On Politics, Pride and Prejudice

Recently, I seem to have been involved in a great many political slanging matches which revolve around the premise "All X's hate Y's" i.e. all Democrats hate Truth, all liberals hate Faith, all Republicans hate Moslems, all pro-choicers hate life, all those against the US in Iraq hate freedom and so forth. To be honest, I would guess these kind of assertions make up around 80% of political blogs comments sections and around 60% of all political blogs themselves.

Oddly enough, I have recently been involved in an email discussion about the roots of prejudice with a Professor of Economics from one of the US's major universities. Said professor describes himself as having views that are "around the center" and doesn't object too much when I say that by UK standards he is right wing. The discussion began as one on the differing forms anti-Americanism can take in different countries and broadened somewhat from there. Eventually, I want to post a detailled appraisal of our discussion but it is on hold right now while he deals with exam time.

Here though, and purely because of the various discussions I've been involved with over the last few days, is a snippet that explains my take on prejudice in all it's forms.

If pressed, I suppose I fall back on the hoary old Scots chestnut that Americans (the group, not the collection of individuals) inherited all the worst traits of the English. (and not even all the English at that, just the SouthEastern English).

Whenever you talk about anti-Americansim, I feel you have to start with an explanation. We must face facts that "I hate America and Americans" simply doesn't always have the referents we would expect. Usually, what the speaker means is that they hate the observed cultural zeitgeist of the US, not the nation itself (what point would there be in hating a few million square miles of rock and turf?) and hate the cliched traits common to many Americans (not all).

In other words, anti-Americanism, like the anti-English sentiment of Scots, is really aimed at a subset both of the culture and personal traits. This is pretty standard behaviour for humans. We make a faulty map and call it the territory. There is a reason that the joke "I've told you a million times, don't exaggerate" is translatable into every human language. Proof can be had simply by looking at some of the far-rights blogging about Islam, for example. They do the same thing but are loathe to admit it, simply because the important concept of relativism has been arbitrarily excised from their conceptual lexicon - a deep philosophical mistake IMHO. They may be able to make a case for it in ethics but it remains an important part of the Universe, as Einstein, Wittgenstein and Kripke bear out. Admitted, most people don't keep this concept in mind. That is why fallacies of the kind:

P1:Aristotle is a Greek.
P2:Aristotle says all Greeks are liars
C: Aristotle is a liar

Are so widespread. The instant we forget that Premise Two should read "Aristotle has an expressed opinion that all Greeks are liars." we lose. We forget the truth value of the second premise is not like that of the first.

Yep, everywhere we go we see the same level of false universalising of statements, from the backstreets of Mosul to Yale, from Right to Left across the political spectrum and in all walks of life. It is a natural thing - so natural in fact that I can only speculate that it was once a useful thing in evolutionary terms, strengthening tribe cohesion against everything that was "other".

I hypothesise that in the hardscrabble days of hunter-gathering or early agrarian communities, without this false universalising a tribe or genetic grouping would have insufficiently defended their genetic identity and scarce resources from interlopers, leading to their demise fairly shortly afterwards if the interlopers DID have such a mechanism. This mechanism then, is surely some gene-coding that has _expression as instinctual behaviour. It would then be the mechanism behind all racism, bigotry, stereotyping and ethnic violence - as well as the vicious infighting that supposedly more intelligent (and thus enlightened)academics are so familiar with.

Oddly enough, a few days after I wrote this, a study was published that appears to prove exactly what I was saying

Now I would ask for your comments on this thesis. I do think that it has to be a neccessary preface and codicil to any discussion which involves statements of the kind "X hates Y's, they are all Z". These statements are always, in the strictest sense, false. However, they may be said to be almost totally false, partly false, mostly true etc once all the above is admitted.

Let's take it from there, shall we? Maybe we can have a sensible discussion that way. Start by noting that prejudice can be negative (all Muslims hate freedom) or seemingly positive (the US is the greatest country in the world).