Haven't read her book, yet, but if the interview is anything to go by it sounds like an important study of where some of the worst of our present day politics and social class snobbery come from. I especially like what Isenberg says about how the hatred of poor people is an inheritance of the British class system and that the mythology of America is largely false. Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, two of the icons of democratic myth weren't that much of an advance on the worst of British class snobbery. Also important is how the attitude of the elite is related to their considerations of the utility of other people for their purposes. That is something which even so much of the left is saturated with, there is no more oppressively utilitarian view of poor people than that of the Marxists and the stinking, British Fabians.
You can contrast the attitudes of the enlightenment era "liberal" founders concerning poor people with that of
the Mosaic Law and see that the allegedly harsh and unforgiving Old Testament was, in just about every way, not just miles but light-years ahead of them.
That "harsh and unforgiving" god image is really pretty much a projection.
ReplyDeleteLargely from people who've never read the book within a community, or who treat it like a 19th century novel. It's a vastly different sort of literature than that. Today it almost has to be approached anthropologically, we are so out of tune with its worldview and presumptions (and I don't mean the kind Stephen Pinker thinks we have risen above. Pinker is an idiot, IMNSHO.).