Cart Before Horse
It's ancient Us-Them rhetoric: We are good. They are bad. If we have more, it is because we deserve more. We're the strong, smart, clean, virtuous members of the human race. ``They'' are not.
Gussied up with the latest sciencey-sounding jargon, this message can be made to sound like hard truth. Well, hard truth for Them. Sweet news for you and me, if we happen to be the right sort of person.
Case in point: Dan Seligman, in this article from Forbes.com (free registration required). Taking on the New York Times' well-meaning recent series on social class in America, Seligman says, hey, those low-class people are just not as good as the readers of Forbes. They smoke. They drink. They overeat. They get pregnant at young ages.
A hard truth about the downscale world, delineated in an avalanche of social science research, is that its denizens tend to behave badly.
``Truth'' isn't a word that should be applied to statements like this, for three reasons.
1. The effects of low-class status on health and well-being are still there after researchers control for differences in smoking, medical care, eating habits, and so on. The most rigorous and lengthy of these demonstrations, conducted over decades by Sir Michael Marmot, are described in his book.
2. Seligman implies that people first behave badly, and that, second, puts them in a low social position -- makes them ``denizens'' of a world below that of Forbes types. Cause and effect, though, also work in the opposite direction: Being low in social status is stressful, impelling people to use coping mechanisms that don't appeal as much to the privileged. As a poor single mother put it in a passage in Marmot's book, why worry about being sick thirty years from now from smoking and fat, when you can't see how you'll get through next week? (it's on page 75). Seligman doesn't address this at all, and no wonder: It would collapse his argument.
3. Also hiding in plain sight in the piece is another assumption: That the good behavior of people in higher social classes is a consequence of their virtue. For example, Seligman writes, ``Studies based on the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth show that low social class correlates strongly with (a) likelihood to drop out of high school and (b) delinquency among both males and females.''
In the Forbes fantasy universe of individual human atoms, I guess it makes no difference how other people see you, and how you see yourself. In the real world, though, poor kids have a lot of incentives to drop out and well-off ones have plenty of pressure not to. And, if they do, the upper-class denizens will have many more chances to get back on track.
In short, this article full of statistics is just crude class-warfare propaganda. Stuff like this is what prompted me to look for patterns in the rhetoric of stigma -- the same few assertions about ``Us'' and ``Them'' that you find, again and again, over the centuries.
Such assertions convince us because we are structured to be convinced -- to see ourselves as part of a ``good'' kind of person, and to explain the troubles of others as a consequence of their not being like us. So, OK, that's human nature.
Just don't call it truth.
