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“Prejudice” and social science
John Ray, an anti-leftist social scientist in Australia, has a couple of blogs for his academic papers (here and here — I don’t know why he has two). Many of the papers are concerned with debunking social science theories advanced in support of efforts to combat what is called “bigotry.” What he finds in the world of social science is the same as what we see in the world around us: people who complain about “bigotry” are usually bigots, people who speak of “stereotypes that are impervious to empirical evidence” are likely to be in the grip of stereotypes that are impervious to empirical evidence, and so on. (See, for example, the paper posted today, April 25.) The result isn’t surprising. What could be more of a “stereotype,” more of a “demonized other,” more of a club to keep people in line, than the image of “the bigot”? What better way to stop discussion and get rid of someone or force a desired result than to make accusations of “racism”? It should be obvious that the self-image of post-Civil Rights Movement morality doesn’t capture the whole truth about that way of thinking. In particular, what antibigots say about their opponents is true of themselves. The issue is an important one. Post-Civil Rights Movement morality has greatly influenced the outlook of most people, in many cases becoming a sort of religion. Nonetheless, the essence of that morality is an anti-human demand for the abolition of all principles of social organization other than human desire and formal procedures, like markets and bureaucracies, that are designed to bring about the satisfaction of desire. The reason that is so is that any other principle of organization would involve making discriminations now considered forbidden. An obvious example would be family life, with its age and gender roles and its restraints on sexual expression. Another would be human culture as such — it’s always local and particular, so letting it play any role at all in social life would offend against the multiculturalist demand that no culture ever be given the preference over another inconsistent culture. The effect of “inclusiveness” is thus to flatten out the social and moral world and reconstruct it based on a sort of technocratic egalitarian hedonism. It is thus utterly opposed to any tolerable human way of life. Nonetheless, it’s supported by strong tendencies in modern life and thought, and by extremely powerful institutional interests. All the world’s bureaucrats, experts and money-grubbers favor it, for example, because it eliminates things that complicate their unconstrained control over social life. Inclusiveness is also supported by an apparatus of pseudo-scholarship
about “prejudice” and the like that everyone accepts as scientific
although it won’t stand up to a moment’s examination. Dr. Ray’s
contribution is to demonstrate the shoddiness of that apparatus. The
contribution is an important one, because a big selling point of
inclusiveness is the claim that it is scientific. It’s even treated as a
precondition of rational discussion — academic institutions feel
justified in forbidding “racist,” “sexist,” and “homophobic” discourse,
and some claim their mission requires them to do so. As a reult, it’s
likely to remain impossible to discuss these issues until the view that
inclusiveness is a simple matter of rationality is forcibly called into
question. And that Dr. Ray is helping to do. Comments
Dr. Ray’s site is indeed excellent, worth a daily read. Regarding the issue of bigotry, I think an interesting clue as to when “bigotry” may be legitimate or not is to look at the 18th century, Johnsonian use of the word. There, it is synonymous with narrow-mindedness, and has nothing to do with “prejudice”. According to that view, we are entitled to our prejudices, but when a man can’t see what is in front of his face, he becomes a “bigot”. The left’s use of the concepts of prejudice and bigotry has succeeded in delegitimizing personal preferences that are not in line with their ideas. Posted by: Gracián on April 25, 2003 10:52 AMI have to study this a bit more, but my own attitude is to be wary when either of the words “prejudice” or “bigotry” come up. After the early 1700s liberals had such a dominance in the Anglosphere, that liberal ideas about individual autonomy became an unchallenged principle for intellectuals and politicians. Once this happened it became very difficult to defend such things as national identity as an intellectual principle. Instead, forms of human identity were either attacked or defended on other grounds, as being a “sentiment” or “prejudice”. It’s common, for instance, to find more conservative English MPs of the 1800s defending their nationalism by saying something like “I know I’m a bigot but ….” In other words, even those with more conservative instincts operated at two different levels: they had inherited liberal principles upholding an individualistic view of the world, and then they had a personal “bias” or “prejudice” or “sentiment” upholding a wider loyalty to nation, or family or church etc. The problem was that intellectual principle usually proved stronger than personal sentiment or prejudice. Traditionalism needed to be defended by challenging the core liberal principles, not by attempting to coexist with them, outside the sphere of principle, as a prejudice or bias. Posted by: Mark Richardson on April 25, 2003 6:27 PM |