Reflection on ‘Aphorism 4’ (Every Prejudice)

“Every prejudice that exists in your society is a part of you. To deny it is to refuse to fight it.”
– Aphorism 4

To me this ministry is a direct and clear challenge. Many of us, and Quakers not least, like to think that we are so enlightened and have moved beyond prejudice and bigotry. We like to tell ourselves comforting lies, and this is a key example.

It’s understandable. We can be so scathing of those who are blatant racists, so negative about employers with sexist policies or pay rates, so condemnatory of those who attack others for their faith, that it is a simple matter of psychological self-defence that we struggle to see the speck in our eye when we decry the beam in another’s. Yet while it may not be the degree of hypocrisy described in the Sermon on the Mount, still, it is hypocrisy.

I’d imagine that a lot of you got a little defensive at that, as well. At being accused not only of being prejudiced but hypocritical as well. Here’s the thing:

Everyone. Is. A. Hypocrite.

It’s true. Just like everyone is prejudiced, and not for unrelated reasons, either. Jung saw hypocrisy as one of the many results of failure to integrate the shadow-self, a failure that is universal. Jungian scholars will no doubt say I have misapprehended some of this, or oversimplify its expression, so please don’t take me as an authority on Jung, but it suffices to make this point. The shadow is all the parts of the self that are hidden, unreachable or simply unreached, from the conscious mind. It is sometimes called the Jungian id, but its correspondence when comparing with Freud is that of the entire unconscious. It contains much that is positive as well as negative, all the unacknowledged parts of ourselves, good and bad. It is instinctive and irrational. I suppose that one might say that it is opposed to those traits that we have come to consider ‘civilized’, but that may be because those traits that are considered civilized are the traits we are most likely to acknowledge and accept. For those of us who value equality, our prejudices might easily be conceived as part of our shadow.

Psychology, in studies of much more rigour and a stronger scientific approach than the work of Jung or Freud, has found that we are amazingly capable of self-deception. We fabricate evidence after we have made decisions, and if pushed we will seek evidence outside ourselves that we can refer to but we will show amazing preference for those things that support the decision we have already made. Indeed, we often deceive ourselves as to whether we have made a decision or not. When I was young, and couldn’t choose between two things, my father taught me a trick (I remember it as my father, though I remember being so young that any figure of parental or quasi-parental authority might have merged into my father in my memory). You can’t choose between A or B, so you flip a coin. It tells you to do B – now, are you relieved, or disappointed? You had already chosen what you wanted, so go with that decision, and ignore what the coin said.

I don’t know what it is that withholds us from acknowledging a choice we have already made, in such an inconsequential situation as that. I do know that many of us find times in our life, more or less often depending on our circumstances, where we need to make a decision and we are expected to be fair. Public authorities, like planning committees, may be expected to work in a quasi-judicial manner, and of course those making decisions in a court are acting judicially. We know they are expected to be fair. Even those who don’t have such a lofty position (or the chance of being on a jury) will have times when one has to make decisions and is expected to be fair. You might volunteer as a judge in a competition, or you might work in human resources. You might be responsible for a purchasing decision at work. You might be a parent.

In those situations where people are expected to be even-handed when a lot is at stake, we have come up with methods – as a society – to try to encourage people into not making a decision until they have evidence. The entire system of tendering for contracts exists in part to prevent a person deciding without evidence. A set of rules is set up as to how tenders will be evaluated, they are often part of the invitation to tender, and then those rules are applied to the offering. It can rarely be done mechanistically, but where discretion is needed the person setting the rules might even set out how to quantify and balance different advantages and disadvantages.

It can get very complicated. But would the people who would pre-judge a process and find the evidence to suit the decision they already made know that they’ve already made the decision? Not always. In fact, I would say they quite often haven’t. And that is one key to this ministry.

Here’s another: the human mind works in large part on heuristics. This word will be familiar not only to those who study cognitive psychology but also those working on machine decision-making, and various other fields. Heuristics are essentially patterns, learned processes that are involved in making decisions, as well as a range of other cognitive processes. They are the broad rules we have learned to live by, how we assume something will be sweet or sour before we eat it. Particularly emotionally intense experiences build strong heuristics, and they change over time with other experiences. The stories we are told also build our heuristics, and the things we see in TV and films.

A lot of the time, these intuitively learned heuristics are good. If we didn’t have them, we would waste a lot of effort testing and checking things that don’t need checking the vast majority of the time. However, they also lead to problems. People with traumatic experiences may develop heuristics that are counter-productive, leading to distrust or avoidance of certain situations or sorts of people. They are no more irrational than any other heuristic, but they aren’t useful any more. These heuristics are also responsible for some of our biases. If the stories we hear are all about women who are emotional and need rescuing, that bias becomes part of us.

There’s all sorts of other cognitive elements of prejudice and bias. The cross-race effect has been much studied, and shows that we pay attention in different ways to the faces of people who share our ethnicity as compared to those of other ethnicities (although some studies show this effect reduced by familiarity with or exposure to people of the other ethnicity in question). Other manifestations of in-group advantage have also been much studied, where we will treat someone more favourable if we share in-groups, even down to something as trivial as the way we take our coffee.

And it’s not always a case of like preferring like. Where our experience, including our subtle (or less subtle) conditioning by society – by other people’s attitudes, by the news media, by advertising and by stories – has taught us heuristics that say “men are more competitive”, “women are more emotional”, “black people are more violent”, then however much we don’t actually intellectually believe those things, they will affect our decision making and the way we react to people.

You are prejudiced, as am I. We can’t help it. What you can do is acknowledge it and try to counter it in yourself and in society. When we are aware of our faulty heuristics, we can compensate. When people are briefed on the cross-race effect before an experiment, it becomes less noticeable. When we know that we have some level of distrust for people of a certain background, we can correct for that. And by telling different stories, exposing ourselves and the next generation to different stimuli, we can change what prejudices are part of our society and our collective selves.

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