If we turn to those restrictions that only apply to certain classes of
society, we encounter a state of things which is glaringly obvious and
has always been recognized. It is to be expected that the neglected
classes will grudge the favoured ones their privileges and that they
will do everything in their power to rid themselves of their own surplus
of privation. Where this is not possible a lasting measure of discontent
will obtain within this culture, and this may lead to dangerous
outbreaks. But if a culture has not got beyond the stage in which the
satisfaction of one group of its members necessarily involves the
suppression of another, perhaps the majority—and this is the case in all
modern cultures,—it is intelligible that these suppressed classes should
develop an intense hostility to the culture; a culture, whose existence
they make possible by their labour, but in whose resources they have too
small a share. In such conditions one must not expect to find an
internalization of the cultural prohibitions among the suppressed
classes; indeed they are not even prepared to acknowledge these
prohibitions, intent, as they are, on the destruction of the culture
itself and perhaps even of the assumptions on which it rests. These
classes are so manifestly hostile to culture that on that account the
more latent hostility of the better provided social strata has been
overlooked. It need not be said that a culture which leaves unsatisfied
and drives to rebelliousness so large a number of its members neither
has a prospect of continued existence, nor deserves it.
The extent to which cultural rules have been internalized—to express it
popularly and unpsychologically: the moral level of the members—is not
the only psychical asset to be considered if one is estimating the value
of a culture. In addition there is its heritage of ideals and artistic
creations, that is to say, of the satisfactions they both yield.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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