the last election, the rest of America rose up against them. They never realized that they had done anything wrong; it had never occurred to them that they had treated anyone differently or slighted anyone's hard-won beliefs. Oh no: it just did not occur to them that anyone's views but their own were adult, hard-won, or based on personal experience. You people, believe me, acted as though you alone were the adults and everyone else were a pack of children to be patted on the head when acting cute or slapped on the wrist when getting out of line. Wagner created an utopia in which the best judge of artistic value - and, ultimately, of personal value - was a cobbler; but in the minds of most intellectual workers, the idea is not too far from the surface that the best thing that the cobbler can do for us is to stick to his last.
The error is profound. The experience of the intellectual worker class is in no way more rational than that of the average outsider; in fact, being since that experience is largely determined by the power of individual, unthinking, unmeciate class and caste similarity, there is very little about it that is even really based on individual openness to facts. It is a social construct, and a particularly obstinate and change-resistant one. I am a member of this class myself; goodness, if not I, who is? I know from the inside how unpopular it is to have changed one's mind, to have accepted that the average intellectual-worker view is just plain wrong, to have come, individually, to different conclusions. Someone characterized me as a martyr looking for a cause. The use of the word "martyr" in a negative sense, as a stupidly wrong-headed person who tries to show his difference from the herd by empty posturing, just shows how much contempt for individuality and opposition lies unnoticed in the average intellectual-worker breast. Martyrs are heroes. But intellectual workers do not care for heroes.
(Incidentally, I do not think that I am a martyr. In the words of Hamlet, would that I were so good a man.)
I will give one instance in which you all, as instinctive members of the intellectual worker class - for you are - have simply absorbed a stated attitude, and are in profound error. First, a demand, and a warning. Read carefully the next paragraph, and be sure that you understand what I am saying. And do not, having failed to read it carefully, send me comments calling me a homophobe or anything of the kind; they will be deleted as soon as read.
The error I mean is simply this: that every LJer I have read, without exception, takes for granted that homosexual and straight relationships are exactly of the same value, and that the resistance to "gay marriage" represents nothing but discrimination. And the core of the error is not in taking this position, but in taking it unthinkingly. There must be dozens of you who simply say: "I am in favour of gay marriage because discrimination offends me." The issue here is not to be or not to be in favour of gay marriage; it is to never have conceived that there is a reasonable opposing position. It is to never have stopped to think, think for oneself, whether there really is no difference between the union of a man and a woman and the union of two members of the same sex; whatever the conclusion you came to. And do not tell me that you have: the manner, the unthinking simplicity, the mere repetition of slogans, tell otherwise. Ninety per cent of you, if you gave any time to the issue at all, covered it in one sentence, one slogan - something like "I am not offended by equality" or the like. You were replacing thought by slogans on this particular matter. You have adopted this attitude quite simply because among the kind of people you are and live with it is a natural habit of mind to find anything that is labelled as "discrimination" just plain wrong, and not to need to think about it.
(Another point. I DO NOT want to engage in a debate on these matters with anyone. Keep your opinions. Only reflect on the way you reached them, and ask yourselves what really is the force of self-evidence in certain cases. I am speaking about a social environmnent here; I am not asking anyone to change their minds, only to become conscious of the environment in which you exist.)
Now try and be an actor or a writer in your own mind. Try and imagine a different experience. Make the imaginative effort of casting your mind into being a member of a group who does not think the same way as your group does; a group who maybe takes a different view, and maybe have had plenty of time to reach their own views on the matter; a group, at any rate, which is taught, by the law, the social experience, the mentality, of America, that their view and their votes are as good as yours. And imagine feeling patronized, preached to, not taken seriously. No adult person minds disagreement; experience, if nothing else, will teach any person who has reached his/her late twenties that there is no way that you can live with people who all agree with you. But no self-respecting, free-born citizen of a democracy will put up with being patronized and treated as a moral infant. That is what they are protesting about when they protest about "elitism"; and that is why, a week ago, Middle America briskly slapped Democrat America across the face. There is much more that could be said about this historical event - and maybe I will have more to say - but this is the essential: a large number of adults who were being treated as children took across their knee and spanked their children, who were behaving as the only adults in the land.
The social power of the intellectual-worker class grows out of three specific features. Of one of them I have already spoken: their tendency to focus their social life on their fellow intellectuals, and to value their opinion. Compared to the conversation of an "outsider", that of a man of one's own trade always has a perceptivity, a direct relevance to and understanding of one's own condition, that others achieve only by chance or exceptional talent. And, by the same token, the praise of a member of one's own world is worth more than that of fifty outsiders, even if those outsiders should happen to be your own public. This tends to create a social group which is very cohesive, extraordinarily cohesive, in ideas, views, understanding and experience. Their views spring from the same peculiar experiences and tend to confirm each other.
The second important feature is their near-monopoly over communication in society. The very being of the intellectual-worker class is in the many different forms of communication that a modern society develops: it is in order to service press and publishing, showbusiness and advertising, that the intellectual-worker class comes into being. Therefore, these mass media, which are supposed to be the medium by which the whole of a society reflects on itself, immediately tend to acquire a particular tone, reflecting a particular experience, which is not that of the whole of society, but only of the class that works on them.
The third feature is the complete confidence of the intellectual-worker class in the world-view they have thus developped. It is not only the case that their experiences reinforce each other, but that they are, by and at large, conscious of working with their minds. They therefore conceive their views and experiences to be particularly reasonable and rational. They quickly develop a missionary urge to spread them around.
The end result of this is a formidable, phalanx-like appearance before the rest of the world. The intellectual worker class moves in a compact, unbroken formation, "as terrible as an army with banners". The ordinary person finds that they neither respect nor understand his/her views and experiences, and that they are all too ready to dictate their own standards of value and reason on the rest of the world. They do not think that is what they are doing; they find whatever they do rational and obvious and normative; they certainly have no idea that there is anything oppressive about it. It is just the way normal people do things.
Indeed, many of them began their adult lives by escaping working-class, middle-class, even upper-class homes in favour of the intellectual-worker-class milieu; and therefore, by a sort of invalid but terribly convincing mood - a mood, not a reasoning - they come to feel that the intellectual-worker mindset is the adult mindset. It has represented adulthood in their lives, and in the lives of their friends and colleagues; therefore it stands for adulthood in all lives. They may even think of their parents and relatives back home with affection; but it is the affection you would give to a backward or ignorant person, someone who has never won through to adulthood - an affection that involves a full measure of contempt.
The result of this attitude and mood is that mentalities that do not adhere to the intellectual-worker standard are unthinkingly, carelessly treated with contempt. It is not something that they even think about, and certainly they would rebel if charged with it. They did rebel, when, in the last election, the rest of America rose up against them. They never realized that they had done anything wrong; it had never occurred to them that they had treated anyone differently or slighted anyone's hard-won beliefs. Oh no: it just did not occur to them that anyone's views but their own were adult, hard-won, or based on personal experience. You people, believe me, acted as though you alone were the adults and everyone else were a pack of children to be patted on the head when acting cute or slapped on the wrist when getting out of line. Wagner created an utopia in which the best judge of artistic value - and, ultimately, of personal value - was a cobbler; but in the minds of most intellectual workers, the idea is not too far from the surface that the best thing that the cobbler can do for us is to stick to his last.
The error is profound. The experience of the intellectual worker class is in no way more rational than that of the average outsider; in fact, being since that experience is largely determined by the power of individual, unthinking, unmeciate class and caste similarity, there is very little about it that is even really based on individual openness to facts. It is a social construct, and a particularly obstinate and change-resistant one. I am a member of this class myself; goodness, if not I, who is? I know from the inside how unpopular it is to have changed one's mind, to have accepted that the average intellectual-worker view is just plain wrong, to have come, individually, to different conclusions. Someone characterized me as a martyr looking for a cause. The use of the word "martyr" in a negative sense, as a stupidly wrong-headed person who tries to show his difference from the herd by empty posturing, just shows how much contempt for individuality and opposition lies unnoticed in the average intellectual-worker breast. Martyrs are heroes. But intellectual workers do not care for heroes.
(Incidentally, I do not think that I am a martyr. In the words of Hamlet, would that I were so good a man.)
I will give one instance in which you all, as instinctive members of the intellectual worker class - for you are - have simply absorbed a stated attitude, and are in profound error. First, a demand, and a warning. Read carefully the next paragraph, and be sure that you understand what I am saying. And do not, having failed to read it carefully, send me comments calling me a homophobe or anything of the kind; they will be deleted as soon as read.
The error I mean is simply this: that every LJer I have read, without exception, takes for granted that homosexual and straight relationships are exactly of the same value, and that the resistance to "gay marriage" represents nothing but discrimination. And the core of the error is not in taking this position, but in taking it unthinkingly. There must be dozens of you who simply say: "I am in favour of gay marriage because discrimination offends me." The issue here is not to be or not to be in favour of gay marriage; it is to never have conceived that there is a reasonable opposing position. It is to never have stopped to think, think for oneself, whether there really is no difference between the union of a man and a woman and the union of two members of the same sex; whatever the conclusion you came to. And do not tell me that you have: the manner, the unthinking simplicity, the mere repetition of slogans, tell otherwise. Ninety per cent of you, if you gave any time to the issue at all, covered it in one sentence, one slogan - something like "I am not offended by equality" or the like. You were replacing thought by slogans on this particular matter. You have adopted this attitude quite simply because among the kind of people you are and live with it is a natural habit of mind to find anything that is labelled as "discrimination" just plain wrong, and not to need to think about it.
(Another point. I DO NOT want to engage in a debate on these matters with anyone. Keep your opinions. Only reflect on the way you reached them, and ask yourselves what really is the force of self-evidence in certain cases. I am speaking about a social environmnent here; I am not asking anyone to change their minds, only to become conscious of the environment in which you exist.)
Now try and be an actor or a writer in your own mind. Try and imagine a different experience. Make the imaginative effort of casting your mind into being a member of a group who does not think the same way as your group does; a group who maybe takes a different view, and maybe have had plenty of time to reach their own views on the matter; a group, at any rate, which is taught, by the law, the social experience, the mentality, of America, that their view and their votes are as good as yours. And imagine feeling patronized, preached to, not taken seriously. No adult person minds disagreement; experience, if nothing else, will teach any person who has reached his/her late twenties that there is no way that you can live with people who all agree with you. But no self-respecting, free-born citizen of a democracy will put up with being patronized and treated as a moral infant. That is what they are protesting about when they protest about "elitism"; and that is why, a week ago, Middle America briskly slapped Democrat America across the face. There is much more that could be said about this historical event - and maybe I will have more to say - but this is the essential: a large number of adults who were being treated as children took across their knee and spanked their children, who were behaving as the only adults in the land.
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no subject
Date: 2004-11-12 08:45 am (UTC)I think I can safely say, then, that this is one of the many reasons living in Europe is better than living in the U.S. :)
no subject
Date: 2004-11-12 09:47 am (UTC)I've had a look at your info page and I think we may have something in common. Mind if I friend you?
no subject
Date: 2004-11-13 05:56 am (UTC)Amen. I was very happy when the statistics showed that 80% of the people who'd voted for Bush had done so for religious reasons. :)
Mind if I friend you?
I hope I don't offend, but this journal is actually reserved for RL friends only. (Which reminds me that I probably shouldn't have posted under this username... sorry about that. *sheepish grin*)
I have another journal at
-Cathy :)
no subject
Date: 2004-11-13 07:22 am (UTC)