“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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Did you enjoy this post, or find it interesting, informative or stimulating? Do you want to keep seeing more of these posts? Please consider contributing to my Patreon. More information is available in the post announcing my use of Patreon.