Thread by @kenanmalik

It will be interesting to see if “WEIRD” becomes the framework for defining certain sections of the population that supposedly reject “the ideals of individualism, moral consistency and the type of sequential logic used in alphabet-based writing systems”. 1/

https://twitter.com/Alex__1789/status/1351158107292880896

There is, though, a long history of seeing the “lower classes” in the same terms as non-Westerners, as fundamentally, and anthropologically, distinct from the elite. It was a central theme of nineteenth century racial thinking. 2/

In his 1883 book "The Life of the Poor", English journalist George Sims wrote of “a region that lies at our own doors… a dark continent that is within easy walking distance of the General Post Office”, a continent “as interesting as any of those newly-explored lands… 3/

“…which engage the attention of the Royal Geographical Society – the wild races who inhabit it will, I trust, gain public sympathy as those savage tribes for whose benefit the Missionary Societies never cease to appeal for funds.” 4/

Twenty five years earlier, Phillipe Buchez, a Christian socialist and briefly president of the French National Assembly gave a talk to the Medico-Psychological Society in Paris. The people of France, he observed, had been “placed in the most favourable circumstances...” 5/

They were “possessed of a powerful civilization” and lived in a nation that was “among the highest ranking… in science, the arts and industry”. How was it possible, then, “that within a population such as ours, races may form – not merely one, but several races…” 6/

“– so miserable, inferior and bastardized that they may be classed as below the most inferior savage races, for their inferiority is sometimes beyond cure”?

The “miserable, inferior and bastardized” races Buchez feared were sections of the working class and the rural poor. 7/

(Buchez’s quotes are from Daniel Pick’s superb book “Faces of Degeneration”) 8/

As Gertrude Himmelfarb observes in “The Idea of Poverty”, to 19th century middle class imagination, the poor were “important not so much in themselves, nor even in relation to the rest of society, as in revealing the limits of progress, the precariousness of civilisation…” 9/

“…There evidently existed, not in ‘darkest Africa’ but in the most advanced city in the most advanced country in the world, at the very apex of civilisation, the equivalent of Bushmen and Fingoes, tribes which resisted amerioration… 10/

“…refused to be drawn into the mainstream of culture, perversely persisted in a way of life and work that was an affront to civilised society. It was as if some primitive spirit, some vestige of primeval nature, were mocking the proud presumptions of modernity.” 11/

That same kind of fear is palpable today, too. 12/