Saturday, 2 July 2022
Prejudice can be rational
It’s my faith that we do what we do because anything else would be less agreeable.
George Gissing - Eve's Ransom (1895)
This Gissing quote captures an aspect of middle class motivation – the hard-nosed pursuit of whatever is most agreeable. Yet it can turn sour. Prejudice is a good example. Used judiciously, prejudice can protect a society against complex moral conundrums, slowing down the rate of social change to a level where major disruption is avoided.
Prejudice can be mired in ignorance of course, but it may also protect a culture against damaging social progress amid competing moral claims which cannot ever be settled in a completely equitable manner.
For example – do whatever you wish but keep it private and we won’t interfere. It’s a kind of mild prejudice which says we don’t approve of what you do but are not prepared to argue about it. We are not prepared to enter that particular moral maze because we don’t have to. These are not completely equitable solutions, but they are solutions. Prejudice can be rational.
Yet prejudice can be made to seem disagreeable when a middle class culture such as ours has been strongly conditioned to associate it with ignorance. Ignorance is definitely not agreeable. Turn rational prejudice into disagreeable ignorance by banging the drum of fanatically equitable standards and we lose the protection of rational prejudice.
We find ourselves having to argue against what were once moral extremes or keep quiet because even rational prejudice has been recast as morally extreme. In other words, the rational strength of prejudice has been lost, which is why our culture is sinking into a state which is neither rational nor equitable.
As for those who have been conditioned to find this state of affairs agreeable – some now seem to have a sense of unease. It can’t be agreeable.
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5 comments:
So if a young woman rejects me as a prospective partner as a young man because she is not attracted to me, (for reasons disclosed or not), is she prejudiced? Of course she probably is and she has a perfect right to be.
Tammly - something we all go through. Character-building I like to think.
Of course prejudice is rational.
As babes we are biased to trust our own mother. Predjudice? Dads have to wait.
Then, when older, we trust who we are used to. Others, not so much.
Then we learn that neighbours can be trusted, and the school pals, and the friendly police. Thus we survive.
The totally trusting from infancy - well, they had better have somebody looking out for them.
All the time the circle of trust expands, until something happens.
Edmund Burke praised prejudice, and thought it essential for a society to work well. It is, after all, merely making judgements about particular cases based on our experience of similar cases; a form of inductive reasoning which everyone engages in. Pre-judice. Pre-judging. Who would be daft enough to criticise that, if they were able to do it well?
So-called "progressives" don't like it, of course, and gave it a bad name. But they still do it. They pre-judge big groups of white blokes, and the police, and Conservative politicians, etc. Perhaps people don't like it if they are not very good at it.
Doonhamer - "All the time the circle of trust expands, until something happens" and we learn about politics.
Sam - maybe that's right and people don't like it if they are not very good at it. Many are not very good at it in that they seem to lack the courage to be prejudiced in their own interests.
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