Pastor's Blog

Not long ago I watched an old British comedy film from the 1950’s, in which a young man of the upper-middle class had made a working-class girl pregnant. The girl’s indignant father demanded that the young man should marry his daughter, a demand whose justice he understood and at once agreed to. The audience howled with laughter at the primitive idea that the future birth of child created an inescapable obligation on the part of the father. In less than half a century, the prejudice of centuries had been overturned, made to appear ridiculous, and replaced by another… (p. 24)

From Theodore Dalrymple’s In Praise of Prejudice , chapter five, “The Effect of Pedagogy Without Prejudice”: Anyone who has observed a mother in a shop of supermarket solicitously and even anxiously bending over a three- or four- year old child to ask him what he would like for his next meal will understand the sovereignty over choice that is now granted to those who have neither experience nor powers of discrimination enough to exercise it on the basis of anything other than the merest whim, without regard to the consequences. By abdicating their responsibility in this fashion, in the name of not passing on their own prejudices or preconceptions to their children, and not imposing their own view of what is right upon them, they enclose their children within the circle of their childish tastes. In the name of the struggle against prejudice and illegitimate authority, they instill a culinary prejudice that, though self-evidently harmful, is far more restrictive in the long run than any ...

In chapter four of In Praise of Prejudice, Dalrymple explains why it is that social engineers prefer a history of disaster to a history of achievement. A country whose problems, by comparison with those of all other countries are minor, and disproportionately caused by the inherent and inescapable difficulties of human existence…rather than by defective political arrangements, does not necessarily please the intellectuals, who are left with nothing, or nothing very much, to think about and rectify. This is why history often has to be revised—to justify taking power and making radical political alterations. If history is indeed but the record of extreme nastiness, then we have nothing to learn from it except that we, who of course are people of unalloyed good will, must do things—everything—differently in the future. And if this means we must to sacrifice historical truth for political power, well then, so be it. The love of truth, while it exists, is generally weaker than the love of p...

From In Praise of Prejudice , chapter three: “History Teaches Us Anything We Like.” In a recent book entitled Menace in Europe…the talented American journalist Claire Berlinski tells us that war and genocide are not part of the history of Europe, but constitute the whole of its history. She arrives at this conclusion by looking at European history through the lens of the Holocaust and a list of wars that fills an entire page of print… Miss Berlinski’s is an example of what might be called the nothing-but school of historiography, by means of which a narrative is constricted [constructed?] from highly selected facts in order to verify a key to the understanding of everything… A present discontent is read backwards, or traced by a golden thread through the whole of history, and made to supply that history with an immanent meaning and teleology. (pp. 8-9) Inconvenient facts usually spur us to heroic efforts of rationalization to preserve our outlook, rather than to honest re-examination; ...

In chapter two of In Praise of Prejudice , Dalrymple observes that unlike Rene Descartes, the 17th century philosopher who systematically subjected everything to doubt in order to see if there was anything of which he could be absolutely certain, modern Cartesians wish to destroy certainty itself. The popularity of the Cartesian method is not the consequence of a desire to remove metaphysical doubt, and find certainty, but precisely the opposite: to cast doubt on everything, and thereby increase the scope of personal license, by destroying in advance any philosophical basis for the limitation of our own appetites. The radical skeptic, nowadays at least, is in search not so much of truth, as of liberty—that is to say, of liberty conceived of the largest field imaginable for the satisfaction of his whims. He is in the realm of moral conceptions what the man who refuses to marry is in the realm of relationships: he is reluctant to foreclose on any possibilities by imposing limits on himse...

In chapter one of In Praise of Prejudice , Dalrymple cites the Oxford Shorter Dictionary , which defines prejudice as, A previous judgement, especially a premature or hasty judgement. Preconceived opinion; bias favourable or unfavourable; prepossession…usually with unfavourable connotation. An unreasoning predilection or objection. He goes on to point out that nowadays the idea of prejudice is usually associated with race (“the word race and prejudice go together like Mercedes and Benz, or Dolce and Gabbana”). Surely in this connection prejudice is a vice to be diligently avoided. But does it follow from this that all prejudice is vicious? Is it really possible to live without preconceived ideas? Are all preconceived ideas necessarily wrong? The man without prejudices, or rather, the man who declares himself such, is a man who is terrified to be thought first bigoted, and second, so weak of mind, so lacking in individuality and mental power, that he cannot think for himself. For his op...

I have just begun what appears to be a very profitable read, In Praise of Prejudice: The Necessity of Preconceived Ideas , by Theodore Dalrymple. To call someone prejudiced is to relegate him to the lowest rung of intellectual life. But is there anyone who isn’t prejudiced? As Dr. Dalrymple argues in this brief and bracing rehabilitation of both prejudice itself and the necessity of prejudice, someone who walks out into the world completely unprejudiced is as helpless as a newborn babe. In fact, as Dr. Dalrymple shows, prejudice is at the root of most virtue as well as of a lot of vice. To expect people to work out all their morals for themselves from abstract first principles is to expect far too much from them. It is not only unrealistic, it is harmful. The pretense that we can be totally unprejudiced, argues Dr. Dalrymple, who speaks from wide clinical experience as a doctor in a slum hospital and the prison next door, is a pretext for licentiousness and lack of self-control, to the...