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Class virtues
Christian Century, April 4, 2006
CLASS VIRTUES: David Brooks, New York Times columnist, likes to sing the praises of values such as industry, temperance, prudence and thrift. These are all middle-class values, according to William Deresiewicz, values that he himself holds because he belongs to the middle class. But there's a dark side to all these values: narrowness, prudery, timidity, meanness, hypocrisy and self-conceit.
Though working-class people are reputed to be less temperate, thrifty, industrious and so on (whether these descriptions are fair or not), "working-class life breeds its own virtues: loyalty, community, stoicism, humility, and even tolerance," Deresiewicz says. Of course, not all working-class people exemplify these virtues, he says, but "if only because of their limited possibilities in life," working-class people tend to "care more about their families and their friends and the places they're from than they do about their careers" (American Scholar, Winter).
COPYRIGHT 2006 The Christian Century Foundation
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
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