I lived in South Yorkshire when the Rotherham scandal went mainstream. It wasn’t ‘breaking news’ to many of us living there. I became involved in helping a female pupil at the school at which I was a parent-governor. She was 12 years’ old and was being groomed by a Pakistani rape gang. I was also, I suppose, a member of the middle-class then, by virtue of my profession (academic). Naively I expected my feminist female colleagues to have some empathy for the poor girls of Rotherham - they’d all undergone the ‘patriarchy is evil’ standard programming. What could be more patriarchal than a rape gang? It was gutting to see how little they cared. They just didn’t see them. As you say, the white working-class just have no place in their hierarchy of oppression. My same ex-colleagues will cry for the women of Iran or Afghanistan or, right now, Gaza but they couldn’t give tuppence for the poor girls down the road. Everyone elsewhere matters more. Another commenter has mentioned the decline of Christianity as a factor in the loss of basic humanity and that consensus of caring. Alexander Solzhenitsyn repeatedly warned that ‘Men have forgotten God’ in his writings; we see yet more evidence of that by the day.
I immediately thought of poor Leonard Bast and the Schlegel sisters' enormous bookcase falling on him and killing him in Howard's End.
E M Forster - the author - being gay - felt like an outsider in Edwardian Britain and so was naturally on the side of the Schlegel girls who represented what today would be the Woke Left upper middle class.
Independently wealthy - nobody in the family has a job - and they have servants - the source of their wealth is never disclosed but it allows them the luxury of being kind to the working classes.
It costs them nothing to invite the impoverished bank clerk Leonard Bast in for tea when Helen Schlegel accidentally takes his umbrella after a concert.
Leonard is a tragic figure - the sensitive, artistic, working class man trapped in a soul destroying clerical position which he hates but keeps him from starvation.
His awkwardness around their very Woke tea table is painful in the extreme.
They try to include him in their social circle but it is clear he will never belong and is being massively patronised to give them the pleasure of feeling virtuous.
Leonard is a genuine sensitive - walking for miles outside London one full moon night just to escape the squalor and enjoy the beauty of nature - surreptitiously reading poetry at his work desk - attending classical music concerts with his battered old umbrella - desperately trying to look respectable.
Painfully aware of his inferior position.
E M Forster slyly suggests that it is Leonard's aspiration to be cultured that ends up killing him - his association with the Schlegel sisters proving lethal - thereby revealing Forster's innate snobbery.
Despite the attempts of well meaning upper class philanthropists no good can ultimately come from providing the workers with public libraries, museums, art galleries and concerts Forster implies revealing his own status anxiety.
This is not true but exposes the snobbery of the left wing Bloomsbury set which Forster was on the edges of. Virginia Woolf hated him but she was also brutal about the lower orders as was D H Lawrence - an enthusiastic eugenicist.
The modern day equivalent of the Schlegel/Bloomsbury set - left wing in their politics - right wing in their economics - supremely patronising - Titania McGrath would not be out of place in Forster's novel.
And they would all hate Tommy Robinson - intelligent, outspoken, working class and proud of it, deeply patriotic - I have a strong suspicion that the unashamedly materialistic right-wing villains of the novel - the wealthy but uncultured Wilcoxes (they don't read but love sport so must be the bad guys) would really get along with Tommy and rather admire him.
The whole woke movement is simply class-signaling by other means.
They throw soup/march slowly/whatever 'not' to persuade you to agree with them, but in order to identify themselves to each other. They wave their luxury beliefs like flags to signal to other affluent people that they're on the same side.
It wouldn't matter if you could get rid of the class system. You could bring the whole next generation up on another planet, brainwashing them to believe they had always been freewheeley and equal and open-minded and part of the same class, and then watch the exact same behaviors blossom up from nothing. The urge to be snobbily better-than -- *especially* in illegitimate ways -- is in their basic personality, instincts and DNA. (Sorry, but it is!)
If you want something that might work in the (relatively) short term, then claim the moral high ground and claim it hard. After all, it really does belong to you, and they respond to moral labels if not moral content.
Class is a mighty difficult topic. Marx wrote a lot about it but never defined his terms. HG Wells demonstrated that a man might play several different class roles, depending on his economic activity.
But one thing is relatively simple and quite obvious when talking about then and now: the disappearance of Christianity. Can people be a people without some shared immutable spiritual and moral authority?
I lived in South Yorkshire when the Rotherham scandal went mainstream. It wasn’t ‘breaking news’ to many of us living there. I became involved in helping a female pupil at the school at which I was a parent-governor. She was 12 years’ old and was being groomed by a Pakistani rape gang. I was also, I suppose, a member of the middle-class then, by virtue of my profession (academic). Naively I expected my feminist female colleagues to have some empathy for the poor girls of Rotherham - they’d all undergone the ‘patriarchy is evil’ standard programming. What could be more patriarchal than a rape gang? It was gutting to see how little they cared. They just didn’t see them. As you say, the white working-class just have no place in their hierarchy of oppression. My same ex-colleagues will cry for the women of Iran or Afghanistan or, right now, Gaza but they couldn’t give tuppence for the poor girls down the road. Everyone elsewhere matters more. Another commenter has mentioned the decline of Christianity as a factor in the loss of basic humanity and that consensus of caring. Alexander Solzhenitsyn repeatedly warned that ‘Men have forgotten God’ in his writings; we see yet more evidence of that by the day.
Another excellent thought provoking essay.
I immediately thought of poor Leonard Bast and the Schlegel sisters' enormous bookcase falling on him and killing him in Howard's End.
E M Forster - the author - being gay - felt like an outsider in Edwardian Britain and so was naturally on the side of the Schlegel girls who represented what today would be the Woke Left upper middle class.
Independently wealthy - nobody in the family has a job - and they have servants - the source of their wealth is never disclosed but it allows them the luxury of being kind to the working classes.
It costs them nothing to invite the impoverished bank clerk Leonard Bast in for tea when Helen Schlegel accidentally takes his umbrella after a concert.
Leonard is a tragic figure - the sensitive, artistic, working class man trapped in a soul destroying clerical position which he hates but keeps him from starvation.
His awkwardness around their very Woke tea table is painful in the extreme.
They try to include him in their social circle but it is clear he will never belong and is being massively patronised to give them the pleasure of feeling virtuous.
Leonard is a genuine sensitive - walking for miles outside London one full moon night just to escape the squalor and enjoy the beauty of nature - surreptitiously reading poetry at his work desk - attending classical music concerts with his battered old umbrella - desperately trying to look respectable.
Painfully aware of his inferior position.
E M Forster slyly suggests that it is Leonard's aspiration to be cultured that ends up killing him - his association with the Schlegel sisters proving lethal - thereby revealing Forster's innate snobbery.
Despite the attempts of well meaning upper class philanthropists no good can ultimately come from providing the workers with public libraries, museums, art galleries and concerts Forster implies revealing his own status anxiety.
This is not true but exposes the snobbery of the left wing Bloomsbury set which Forster was on the edges of. Virginia Woolf hated him but she was also brutal about the lower orders as was D H Lawrence - an enthusiastic eugenicist.
The modern day equivalent of the Schlegel/Bloomsbury set - left wing in their politics - right wing in their economics - supremely patronising - Titania McGrath would not be out of place in Forster's novel.
And they would all hate Tommy Robinson - intelligent, outspoken, working class and proud of it, deeply patriotic - I have a strong suspicion that the unashamedly materialistic right-wing villains of the novel - the wealthy but uncultured Wilcoxes (they don't read but love sport so must be the bad guys) would really get along with Tommy and rather admire him.
The whole woke movement is simply class-signaling by other means.
They throw soup/march slowly/whatever 'not' to persuade you to agree with them, but in order to identify themselves to each other. They wave their luxury beliefs like flags to signal to other affluent people that they're on the same side.
It's U and Non-U, dressed as a rainbow.
It wouldn't matter if you could get rid of the class system. You could bring the whole next generation up on another planet, brainwashing them to believe they had always been freewheeley and equal and open-minded and part of the same class, and then watch the exact same behaviors blossom up from nothing. The urge to be snobbily better-than -- *especially* in illegitimate ways -- is in their basic personality, instincts and DNA. (Sorry, but it is!)
If you want something that might work in the (relatively) short term, then claim the moral high ground and claim it hard. After all, it really does belong to you, and they respond to moral labels if not moral content.
Class is a mighty difficult topic. Marx wrote a lot about it but never defined his terms. HG Wells demonstrated that a man might play several different class roles, depending on his economic activity.
But one thing is relatively simple and quite obvious when talking about then and now: the disappearance of Christianity. Can people be a people without some shared immutable spiritual and moral authority?