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Why does “prejudice” seem so sinful?
The conviction that there’s something odd and repellent about making distinctions on grounds of religion, race, sex and the like calls for explanation. How come no one used to think it’s a problem and now everyone does? And why are such distinctions so much worse than distinctions based on the fact that someone’s a fundy, ’phobe, rural southerner, used car salesman or community college dropout? I’ve suggested that the
bureaucratization of life and in particular education has a part in
the matter. If we’re all factory-produced cogs in the machine then the
traditional distinctions do seem aside the point. What matters is
whether we accept the system (which we don’t if we’re fundies or ’phobes) and how
we’re graded (used car salesman, lawyer or Harvard graduate). Electronic
mass communications also seem a factor. TV is what constitutes our
public life today, and it turns us all into unconnected individuals
surrounded by the same cloud of persons, thoughts and events. Since we
all occupy the same position in the same world, with minor distinctions
resulting from the particular channels we happen to choose, what grounds
could there be for the feeling that membership in a particular
traditionally-defined group could matter publicly?
Comments
Bureaucrats make distinctions all the time among their “clients.” If they didn’t they’d lose a big chunk of their claim on their paychecks. I think the more-likely cause is egalitarianism. That’s the deadly enemy of distinctions: any distinction runs the horrible risk of making one of the entities that are compared superior to the other. By now most people have been so cowed by this official doctrine that, when someone absolutely must make a distinction, he immediately assures us that different doesn’t mean unequal. Well, sometimes it does. Make a list of the most-pernicious liberal doctrines, and you’ll find that most of them are particular applications of the ideology of egalitarianism. Posted by: frieda on May 28, 2003 4:06 PMAgreed that egalitarianism is an explanation, but I was exploring the issue from an institutional rather than ideological perspective. I hope it’s not overly Marxist to think that mode of social organization determines consciousness to at least some degree (as well, of course, as the reverse). Posted by: Jim Kalb on May 28, 2003 5:32 PM |