Generalization, Prejudice, Bigotry
To forestall many weary semantic arguments, I urge one and all to adopt a certain clarity of thought on the topic of prejudice and race prejudice.
Each man was to be judged on his merit. Anything else is devilry.
If an innocent man comes from a group where there are many guilty men, he is innocent, not guilty. If a guilty man stands among a group where there are many innocent men, he is guilty, not innocent.
To condemn the innocent is unjust. To vindicate the guilty applauds the crime and encourages its return.
Again, if a man who can do the job comes from a group where many men cannot, let him do the job. If a man who cannot do the job comes from a group known for having many who can, it does not make him able, therefore let him not do the job.
To banish the productive while hiring the unproductive is inefficient, and, in its way, is another type of injustice, for it visits a hardship on employer and employee alike. The unsympathetic nature of the free market is justified by the fact that it tends, when left to itself, to correct these types of injustices.
Let us not conflating this devilry with the type of judgment all men make all the time, where we expect members of a group to behave as that group does.
If you expect a man to act like others of his group, any group, that is not right or wrong, that is merely a generalization, a stereotype.
Example: when I was a law student, a renter would not rent a room she had to let to me, because I was a boy. Renting to boys is a riskier proposition than renting to girls.
Insurance companies make all their money off of actuarial generalization of this kind all the time.
Stereotypes are how humans set their default assumptions for dealing with unknown members of known groups.
Some Leftists denounce stereotyped thinking, or the use of stereotypes in fiction, by claiming such things are prejudice or bigotry. As with all things they say, it is a lie.
If, after seeing evidence that a man is not acting like others of his group, you nevertheless ascribe whatever you expected to him, regardless of evidence, that is prejudice. You pre-judged him. This is both an error in logic, a lapse of courtesy, and a moral error.
If you also discover that not only is it not true that most members of group behave in the expected way, but that your expectations are simply false to facts, a lie, an illusion, and you still do not change your mind or adapt to new evidence, that is bigotry. It is substituting emotions for facts, hysteria for thinking. This is not merely evil, it is insane.
We saw this just this week with the slandermobbing of the Convington Boys. Like the Muller probe, they have the alleged criminal’s guilt firmly established in mind first, and only then seek some sort of lame excuse to justify it.
Bigotry expressing hatred and contempt against a race is racism. It is saying all members of the race are guilty, even if some are innocent, and all are incompetent, even when some are competent.
Racism is condemning individuals not on the merits of the case. That is the whole appeal. It condemns individual judgment and substitutes collective condemnation.
The Leftists, who lie about this as about all things, conflate any difference in outcomes to be caused by racism, and call any observation of differences between groups racism.
When the group being differentiated is not a racial group, such as the differences between men and women, or the difference between chaste and perverted, Christian and paynim, they invent a new term to call it, analogizing it with racism, hence: sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, et cetera et ad nauseam.
If there be any man reading these words who did not already know the difference between generalizations, which are harmless, and bigotry, which is hellish, you should be ashamed. You have either been deceived by your teachers, or are guilty of negligence in using your powers of thought.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
