The other day I encountered someone wearing a button that had the same three words as in my title here, except in reverse order. The sentiment thereby expressed is widely held and on conspicuous display in this, the month formerly known as June. It is very much a sentiment of the present day. It also reveals much this wrong about the present day.
The
“prejudice” refered to in the sentiment on the button can be defined as “a
negative attitude towards an identifiable group of people.” It is unlikely that the sort of people who
would wear buttons like this or, for that matter, the sort of people who would
make buttons like this, know of any other sort of prejudice. Fifty years ago the definition might have
included the idea that the negative attitude is unfair because it is formed
with inadequate information about the group in question. Today, a negative attitude towards groups towards
which you are not supposed to have negative attitudes is regarded as a
prejudice even if it is informed and those who have built their careers and
reputations on combatting prejudice generally support government attempts to
suppress the spread of information, even if it is accurate, that could
contribute to the forming of such negative attitudes. This is what the expression “truth is no
defence” which sometimes comes up in discussions of “hate speech” is all about.
This change
in the meaning of the word prejudice that has been observable within my
lifetime is small but it is also significant.
There is a much larger difference, however, between prejudice in both of
these senses and the sense attached to the word in 1813 when the Jane Austen
novel, the title of which is alluded to both by the button and by my own title,
was first published. Even larger is the
gap between today’s usage of the word and that of Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France published
twenty years before Austen’s novel.
Burke’s Reflections include an extended defence
of prejudice which would be unintelligible if the word were taken in its
present day meaning. Prejudice, as Burke
used the word, was not necessarily either directed towards people or negative
(that prejudice can be connected to its object by the preposition “for” as well
as the preposition “against” has largely been forgotten). Rather it had reference to tapping into the
accumulated wisdom of the human race available in tradition as opposed to
relying entirely upon one’s individual reason.
“We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own
private stock of reason”, Burke wrote, “because we suspect that this stock in
each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves
of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages.” Continuing the thought he said:
Many of our men of speculation,
instead of exploding general prejudices, employ their sagacity to discover the
latent wisdom which prevails in them. If they find what they seek, and they
seldom fail, they think it more wise to continue the prejudice, with the reason
involved, than to cast away the coat of prejudice and to leave nothing but the
naked reason; because prejudice, with its reason, has a motive to give action
to that reason, and an affection which will give it permanence. Prejudice is of
ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady
course of wisdom and virtue and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment
of decision skeptical, puzzled, and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man’s
virtue his habit, and not a series of unconnected acts. Through just prejudice,
his duty becomes a part of his nature.
To speak of prejudice as a good thing was uncommon even in
Burke’s day. His contemporary and friend,
the lexicographer Samuel Johnson who was immortalized for his table talk by
James Boswell, included two definitions under prejudice in his Dictionary, the second of which was “Mischief;
detriment; hurt; injury.” Obviously this
is not what Burke was defending and Dr. Johnson himself said of this definition
“This sense is only accidental or consequential; a bad thing being called a prejudice, only because prejudice is commonly a bad thing, and is not derived from the original or etymology
of the word: it were therefore better to use it less; perhaps prejudice ought never to be applied
to any mischief, which does not imply some partiality or prepossession.” It is in the sense of Dr. Johnson’s first
definition of the word that Burke used it.
That definition is:
Prepossession;
judgment formed beforehand without examination. It is used for
prepossession in favour of any thing or against it. (1)
The word prepossession is less familiar than the word it is being used to
define, so much so that it does not have its own entry in the same Dictionary, but the meaning of both words
is provided in the remainder of the first sentence and it is exactly what the Latin
root of prejudice suggests. Instead of prepossession
we are more likely to speak of “preconceived opinion.” In a court of law this is, of course, a bad
thing. That justice involves listening to
the arguments of a case and deciding based upon the facts in evidence rather
than pre-judging based on other
factors is part of what the ancient depiction of the personification of Justice
as wearing a blind-fold is supposed to indicate. The negative implications of prejudice in a
legal context are the original reason for the more general notion in other
contexts that prejudice is a bad thing that Dr. Johnson alluded to in his
second definition. What Burke
demonstrated was that preconceived opinion has a positive as well as a negative
side. Note how he spoke of “just
prejudice”. That is “just” as in “righteous”,
not “just” as in “mere”.
To understand Burke’s argument, it is important to keep in
mind what he was arguing against. Burke’s
Reflections was written in response
to the destructive violence of the French Revolution. The worst of that violence was still yet to
come at the time he wrote but what he had seen had left a huge impact on him
because those perpetrating that violence were doing so in the name of the
ideals that he himself had professed as a Whig (classical liberal) in
Parliament. His defence of the virtues
of the Age of chivalry and of established, traditional institutions such as the
Crown and the Church in Reflections
reads like what one would have expected his friend Dr. Johnson, a Tory, to have
written had he lived to see the French Revolution and it is likely that Burke
as he wrote was asking himself what Dr. Johnson would have said. Burke was, to borrow and slightly adjust a
famous definition from Irving Kristol, a Whig who had been mugged by reality.
Burke was addressing not merely the way the revolutionaries
had turned ideals into “armed doctrines” but the way of thinking that had
brought this about. The French Revolution
came at the end of a century in which Modern philosophers had declared war
against tradition in the name of reason.
This was utterly foolish on their part.
Tradition – knowledge and wisdom accumulated and passed down from the
past – is what prevents us from having to re-invent the wheel, literally as
well as figuratively, in each generation, and this applies to philosophy as
much as to anything else. The
temptation to exalt reason, the individual’s capacity for judgement based on
the knowledge available to him, over tradition, the capacity of man in the
collective whether as family, nation, civilization or the entire race or species
to accumulate and pass on knowledge and wisdom for the benefit of those yet to
come, however, was one which the thinkers of the eighteenth century found
difficult to resist. It must be
resisted, however, if consequences like those of the French Revolution are to
be avoided and this requires a healthy share of the instinct the late Sir Roger
Scruton spoke of that the good things in life are difficult to build but easy
to destroy.
The wisdom that we inherit through tradition in Burke’s
argument, while it can be described as prejudice in that its availability
precedes the application of reason on the part of the individual to its
justification, is not necessarily contrary to reason. Indeed, the difference between Burke’s “just
prejudice” and bigotry in the word’s lexical meaning (as opposed to its common
use as pejorative epithet for disagreement with liberalism) is that whereas
just prejudice is opinion derived from tradition that has yet to be confirmed
by the individual’s use of reason bigotry is opinion that is stubbornly held to
even after it has been convincingly rebutted by reason. That tradition, the source of just prejudices,
is self-correcting and flexible by contrast with ideology, which is what you
get when you reduce human knowledge to the technical knowledge that you are
left with when rationalism’s irrational demand that reason precede all
knowledge is complied with, was a key insight of the title essay in Michael
Oakeshott’s Rationalism in Politics and
Other Essays (1963), an essay which revisited this theme from Burke’s Reflections from the position of
hindsight available in the twentieth century after the rationalism that in
Burke’s day was in its infancy had run its course for a couple of centuries.
Prejudice, at least in the sense defended by Burke, is much to be preferred
over pride. Although Aristotle, at least
in some English translations, spoke of a “pride” that he considered to be the
highest of virtues rather than a vice, the word he used was μεγαλοψυχία which
is not an exact equivalent of the English pride. Indeed, pride is not among the definitions
that Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott provide for μεγαλοψυχία in their exhaustive
and definitive Greek Lexicon. Arrogance is
provided as a secondary meaning for the occasions when the word is used in a
negative sense, but the primary definition is “greatness of soul, highmindness,
lordliness”, with the implication of “generosity” and in their intermediate
Lexicon “magnanimity” is provided alongside the literal first meaning of “greatness
of soul.” In other words, μεγαλοψυχία, while it does include a sense of
thinking well of self also includes the idea of being generous to others. While Aristotle contrasts it with a vice that
is sometimes rendered “humility” in translation, the word he used is not the word
for the humility praised as a virtue in the New Testament (ταπεινοφροσύνη) but
the literal opposite of μεγαλοψυχία, i.e., μικροψυχία, defined by Liddell and
Scott as “littleness of soul, meanness of spirit.” Similarly, μεγαλοψυχία is not among the
words used by the New Testament for the pride consistently condemned as a sin. The main words for pride in the New Testament
are ὑπερηφανία which Liddell and Scott define as “arrogance” and when used with
an object “contempt towards or for” and ἀλαζονεία which they define as “false
pretension, imposture” and “boastfulness” (Koine lexicons usually define it as “arrogance”
and “boastfulness”) and τυφόω which is a verb which in classical Greek usually
meant to delude (when others were the object) or to be crazy or demented (when
self was the object) but which in the New Testament means to be conceited. In the Authorized Bible, the passive
participle of the verb is rendered “lifted up with pride” in 1 Timothy 3:6, the
verse which links pride to the fall of the devil.
These New Testament words are closer in meaning to the
English “pride” than Aristotle’s μεγαλοψυχία.
So is the word ὕβρις which Aristotle and for that matter the ancient
Greeks in general regarded as the worst defect in character. This word has passed into English as hubris which we ordinarily think of as a
synonym for arrogance. In ancient Greek
it was an arrogance that manifested itself in acts of violence, insolence or
insult towards others, i.e., the opposite sort of behaviour towards others than
that suggested by Aristotle’s μεγαλοψυχία.
In Greek tragedy, this was most often the “fatal flaw” (Aristotle’s word
for which is the same word the New Testament uses as its basic word for “sin”)
which brought down the tragic hero.
Pride is the English word which translates the Latin
Superbia which in Latin theology is consistently identified as the worst of all
sins. It is, for example, always listed
either first or last in lists of the Seven Deadly Sins depending upon whether
they are listed in descending or ascending order. In this matter Latin theology is in close
agreement with Greek theology. Evagrius
Pontius identified a list of eight vices which was later reproduced by St. John
Cassian in his Institutes. The list is for the most part identical to
the Latin Seven Deadly Sins – the lower sins or vices in each include gluttony,
anger, avarice, and lust (fornication in Pontius/Cassian). In this list, which goes from least to worst,
the eighth vice was pride, which Cassian described as the most savage vice and
the root of all the others. The New
Testament word ὑπερηφανία is used for pride.
The seventh vice, and therefore second worst, was κενοδοξία which is
usually rendered in English by “vainglory” (as, for example, the Authorized
Bible does in the one New Testament verse in which it appears Phil. 2:3) or by “boasting”
and which is almost identical in meaning to pride, the basic difference being
that whereas vainglory/ κενοδοξία requires an audience pride/ ὑπερηφανία is something
one can have in solitude. Another way of
looking at it is that pride is the internal sin, vainglory its outer
expression. In the Latin Seven Deadly
Sins, produced by Gregory the Great’s revising of the earlier list and
condensing these two into the single Superbia, Invidia (Envy) is added as the
second worst sin and it too is closely connect with pride. Traditionally Pride and Envy are the sins
which first arose in Lucifer’s heart prompting his rebellion against God and
are thus literally the source of all other sins.
So, no, the button, like the present day, has it
backwards. Prejudice – in Burke’s sense –
is preferable by far over Pride.
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