June 10, 2003
NO PREJUDICE AGAINST PREJUDICE
You be the judge (Martin Krygier, Sydney Morning Herald, 6/6/2003)In 1989, I was in Warsaw. I was approaching a hotel that contained one of the few shops in which you could buy anything of quality, for foreign currency, as gifts for friends. Outside the hotel was a group of Romany women, one of whom approached me and asked for 20 zloties; a miniscule amount. So, without a second thought, I gave it to her. In gratitude, she offered to tell my fortune without charge. This all seemed a pleasingly exotic diversion to me, and I reasoned to myself (for at that stage I was still reasoning) that I could handle myself in the middle of the day outside a well-populated open-air coffee shop, against - if it turned out to be against - a woman half my size.
What happened then was a remarkable example of psychological games played by experienced players at the expense of a fool. The short summary is: they talked me into trusting them enough to show them the money I was carrying - in the interests of telling my fortune, of course. And soon it dawned on me that I had been conned and robbed....
I entered the hotel and said to the doorman: "You know what is going on here and you have a responsibility to warn or protect those who don't. Why don't you?"
"Once, I used to chase them away," he replied. "But I was warned that one night I would find a knife in my back. I've got to live and it's not my affair. If anyone's stupid enough to be taken in by a group of gypsies, that's their problem."
"But I'm not Polish," I protested. "I don't know anything about gypsies."
"Everyone in Europe knows about them."
"But I'm from Australia." At that, he softened. The doorman recognised in me that rare thing: a person innocent of relevant prejudices and therefore ready to be taken for a ride.
The next day, I was talking to a sociologist friend about the incident and he said: "It's funny. We spend a great deal of our time trying to disabuse our students of their standard stereotypes and prejudices. Yet, if you'd just had the normal prejudices of a Polish peasant, you'd never have got into this mess."...
"Dare to know", have courage to use your own reason (rather than accepting prejudice), was how the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant characterised the Enlightenment.
But the Enlightenment didn't have it all its own way. Compare Kant with his conservative Anglo-Irish contemporary Edmund Burke, in Reflections on the Revolution in France: "Prejudice is of ready application in an emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision, sceptical, puzzled and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man's virtue his habit, and not a series of unconnected acts. Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his nature."
The people who rail against prejudice lack economic sense. Knowledge is good, but it is also costly to acquire. ("Facts, like jade, are costly to obtain," wrote the economist Steven N.S. Chen in his "Fable of the Bees.") Prejudices economize on learning costs. They enable us to make decisions and act without incurring the costs of a search for the ultimate and complete truth.
When we have become gods, when our powers are unlimited and we are all omniscient at zero cost, then prejudice will be banished. Until then, we all must rely on it. The effort to discredit prejudice is merely a kind of intellectual bullying, a public con game, used by opportunists to promote their own prejudices by stealth. The victims are persuaded to give up their own prejudices, while the con artists keep and use their own, just as the Warsaw gypsies kept their own cash but persuaded Mr. Krygier to give up his.
Let's admit it: we conservatives are gullible rubes. We've let liberals con us out of our prejudices for decades, and squawked not while they acted freely on their own.
Therefore stand tall, I say, and show the world your reasonable prejudices. Be not afraid!