Occupational Snobbery and Gods Love
Occupational snobbery: the words themselves are offensive. No one self-applies the description of "snob" unless it's ultimately to denigrate themselves: a wine snob, for example, is what the person who's about to serve you a $3000 bottle of Chateau Cheval calls himself so that you won't spit his overpriced/overdone grape juice back into his face. A theater snob is someone who doesn't want you to hate him for the thirty minutes he's about to spend telling you how exquisite his last off-Broadway experience was. We're familiar with these kinds of snobs; to some extent we embrace them. But occupational snobbery. What is more offensive? Body formation snobbery? ("It's so upsetting that your daughter is a macrocephalic; mine's more or less Vitruvian I suppose." Hallelujiah choirs burst out at the sight of the golden child; cue F-stop adjustment.) Victim of violent crime snobbery?
Occupational snobbery, unlike the ordinary elitist/aristocratic snobbery we all know and love, is not an appreciation for the finer things in life. It is not a comically misplaced sense of priorities. It is, rather, a too-deadly-accurate sense of priorities. You are being a snob about the fact that you-or that someone who reflects well on you by association, for example someone who was born from your genetic materials or someone who used to date your neighbor-is superior to other people in three categories:
(1) the amount of time they spend working(2) the difficulty of the work(3) the amount of money earned for the work
When the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God poured down his bilious wrath upon Adam and Eve, he cursed them and their inheritors of Original Sin for all generations to come. The nature of his curse: to toil, to work the earth, and to know no cease from toiling.
When you are an occupational snob, you are explicitly saying to someone that you toil less than they do. You are explicitly saying that your toil is less upsetting to you than theirs is. You are explicitly saying that your toil is more approved of in the eyes of your fellow toilers, that not only do you toil less but that your toil is less crushingly meaningless to those enmeshed in our shared veil of tears.
When you are an occupational snob, you are explicitly saying to someone that God's curse weighs less heavily on you.
When you are an occupational snob, you are explicitly saying that God loves you more.
And very likely he does, but this is neither here nor there. Let us be good to one another, and let us not hit one another where it hurts. Let's be delightful snobs about the things that don't matter-liquor, literature, lithographs-and let's treat the people who serve us our food and who clean our toilets as human beings. If God loves them less, let's take it upon ourselves to even the score.
