Need of the hour: Culture Shaming

Nowadays, most are familiar with body shaming (unkindness towards obese people), status shaming (looking down on people lower down the social scale), contempt for those with a less paying or less powerful job, or even with those having a less expensive car. All these are only symptomatic of a mean, materialistic mind.

What is needed more in our society, is encouraging people to be more civilised,  cultured & interested in things which makes mankind different from animals. If need be, even culture shaming could be pressed into service into making philistines aware of their cultural inadequacies irrespective of their wealth or even academic education or status.

An example is in Agatha Christie's "Lord Edgware Dies". Lady Edgware, for reasons of her own, wants to dispose of his lordship. So she hires a famous impersonator & mimic to impersonate her at a dinner party (& give her an alibi) while she goes & kills her husband. The problem is one of these identical looking ladies is quite cultured & knows her Homer whereas the other is a philistine & knows Paris only as the city of fashion & not a Paris who abducted Helen of Troy in Homer's Iliad, & makes a fool of herself by exhibiting her ignorance of Homer.

This discrepancy leads eventually to solving the murder. So this shows how important it is to have at least a smattering of culture to be considered civilised.