Judge, Discriminate, and Hold Prejudices

(Just make sure they are the right ones.)

Theodore Dalrymple is one of my favorite living writers. He makes complex notions seem obvious and self-evident while employing a sporadic dry wit. His is reliably enjoyable reading that feels like a guilty pleasure.

He has a fascinating history as an English psychologist working in some of Britain’s slums and its prisons. He encounters the modern philosophies through the people who live them, who have really internalized the concept that their crimes were the fault of anything except their own will: their bad upbringing, their parents, their anxiety, their addictions, their ancestry, and so on.

His dryly titled book, In Praise of Prejudice, argued that a society cannot function without prejudices, and shouldn’t desire to. Prejudice is another word like “discrimination” that has been tainted by a specific type thereof. To have prejudices or biases is to admit that some things and some choices are better than others. It is appropriate, and even a sign of education (though not necessarily schooling) to have a discriminatory palate, for instance.

Dalrymple laments the disregard of what we once called decorum, long since replaced by the acclamation of pointless rule-breaking. There was once a societal pressure to act in certain pleasant ways that made life nicer for our fellow man. As a collective, we held prejudices against those who spit on the sidewalk, put their feet up in public places, were vulgar, etc. There are still places and people who hold this view, but they are becoming less common, and people of scruples are increasingly regarded as villainous. Our rejection of prejudice becomes a rejection of all standards, indeed of all authority too (for authorities judge, or rather, hold prejudices against certain types of behavior).

Theodore Dalrymple takes this abandonment of prejudice and explores the impact that this “ideal” has had on communities. For example, the way that we no longer “judge” those who reject monogamous relationships, those who have children with lots of different men, those men who pursue women only to abandon them, etc. Even this singular area of the abandonment of sexual ethics in favor of “openness” can be shown to have destroyed not just homes and lives but entire communities.

“It has been one of the great mistakes of contemporary social thought, at least as exemplified by the policies pursued by governments, that the most important aspect of the environment into which children are born, which most influences their chances in life, is the material or economic aspect. The absence of some physical appurtenance has been regarded as a terrible deprivation, while moral squalor and emotional instability had been attributed to material poverty alone.”

— Theodore Dalrymple

Just the term “moral squalor” would make many cringe today. “By whose standard?,” so many would indignantly screech. After all, they themselves have largely abandoned standards. But if we are to judge the outcome as proof of earlier injustice, as so many insist, then there is no greater injustice than depriving a child of one of his parents. Yet increasingly (and more so in Britain), the decisions of adults who choose to deprive children in this way are lauded for their “lifestyle choice”.

When speaking of the Sikh immigrants who arrived in England and prospered in terms of their upward wealth mobility and their overall happiness, he describes the cultural conditions that made that possible:

“They had two, or possibly three, great advantages vis-a-vis the local population. The first is that they had a strong collective prejudice in favor of the importance of the family. This prejudice, which had been under strong and prolonged ideological attack in the West, no longer existed among the local population. It had been replaced by another prejudice, that all forms of family life—a constantly shifting cast of presences in the household among them—were morally, emotionally, and socially equal. It is, in general, far easier to replace a good prejudice by a bad one than the other way around, perhaps (here I speak as a person without religious belief) because the heart of man is inclined more to evil than to good, to gluttony more than to moderation, to hate more than to love, to sloth more than to industry, to pride more than to modesty, and so forth.”

He goes on to describe how the attitude of so many poor English people is that their condition is due to oppression by the rich, and that they are helpless to rectify their own lot. Thus, they do not aim as high as they ought, or they do not aim at all. This mindset has been rightly derided as the “victim mentality” by many American social critics, and it is not limited to a racial dynamic, as is often implied. Few things are worse for a child than to raise him with the assertion that he has no control over his outcome, and that every failure he endures is the fault of someone else.

In an attempt to rectify all injustice, our modern social elitists have curated arguments in favor of equality of outcome and equality of opportunity. Both are false hopes, even if we merely look at human biology to see that our opportunities and outcomes will look different, and to actualize either proposition would require a horrific, draconian regime.

“Egalitarians may deny that they desire exact equality of outcome, but they have great difficulty in specifying exactly what degree of inequality is acceptable to them. That is why there are so many studies that examine inequality, whether of income or of some other marker, and why any increase in inequality is lamented as evidence in itself that an injustice has been committed. This, no doubt, is why you never see an increase in inequality praised as representing an increase in justice, as it might be—I do not say must be—if justice has anything to do with the rewards and penalties for individual conduct.”

Justice in the sense that Dalrymple described it above, is another of those words that people wince at now. The idea that a man would get his due, and that we might even support that, seems untenable for those who choose to act in ways that cry out to Heaven for vengeance. Further, the idea that there could be a relationship between our choices and our outcomes is increasingly labeled as a type of bigotry, as if one hates a poor person if he admits that the person’s poverty was correlated to a drug habit or even a life of crime. The consequence of this refusal to acknowledge basic causations is to reduce every inequality to oppression, and every success to exploitation. Ironically, it becomes dehumanizing because it robs us of our autonomy to crawl out of lousy circumstances and seek self-betterment.

Dalrymple has had more contact with unsavory individuals than most of us, and through their eyes (and mouths), he has seen the ethos that encouraged their behaviors. Disturbingly, it’s the same doctrine that is pouring out of our educational institutions, and to some degree, our media enterprises. That which has failed repeatedly at the micro level will only do so more spectacularly in its broader application, which is what is happening. If we are to rebuild anything resembling civilization, we must re-learn to judge righteously, discriminate fairly, and hold the right prejudices.

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