>On Sep 28, 2007, at 5:26 PM, Dennis Claxton wrote:
>
> > ravi wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> >> The truth is more probably that atheism is a luxury of over-educated
> >> comparatively wealthy intellectual brats
> >
> >
> > I don't know. If you're raised with religion it takes a lot of work
> > to shake it off. It took me years and I began trying long before I
> > became over-educated. And if I am comparatively wealthy then lord
> > help my child.
>
>Besides, this pseudo-populism annoys me. In this society, there are
>advantages to being rich. Is atheism, or freedom from superstition,
>one of those advantages? And what's wrong with being educated? It
>also annoys me when highly educated people doubt the value of
>education. I just don't believe them. It's a faux populist pose.
>
>C. Wright Mills: "The idea that the millionaire finds nothing but a
>sad, empty place at the top of this society; the idea that the rich
>do not know what to do with their money; the idea that the successful
>become filled up with futility, and that those born successful are
>poor and little as well as rich - the idea, in short, of the
>disconsolateness of the rich - is, in the main, merely a way by which
>those who are not rich reconcile themselves to the fact. Wealth in
>America is directly gratifying and directly leads to many further
>gratifications. To be truly rich is to possess the means of realizing
>in big ways one's little whims and fantasies and sicknesses...."
I have been reading Alice Munro, a short story writer from Canada, because Mike B suggested I read her. THanks for the suggestion, Mike, and I must pass it along. I utterly love her stuff. Go read: now!
Anyway, she writes about her life, she was born in 1931, and it's pretty auto-biographical, she even says as much. I'm not so sure, reading her tales of life in the backwoods (bush) of Canada, that atheism is a luxury confined to the overeducated or to the wealthy. Certainly, some pretty poor folk she writes about are atheists. Yes, it's fiction... but, it's hardly more fictional than Ravi's assumption that on the basis of his apparently friendless life (thatis, his lack of a social life he often complains about), he can make such a claim.
Oh, and for a nice take on C. Wright Mills' quote, above, again: Alice Munro. She captures nicely this faux populism, but exposes it as Mills' does. There was a line I read yesterday, in one of her stories (too lazy to look it up), where she, as narrator, is writing to herself. She describes people responding to an educated man with disdain. Then she writes something like, "They disdained him. And they admired him. That would be a more honest portrait." (that's a paraphrase. But you get my drift.
If anyone I've ever read has her finger on the pulse of -- at least here -- the poor and blue-collar/rural working class, she does. She often catches so dazzingly, breathtakingly exactly what I've tried to describe -- and it's so often just a little sidenote in the story. Laid there, unadorned and unexpected, for you to stumble over and think, "oh. wow. that's perfect."
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