THE DISCONTENTED CLASSES
57
learn, a half-educated resentment for the traditional intellectual values
some of their teachers and schoolmates represented. While their
humbler parents may have maintained in many cases a certain rever–
ence for education, their children have gained enough familiarity to
feel contempt. (Tragically, the high schools and colleges have often
felt compelled at the same time to lower their standards to meet the
still lower level of aspiration of these youngsters, no eager beavers
for learning, but too well off to enter the labor force. ) In many
local school board fights, the old conservative and hence intellectually
libertarian elites have been routed by lower-middIe-class pressure
groups. Once having seen the political weakness, combined with social
prestige, of the traditional cultural values, the discontented classes,
trained to despise weakness, became still less impressed by the intel–
lectual cadres furnishing much of the leadership in the '30s.
We have spoken earlier of the xenophobia and slowness in alter–
ing opinions characteristic of the lower classes.
If
in a survey people
are asked, "Do you think it wise to trust others?" the less educated
are always the more suspicious; they have in the course of life gained
a peasant-like guile- the sort of sloganized cynicism so beautifully
described by Richard Wright in
Black Boy.
In an hierarchical society,
this distrust does not become a dynamic social and political factor;
except insofar as it prevents the organization of the masses, it remains
a problem only for individuals in their relations with other individuals.
But when the mistrustful, with prosperity, are suddenly pushed into
positions of leverage, attitudes previously channeled within the family
and neighborhood are projected upon the national and international
scene.
Recent psychoanalytically-oriented work on ethnic prejudice pro–
vides possible clues as to why overt anti-Semitism has declined at
the same time that attacks on Harvard and other symbols of
Ea~tern
seaboard culture seem to have increased. In their valuable book,
The
Dynamics of Prejudice,
Bruno Bettelheim and Morris Janowitz make
the point that in America Jews and Negroes divide between them
the hostilities which spring from internal conflict: The super-ego is
involved in anti-Semitism, since the Jew is felt to represent the valued
but unachieved goals of ambition, money, and group loyalty ("clan–
nishness"), whereas fear and hatred of the Negro spring from id
