On glasses and genocide

How many times have you heard someone declare: "I haven't read a book in my lifetime!" "Life taught me everything I know, not books!" His voice slightly trembling with a strange kind of pride and contemptuous laughter, sneering at unfamiliar sights and sounds, the arms folded in a defensive gesture, the feet rooted to the spot.

There is something frightening in erudition, culture, education. Something that has made generations of schoolkids flock like nervous animals and ostracize the learned, something that has made class systems so persistent in modern civilization, something that has driven people generations after generations to resent, banish, even kill their fellow people for their knowledge.

During the Khmer Rouge rule of Cambodia, education was regarded with undiluted hostility. People deemed professionals or intellectuals were tortured and murdered. Even wearing glasses was enough to get a person killed, as the Khmer Rouge saw it as aggravating evidence of literacy.
 
Pol Pot, leader of the Khmer Rouge, was himself a former university student, with a fondness for French literature. His poor academic record was an advantage, though, as the staunchly anti-intellectual communist party considered the uneducated peasants as the true proletariat.

In some way, what happened in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979 was a crystallization of the resentment and even blind hate people have always had against education, and even moreso, the "elite", as these two things have a historical affiliation.

This mentality is especially evident among the proletariat. In Britain, for example, social mobility is worse than in any other developed country. Of course, there are many different socio-economic factors contributing to it, but I think there is a mental factor too preventing working class people from reaching the upper rungs of society, and that is the tribe-like mentality, the peculiar mixture of self-pity and pride that goes with being 'working class'. At the same time, working class people envy the upper classes and bemoan their own standard of living, yet take strange pride in it, and scorn those who try to break away from the traditional cultural surroundings of the working class. This mentality is inherited and passed on to following generations, each passing generation making it more difficult to break free from this mold.

George Orwell wrote in his essay "North and South":

 Of course I know now that there is not one
working-class boy in a thousand who does not pine for the day when he will
leave school. He wants to be doing real work, not wasting his time on
ridiculous rubbish like history and geography. To the working class, the
notion of staying at school till you are nearly grown-up seems merely
contemptible and unmanly. The idea of a great big boy of eighteen, who
ought to be bringing a pound a week home to his parents, going to school in
a ridiculous uniform and even being caned for not doing his lessons! Just
fancy a working-class boy of eighteen allowing himself to be caned! He is a
man when the other is still a baby.

Orwell had a point quite contrary to mine, but I think he pointed out the problem in that part. The attitude prevalent in the working class that education is seen as something negative, pointless, as "unmanly", is what holds them back. I don't mean that people should educate themselves simply in order to pursue materialistic values or social status, but there is a danger in lacking knowledge of things not directly linked to our daily lives and activities. When you don't know who the prime minister is, there is a risk of finding yourself someday voluntarily stepping on landmines.

The contempt for intellectualism isn't merely a working class phenomenon. What I've always found strange is how the cultural elite seems to play right into the hands of the ignorant few by fostering the kind of inanely romantic notion of the idiot savant, of the working class, of the unaffected wisdom of the streets. Nothing is seen in the world of art as contemptible as being academic.

At the same time, the layperson tends to label every piece of art he is unable to grasp as "arty". The world of culture and arts has for a long time leaned towards the left, but the working class has never shown the same kind of affection towards high art, instead favoring the culture they feel they are supposed to hold as their own, for example sports.

Back in scool I remember reveling in being stupid. I was the worst kind. Not that I did poorly, but in some inexplicable way I wanted to. I held ignorance in high regard. I had naïve fantasies of dropping out, making it in the streets, the usual schoolboy dreams of rebellion and ripening through real living, whatever it was. I was the first to denounce things as "phony", I sneered at academics, opera and contemporary art. I viewed the people working in the construction sites as superior, just because of their profession. Slouching in my seat in class, I saw manual labor as real, honest work, life free of pretension and histrionic. Books were for the elitist types. Childishly, not being a part of the working class (even though coming from a non-academic family background, I hadn't worked a day in my life) I assumed being working class meant being an uneducated brute.

Looking back, I've come to the conclusion that my rebellion stemmed from coming face-to-face with my own limitations, my shortcomings, my disabilities. It was a direct reaction to being told from a very early age by parents and doctors to discard any notions of doing physical work for living. Despite being a bookish type, I thought I was unfairly condemned to work within the confines of words, computers and offices for the rest of my life. I felt trapped. Loathing all things highbrow, I thought I was refusing "the elite" and its pretensions, but I was actually refusing a part of myself.

I wasn't the only one. After all, there is a warm sense of security in unconsciousness. People take great comfort in not having to assess information that contradicts their own outlook. East End, Phnom Penh, your neighborhood, my neighborhood, the school you went to, the school I went to. Wherever you go and no matter how far away, the allure of ignorance is there, it's in us. You can't avoid it. The oppressive presence of the nameless, faceless elite lingering on the paragraphs that are too abstract, the words that are too complicated, the books that are too long. Deep inside every one of us, there is a person cruel enough to send a man to his death for wearing spectacles.