To establish my lib cred, I’m referencing a story I heard on NPR the other day:
The headline is not correct. Kahlenberg explicitly and repeatedly said he wanted to look at race AND class, not class INSTEAD OF race. Just to get that out of the way.
The interesting part–and the part that shows up around here–is his suggestion that liberals have a real blind spot when it comes to class, sometimes. One of the places this occurs is when liberals make sneering comments about someone’s education. In another thread, for example, someone made a mocking comment about how well Trump will do in jail, since low-education men are his bread and butter.
Kahlenberg suggests this is prejudice:
Obviously I’m pretty far to the left, so I’m not excluding myself from this criticism; but I thought it might be worth discussing and looking at. What say y’all?
Obviously, if you aim to persuade someone to your point of view, then it’s a bad idea to “sneer” at them.
However, does this perception of “sneering” credibly come from things that liberals routinely say and do? Or is it more to do with how right-wingers’ severe allergy to any remarks or coverage that’s less than 100% respectful and complementary?
i.e. if you poll a right-winger for examples of “liberal sneering” they will immediately regurgitate a dozen or so examples from the top of mind, but they’ll often have to go back 5-10 years, and many such examples will upon examination turn out to be misrepresented or exaggerated. The story there is less about liberals being disrespectful than about conservatives being so tweaked by criticism that they lug this collection of bloody shirts around with them, to be waved on demand as anecdotal proof of “look how much they hate you.” (it’s coming in this thread, watch for it).
tl;dr to accept the framing “liberals sneer too much at conservatives” is to accept a victimhood narrative of people who routinely yawn at actual threats of violence or even genocide against non-conservatives, and somehow liberals keep falling for it.
I recommend reading both the excerpt I quoted above, and listening to or reading the transcript.
From my own experience, I definitely find that some liberals use “uneducated” as a sneer, specifically referring to people who didn’t attend college. Given the expense of college and the inability of many working-class people to afford college, this is not okay.
Sure, that happens–but that’s not what I’m talking about here. Just because some conservatives have a real martyr complex doesn’t mean that class discrimination doesn’t happen among liberals.
Sure, highly-educated people do sneer at less-educated ones. But
It’s human nature, whether left-wing or right-wing, to sneer at people who you perceive as below you. A bad sentiment, but an unavoidably human one.
Many of these folks don’t realize that a degree doesn’t necessarily mean that much. There are idiotic PhDs, and there are geniuses who didn’t even finish high school.
I doubt members of the Scarsdale Zoning Board commonly sneer in any obvious way. But if there was a zoning variance request for more than the tiniest number of low income housing units, I also doubt they would grant it.
In fairness it goes both ways. My mother’s family looked down at my father as a snotty intellectual who thought he was better than people who got their hands dirty when they worked; he looked down on them as dullards who were uninterested and uninvolved with the rest of the world.
There is a difference between making an unprovoked negative comment about a person’s lack of education, and attributing demonstrably stupid opinions (Birthers, Truthers, etc.) to the bearer’s lack of education and intelligence.
There is a huge difference between intelligence and education. A person can have a decent education, at least in this country, and still not be very intelligent; and I would expect stupid opinions from stupid people more than from uneducated people.
Even if college were financially within the reach of everyone who wanted it, it still would not be okay.
I believe that higher education is a good thing; but there are plenty of people who don’t need, don’t want, or are not equipped to benefit from it, without making them in any way “below” or less valuable than those who are.
It’s a bad look and politically detrimental to put down people based on formally-achieved education level.
However, I don’t think that extends to pointing out the lack of critical thinking capacity that characterizes science denialists/conspiracy theorists, whose rantings seem to transcend whatever degrees they attained, and who continually sneer at and demonize highly educated and trained experts.
It’s like a malignant transformation of the old “if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?” putdown.
This, and some other posters, are getting at an important distinction. It’s reasonable to scorn people who behave in anti-intellectual ways, who disdain science in favor of crackpottery and conspiracy theories. But it’s not reasonable to scorn folks without formal education, or to conflate a lack of formal education with anti-intellectualism. Linus Pauling wasn’t exactly uneducated, and yet:
A lack of higher education is significantly correlated with economic class, so when someone sneers about the “uneducated masses” and the like, that’s classist. But anti-intellectualism isn’t so bound by class.
It’s very difficult not to be condescending or sneer, when you’ve got stuff like climate change primarily being denied by the uneducated on one side of the aisle. You’ve literally got people whose lack of education is contributing to and exacerbating worldwide problems because they don’t have the education to understand why their position is flat out wrong. It’s NOT a matter of opinion or anything like that- it’s scientific fact, or about as close as you can get to it.
Case in point- the whole idea that global warming’s a “theory” and that somehow invalidates it. Any moron who has learned the scientific method realizes that a theory explains something, and then you test that theory in some fashion to validate it. And that there’s not some additional stage when a theory is proved and becomes fact.
I personally find it VERY difficult not to sneer/discount/be condescending to anyone who says any of this. It’s a matter of an equal playing field- if one side is deficient in the basic knowledge to make meaningful conversation about things, then I almost feel like they shouldn’t be included.
I mean, my grandparents had no business voting on anything involving evolution- they claimed “we didn’t come from monkeys”, and that it was godless nonsense, and so forth. You couldn’t even discuss it with them because they were completely ignorant about it and didn’t want to learn. Too many are that way about a whole host of issues these days.
I guess where I’m going is that I’m pretty condescending and sneer at the ignorant, but not at the uneducated, but the Venn diagram between the two has a LOT of overlap these days.
Are you sure you don’t make mistakes here? As I said before, scorning the anti-intellectual isn’t the problem that I’m talking about. Focusing on the overlap on the Venn diagram can, I suspect, lead to errors, in which people talk about the uneducated as the problem, or privilege formal education.
By way of example: most of the people who promulgate climate-change conspiracy are well-paid talking heads and lobbyists, and they’re positively lousy with college degrees. The Venn diagram between promulgators and the formally educated in practically a small circle inside a large circle. But your entire post focused, not on the promulgators, but on the dupes.
I posit that your focus is determined, in part, by the prejudice that I’m discussing.
I find the Venn overlap of climate deniers with more formal education to be more concerning than with those less educated. Just shows that education is not the cure for stupidity. Just look at the long list of climate denial and anti-vax enablers who have plenty of formal education, often from the so called best schools in the nation. As usual this is a problem that starts at the top and proves that education is no cure for corruption either.
I’ve found that as often as not, the people who are formally educated who still promulgate climate denial are more cynical than anything else- they’re starting from the position that they don’t want it to be true, and are scheming up pseudo-scientific explanations for it, much the same as they do to explain away why evolution can’t be real. “How do we know it’s not a natural fluctuation?” “The Earth has been this hot in the past, and nothing bad happened?” and so forth. In other words, stuff that requires a certain degree of education to even come up with.
Or if they’re not true believers, they’re pushing this bullshit knowing that it’s bullshit, and they just don’t care because it’s politically expedient in the present day. Like the oil companies have done for decades, and like I feel the upper echelons of the GOP have and are doing right now.
The problem as I see it, isn’t so much the promulgators because they’re knowingly promulgating bullshit, it’s the dupes, because they don’t have the tools to see through it, and they’re the ones voting.
That’s how you combat this- more education, more inquisitiveness, and so forth to be able to see through the bullshit of those in positions of power. And it’s vital in a democracy for the electorate to be able to make informed choices and not get duped by demagogues and people promulgating ignorant bullshit.