It's salutary but never comfortable to be confronted with your own hypocrisy.
I hate it when anyone looks down their nose at someone who breaches some man-made rule of etiquette or, in their view, lacks social skills.
It's trivial, superficial and unfair.
Also illogical: how can you blame someone for not knowing what they don't know? Or - if someone does know it's considered unacceptable to, for instance, pick their nose in public, interrupt a conversation or ask a stranger for a loan - blame them for making a free decision that the issue isn't important enough for them change their way of doing things?
But I have double standards. I'm not bothered if anyone mispronounces a word or lays a table with the knives and forks back to front, but I'm far less tolerant of people's attitudes when those people come from an apparently privileged, financially secure or socially sheltered background.
My hackles rise when (to use some recent examples) someone designates all prison inmates as 'awful people' - assuming the people outside are the 'good people' - or regards it as a social outrage that they have lost interest on their investments, or considers that doing your best for your children means giving your children the best of everything, leaving only the small change to spare for children who are starving.
But that's equally unfair and illogical of me. I'm blaming people for not knowing what they don't know, holding them responsible for something I find unacceptable, and blaming them for making a free decision that the issue isn't important enough for them to change their way of doing things.
And I'm assuming that because they have education, money and social status, these things should confer on them insight, compassion and sensitivity - which means I'm putting far too much faith in educational, financial and social privileges, which don't confer any such things.
God rescue us from the prejudices we don't know we have, and from the hypocrisy of not caring about the ones we do know we have but won't change.
Saturday, 12 September 2009
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