I tried to explain that it's possible to drink alcohol for pleasure rather than just to get drunk - that the actual drink itself could taste pleasant and you could drink enough to reach a state of relaxation without actually getting utterly legless. He seemed doubtful. I didn't blame him.
I expect that if you don't drink yourself but spend most Friday and Saturday nights ferrying people around Leeds in varying states of inebriation, you might have a similar reaction. If you have to put up with drunken people being rude and abusive on a regular basis or witness the kind of pointless violence that often goes together with night time drinking in towns and cities, you might take a dim view of alcohol and the kind of culture and society that embraces this kind of behaviour as normal.
My taxi driver seemed bewildered by this kind of behaviour, but you can see that other people from that community might react differently. With irritation or disgust for example, or condemnation, or they might develop a sense of superiority from what they see as a debased indigenous culture.
Racial and cultural stereotyping has a long and inglorious history, but is still pervasive, even in supposedly enlightened circles.
I was slightly irked by an article some time ago in New Statesman by Alice O'Keefe, relating the experience of being undercharged for a duvet in John Lewis and the travails of a relatively financial constrained 'middle class' person when faced with the moral dilemma of whether to be honest and take it back or not.
The upshot of the article is that 'middle class' morality wins out and she dutifully goes back to the checkout, but the article finishes with the line 'Us middle class types are mugs, right?'
No is the obvious response, you just have standards you were brought up with that mean if you don't go back, you'll feel like you've let yourself down and that your parents would be very disapproving. But the problem I have is the assumption that these kind of standards are the preserve of the middle classes. That a working class person, say, wouldn't be such a 'mug' and would just take it as a piece of luck.
Obviously, you can't extrapolate from individual cases, but pretty much everyone I can think of in my immediate family (largely blue collar or very lower middle class) would have done exactly the same, and I can't imagine we are complete outliers. In fact, it would never have occured to my parents that there was a moral dilemma here at all - you would just go back, no question.
Ultimately, we are all highly influenced by our experiences and surroundings and this feeds into our view of the world. But we need to be alert to the distortions that this inevitably gives rise to. To take some examples:
I regularly see coarse, drunken white people behaving badly - ergo my culture is morally superior to theirs
My only experience of working class people is watching Shameless and Eastenders - ergo all working class behave like that
I'm surrounded by people from ethnic minorities who treat me with contempt, ergo immigration is a bad thing
I work with lots of professional / hard working people from overseas, ergo immigration is a good thing with great benefits to society
All of these are pieces of a jigsaw, none completely right and none completely wrong. What we forget at our peril is that these kinds of views (including our own), and the experiences that give rise to them are the products of constrained experience - either geographically or socially or both. The challenge to them is to introduce a broader perspective from wider experience, so some kind of context can be achieved.
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