Prejudice Versus Diversity: An Untimely Case for Classical Conservatism
by Christopher DeGroot (July 2018)
François Flameng and Paul Helleu, John Singer Sargent, 1880
For many intellectuals, diversity now serves as a powerful idol. Having sympathy for “the excluded,” or, anyway, a careerist desire to appear “moral,” they want us to believe that diversity is an unmixed good. They seem not to know, or at least care, that history is not on their side, that diversity, for good reasons, was always considered a source of conflict in the history of peoples and nations. In Victor Davis Hanson’s words,
Ancient Greece’s numerous enemies eventually overran the 1,500 city-states because the Greeks were never able to sublimate their parochial, tribal, and ethnic differences to unify under a common Hellenism. The Balkans were always a lethal powder keg due to the region’s vastly different religions and ethnicities where East and West traditionally collided—from Roman and Byzantine times through the Ottoman imperial period to the bloody twentieth century. Such diversity often caused destructive conflicts of ethnic and religious hatred. Europe for centuries did not celebrate the religiously diverse mosaic of Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant Christians, but instead tore itself apart in a half-millennium of killing and warring that continued into the late twentieth century in places like Northern Ireland.
In multiracial, multiethnic, and multi-religious societies—such as contemporary India or the Middle East—violence is the rule in the absence of unity. Even the common banner of a brutal communism could not force all the diverse religions and races of the Soviet Union to get along. Japan, meanwhile, does not admit many immigrants, while Germany has welcomed over a million, mostly young Muslim men from the war-torn Middle East. The result is that Japan is in many ways more stable than Germany, which is reeling over terrorist violence and the need for assimilation and integration of diverse newcomers with little desire to become fully German.
Moreover, as James’ younger brother Henry, himself a genius of consciousness, observed in a letter of November 1, 1863 to Thomas Sergeant Perry, “willfully, intentionally prejudiced persons are very rare. Every one certainly is more or less prejudiced, but ‘unbeknown’ to themselves.” The reason, for Henry James, is that “prejudice [is] a judgment formed on a subject upon data furnished, not by the subject itself, but by the mind which regards it.” What is more, “these data are the fruits of the subtlest influences,—birth, education, association.” We can see here that the James brothers, in their different ways, are both describing the limits of human reason. “Each of us dichotomizes the Kosmos in a different place,” amounts to the insight that the self comprehends “data furnished, not by the subject itself, but by the mind which regards it.” And, as we can all discover (to at least some degree) through introspection, “these data are the fruits of the subtlest influences,—birth, education, association.” Our endowed nature, our self, interacts with the external world, the two producing experiences which become knowledge, which is, in a sense, a kind of prejudice: for we exist in time and bring the past with us into the present and into the future. The process being person-specific, it follows that “every one certainly is more or less prejudiced, but ‘unbeknown’ to themselves,” because in order to transcend all our prejudice we should have to get out from our own experience—which is impossible, as it would be, in Thomas Nagel’s apt phrase, “a view from nowhere.”
In T.S. Eliot and Prejudice (1988) the literary critic Christopher Ricks, with his characteristic acuity, noted that “not only there is no substantive to realize the quality of mind which is the opposite of prejudice, there is no verb to realize the activity of mind which is the opposite of prejudicing. As a result, ‘unprejudiced’ summons the absence of a vice and not the presence of a virtue.” There is no such substantive or verb because prejudice derives from the particular histories of men and women. Therefore, in contemplating the opposite of prejudice we are not dealing with objectivity, or impartiality, or what you will, but literally with non-sense. Prejudice, then, has a deep and irreplaceable value owing to the limits of reason itself. Indeed, prejudice is justified by the nature of the human mind itself.
intentions of my words, their significance, for him, shall be translated, so to say; determined by his own nature, with its particular context and history. Nor can I transcend my own limits in regard to him. Everyone’s world lies in his words, and everyone is like a ray of a darkling sun that can see only portions of the burning sphere he and others collectively compose. So that ultimately, the biggest obstacle for government is simply phenomenological experience itself, which, insofar as it finds us interacting with diverse human beings, necessarily produces all sorts of incoherence and effectively solipsistic exchanges.
internal criteria (the result, in part, of a particulate cultural history): and finally re-presented, and by no means in the same manner to everyone. Each person’s world, indeed, is his own re-presentation. And as we understand from the word each, indicating plurality, there is only so much similarity, overlap, continuity. Hence, then, the need for prejudice, in the epistemically robust sense of the word. Of course, in our touchy age of equality, prejudice, as most people conceive of it, denotes only bias, a bad thing. Since our language has been debased, few of us now have an appreciation for how absolutely indispensable prejudice is. Yet it was central, significantly, to the thought of both of those wise men, Edmund Burke and Dr. Johnson, and in our time another excellent man, Theodore Dalrymple, has made a strong case for it in his In Praise of Prejudice (2007).
In Implicit Meanings (1975), the anthropologist Mary Douglas wrote:
In the normal process of interpretation, the existing scheme of assumptions tends to be protected from challenge, for the learner recognizes and absorbs cues which harmonize with past experience and usually ignores cues which are discordant. Thus, those assumptions which have worked well before are reinforced. Because the selection and treatment of new experiences validates the principles which have been learned, the structure of established assumptions can be applied quickly and automatically to current problems of interpretation. In animals this stabilizing, selective tendency serves the biological function of survival. In men the same tendency appears to govern learning. If every new experience laid all past interpretations open to doubt, no scheme of established assumptions could be developed and no learning could take place.
so concerned about “implicit bias.” For it is because prejudice is intrinsic to reason itself that “implicit bias” does not predict discriminatory behavior, and that changes to “implicit bias” do not change behavior, either.
It will now be easy to see what makes revolution so undesirable: It is incoherent. Though it wants to improve the human condition, revolution functions to undermine an essential epistemic foundation, like a man who thinks he can become a sprinter by chopping off his legs. Far better to be conservative, because unlike the revolutionary, the conservative is a kind of nurturer: As the gardener tends to his plants—ensuring that they get the sunlight, water and nutrients they need—so the conservative takes care that the state shall be consistent with the nature of men and women, as determined by their culture and tradition, and indeed by the working character of the human mind itself. In contrast, the revolutionary, like the facile diversity enthusiast, overlooks the necessity of unifying principles, as if peoples, with their specific values and histories, were as malleable and interchangeable as the nifty gadgets that give contemporary life an appearance of natural ease and comfort. Such an approach makes democracy so much divisive chaos, a popularity contest between irreconcilable groups who are keen to advance their interests to the exclusion of others, although this may transpire under such lofty terms as equality, fairness, and justice.
letter to John Norvell: “The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors.” More than two hundred years later, there is still a good deal of truth in this. To read the left and the right on one another is to behold “falsehoods & errors” and mutual unwitting incomprehension on both sides. Nor is this a wonder, for an objective notion of truth, like disinterested contextual inquiry, is of little interest to most people (including intellectuals); what matters most to them is what they can do with “the truth.” And in general, belief is much more important to us humans than “truth,” the latter often being but a means to the former, however unknowingly.
Thus the Democrats, because they are unwilling to recognize that it was they and the Republicans—our other business party, as it were—who produced the populist Donald Trump, have been trying to convince the public that he is Vladimir Putin’s puppet, and that Russian interference is the reason for President Trump’s election: and now, as these efforts appear to be unsuccessful, the Democrats are devoting much time and energy to portraying the man as a serial sexual assaulter. In all this any objective notion of truth or notion of intellectual responsibility is of course quite irrelevant; people have certain ends, and “truth” is put in their service.
Although relativism is a ridiculous concept, being self-refuting by definition, it seems only fitting that so many intellectuals should take its veracity for granted: after all, what do they know but sheer bias and subjectivity, especially given the decline of intellectual standards that has been occurring since the late 1960s? Rigorous and detached inquiry into the nature of a thing—what have they ever known of that? As with intellectuals, so with ordinary people. In the normal course of things, a person asserts his opinion and, above all, feelings associated with some subject. Next, he proceeds to unconsciously misinterpret, in an evaluative manner, those who disagree with him, in order to advance his own agenda, whatever that may be. Nor is he even aware of the incoherence. Now this description holds for nearly all mankind, the well-educated by no means excepted. Indeed, it is they who reason in this fashion most of all, thanks to their knowledge and inclinations, their ambition and vanity. It follows that democracy—where it would be determined solely by coherent debate—is impossible by definition. Alas, what is called democracy was best captured by Jose Ortega Gasset’s grim description of mass men in The Revolt of the Masses (1930): “The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will . . . The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select.”
Although almost all sociologists are liberals, some of the best work in their field can be used to support classical conservatism. In The Righteous Mind (2012), Jonathan Haidt provides an overview of Robert Putnam’s research, which is such bad news for progressives.
Robert Putnam has provided a wealth of evidence that Burke and Smith were right . . . religions make Americans into “better neighbors and better citizens” . . . the active ingredient that made people more virtuous was enmeshing them into relationships with their co-religionists. Anything that binds people together into dense networks of trust makes people less selfish.
So much, then, for all the high-toned talk about the value of diversity. The thing is largely a vice, not a virtue. In the abstract, of course, diversity sounds wonderful: we’ll all be enriched by each other, aided in this by our tolerance and respect for people who are unlike us. In actual experience, diversity is far more complicated, limiting, and finally destructive. Yet the mind tending to believe what it wants to be true rather than what is true, people will go on believing otherwise, like a crazy man who drowns since he insisted that he could breathe underwater.
Neuroscience, too, supports classical conservative political philosophy. Says Haidt:
Oxytocin should bond us to our partners and our groups, so that we can more effectively compete with other groups. It should not bond us to humanity in general.
Several recent studies have validated this prediction. In one set of studies, Dutch men played a variety of economic games while sitting alone in cubicles, linked via computers into small teams. 33 Half of the men had been given a nasal spray of oxytocin, and half got a placebo spray. The men who received oxytocin made less selfish decisions—they cared more about helping their group, but they showed no concern at all for improving the outcomes of men in the other groups. In one of these studies, oxytocin made men more willing to hurt other teams (in a prisoner’s dilemma game) because doing so was the best way to protect their own group. In a set of follow-up studies, the authors found that oxytocin caused Dutch men to like Dutch names more and to value saving Dutch lives more (in trolley-type dilemmas). Over and over again the researchers looked for signs that this increased in-group love would be paired with increased out-group hate (toward Muslims), but they failed to find it. 34 Oxytocin simply makes people love their in-group more. It makes them parochial altruists. The authors conclude that their findings “provide evidence for the idea that neurobiological mechanisms in general, and oxytocinergic systems in particular, evolved to sustain and facilitate within-group.”
too little in our time.
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Christopher DeGroot is a columnist at Taki’s Magazine and Senior Contributing Editor of New English Review. His writing has appeared in The American Spectator, The Imaginative Conservative, The Daily Caller, American Thinker, The Unz Review, Ygdrasil, A Journal of the Poetic Arts, and elsewhere. Follow him at @CEGrotius.
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