COMMUNITY HATREDS.
COMMUNITY HATREDS. A friend of mine who had served in the Peace Corps in Ecuador for two years once told me that it took him almost the whole two years to learn the web of hatreds and grudges that underlay life in the village and that had accumulated over generations. A wonderful letter from David Leverenz in this week’s New York Review of Books quotes “two memorable sentences in Stone’s The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (1977, p. 98): ‘The Elizabethan village was a place filled with malice and hatred, its only unifying bond being the occasional episode of mass hysteria. The only modern equivalent is the Oxford Common Room.’”
Doesn’t really square with the cooperative childcare we’ve heard about with regards to villages, does it?
Maybe a comparable example we have in America today is that of the college campus. Not that there’s so much hatred as there is prejudice, grudges, and disrespect. Practically every student in a tech-related major took great joy in sneering at all the non-tech students, “Want fries with that?” Meanwhile, the non-tech students would laugh about how nerdy the computer science kids were. Gossip also made it known which kids were despised among the others in their club or major.
I was always surprised (and a bit miffed) when the administrators would refer to “the campus community” but I guess the campus was more tight knit than I thought.