Читать книгу In Praise of Prejudice - Theodore Dalrymple - Страница 12

7

One Prejudice Always Replaced by Another

TO OVERTURN A prejudice is not to destroy prejudice as such. It is rather to inculcate another prejudice. The prejudice that it is wrong to bear a child out of wedlock has been replaced by the prejudice that there is nothing wrong with it at all. Interestingly, the class that first objected on intellectual grounds to the original prejudice, namely the well-educated upper-middle class, is the least likely to behave as if that original prejudice were unjustified. In other words, for that class the matter is principally one of intellectual preening and point-scoring, of appearing bold, generous, imaginative, and independent-minded in the eyes of their peers, rather than a matter of practical policy. When George Bernard Shaw characterized marriage as a legalized form of prostitution, he was not so much demanding justice and equality for women, as he was encouraging the dissolution, even as an ideal, of permanent bonds between a man and a woman. Unfortunately, mass-bastardy is not liberating for women.

But what does this prove, you might ask? Is not the problem a hangover from the original prejudice?

A glimpse of an important aspect of the reality of massbastardization (at least in Britain) may be had from a report recently published by the Joseph Rowntree Trust, a British charity devoted to the study and elimination of urban poverty. The researchers interviewed forty-one teenage girls, some of them as young as thirteen, who had decided to have a baby. (The writers of the report failed to remark that most of their subjects had been, in the eyes of the law, victims of a sexual crime, an odd omission in a society hysterically obsessed by the dangers of pedophilia.)

The report quotes the girls verbatim, and the first thing that strikes the reader is their incoherence in their native, and only, language. Their vocabulary is impoverished, their syntax abominable. They struggle to make themselves understood: like the victims of certain kinds of stroke, they have not the words to articulate their feelings and thoughts. Perhaps this is not altogether surprising, for one of the things they have in common is their disdain of school and education (admittedly not the same thing, or even faintly connected, in the world in which they were brought up). The intergenerational effect is evident:

I could of done a lot better. . . I don’t think my mum—my [absent] dad, sort of, would say, of, yeah—yeah—I want the best for you. . . my mum was like, “Just go to school.” She didn’t really like, ask for homework and stuff—to see like, when it wasn’t done. Kind of, she didn’t ask me if it had been done or anything like that.

(Note the passive voice where homework is concerned. She speaks as if homework did children rather than children did homework. One may wonder whether it would not have been better for her future if the child had not grown up where there was a social prejudice in favor of education, rather than the reverse.)

The girls interviewed by the authors had a profound sense of their own social authority—a prejudice, in fact, since they derived it not from personal reflection on philosophical principles, but from unthinking acceptance of the social mores into which they were born. A fourteen-year-old girl said:

Some teachers were OK—other teachers I used to swear at—I didn’t like them at all.

The idea that dislike of someone was not sufficient grounds to swear at him, that tolerable social relations require self-control, that living with others imposed a duty of restraint, had not been inculcated in her as a prejudice, and it was now unlikely that she would ever learn it, let alone conform her behavior to it. The less than encouraging consequence was that she would continue to see all human relations as a power struggle that she was likely, on most occasions, to lose, given her relative poverty, lack of education, vulnerability and exploitability as a single mother, and utter dependence for her sustenance on a state bureaucracy for which she was but a number, with all the resultant frustration, misery, and victimization that follows from such a position.

Another girl, telling her interviewer why she did not like school, said:

all the teachers made you stand up when they walked into the room. Why should I stand up? I don’t stand up for my [separated] parents, so why am I gonna stand up for them? It was a—very much, you’re the child, I’m the teacher.

Contained in this passage is the assumption that, since all people are created equal, all social relations must be conducted on the same and equal basis: that what is appropriate with one’s parents (not, of course, honor or obedience) is appropriate with everyone, in all circumstances. Authority derives from drawing breath, by the secular equivalent of divine providence—that is to say, by natural right. Not surprisingly, it comes hard to such people that the world in general is not as interested in them as the people in their immediate circle are. And when this attitude of inherent authority has entered the fabric of the presuppositions of everyone around them, it is again not surprising that when teachers inform parents of the misconduct of their offspring, they, the parents, take it as a personal insult and blame not their children, who are the outer limits of their own egos, as they would once have done, but the teachers and the school, who have committed the crime of lèse-majesté . A blind prejudice in favor of constituted authority has been replaced by a blind prejudice that authority, other than one’s own, is inherently illegitimate.

No one would suggest that parents ought to have unyielding faith in teachers that is impervious to evidence of individual malignity; but a prejudice that, when teachers complain of the conduct of a child, they are more likely to be in the right than in the wrong, would conduce overall to the improvement, rather than to the deterioration, of a child’s conduct.

We can rid ourselves of any particular attitude to any given question, no doubt, but we cannot give up having any attitude whatsoever towards it.