In Praise of Prejudice: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists Are Murdering Our Past

by Theodore Dalrymple

Book Overview

Today, the word prejudice has come to seem synonymous with bigotry; therefore the only way a person can establish freedom from bigotry is by claiming to have wiped his mind free from prejudice. English psychiatrist and writer Theodore Dalrymple shows that freeing the mind from prejudice is not only impossible, but entails intellectual, moral and emotional dishonesty. The attempt to eradicate prejudice has several dire consequences for the individual...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1594032025
• ISBN13: 9781594032028
• Release Date: August 2007
• Publisher: Encounter Books
• Length: 200 Pages
• Weight: 0.72 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.5" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

The Most Interesting Man in the World.

Well, Dr. Dalrymple is to me at any rate. I would place him solidly on my list of top five writers without any question. Indeed, I probably will read anything he ever writes on any subject. Yes, I agree with the other reviewers that this book is too short, but, being that it is part of a series called "Brief Encounters," this is to be expected. Here our eminent retired psychiatrist demolishes a major cornerstone of political correctness. Specifically, it is the mandate that we be non-judgmental in regards to everyone and everybody--with the exception of those who are judgmental or prejudicial, of course. In their case, no fate is too severe. Dr. Dalrymple argues convincingly that a life without preconception is an impossibility; just as is truth without presupposition. To display prejudice once meant an individual had discernment, but now it means one has a variety of PC ism. The influence of the sensitivity-at-all-costs gang has altered the world irreparably and for the worse. Dr. Dalrymple showcases this eventuality within a myriad of contexts. One of which is unconventionality which once equated with individuals being... unconventional. Yet now, the label has morphed into a compliment. This has led the avant-garde to undergo "the equivalent of an arms race," becoming more and more outlandish in order to satisfy the needs of their social clique. They always forget the truism that the only thing which never changes is the avant-garde. No longer are politeness and civility integral to functional social relations. Making a spectacle of oneself in public can be lamentable but is deemed a sign of honesty and sincerity. No matter how out-of-control the person who "loses it" becomes his tantrum elucidates how true he is to his feelings. Asking him to show restraint would rob him of authenticity. Numerous ornate phrases bejewel In Praise of Prejudice and my own favorite is "The Law of Conservation of Righteous Indignation." Dr. Dalrymple posits that a free-floating, constant mass of indignation among populations may be as intrinsic to humanity as our lust for fat and salt. We find that as old prejudices dissipate, new ones form to become repositories of animus. Tobacco is a perfect example. Once it was regarded merely as a vice but now outrage over its usage unites our elites. Our leaders then spray their sanctimonious acrimony upon the demon weed and whoever is foolish enough to pay the exorbitant taxes that allow them to smoke it. Yes, this is a brief encounter with Dr. Dalrymple, but, as always, it is one that leaves readers vastly enriched.

"People Need To be Reminded Of The Obvious"

Much of the criticism directed here against this witty and insightful short work laments that it elaborates the obvious. Such critics of it are, of course, to be commended for their own prior level-headedness, while at the same time they should realize they're overlooking Dalrymple's argument that large sections of the media and academe have in our day genuinely lost sight of the obvious. And the obvious, as the aphorism has it, is the hardest thing to point out to people who've genuinely lost sight of it. Even Socrates recognized that people more often need to be reminded than, in the fashion of the Sophists, newly instructed. I add C.S.Lewis' sobering insight that even God didn't bother to be original. Some of the hostility toward this book seems motivated, as well, by a simplistic religious fundamentalism, since it's true Dalrymple declares himself a non-believer. But he who is not against you is with you, as the Bible asserts. By all means read Burke and Kierkegaard, but I suspect each of these old worthies would have seen the basic thrust in Dalrymple, as in Plato, is in the direction of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.

Fascinating, as always

Who in today's world would dare admit to being prejudiced? Not many. In the modern mind, to be prejudiced is to be racist, narrow-minded and backward. We are all supposed to be free-thinkers, to question everything we have been taught, to own our mind as completely as one would a home of his own construction. But this is simply not possible. No person can question everything and rethink, from first principles, all of their beliefs. Prejudice (the acceptance of inherited ideas as truth without questioning them) is a fact of human life (for both good and bad) and always will be. Why, then, do modern people insist on believing in an idea that, because it is impossible, requires intellectual dishonesty? Dalrymple points out the real reason behind the modern popularity of the idea of the totally free-thinking individual: we don't want any restrictions on our actions but rather complete license to do whatever we please. The modern embrace of the pure rationalism championed by the likes of Descartes and Mill is simply an excuse for a philosophical disputatiousness that rejects all authority regarding moral behavior, whether that authority is religion, history or social convention. Custom and etiquette are diminished, and society thus loses important regulators of anti-social behavior, whether it's illegitimacy or littering. Without self-policing of one's behavior, the law is the only force that can mediate the resulting rights conflicts, and thus it should not be surprising that the government's power grows to the point of authoritarianism. In essence, this book is a philosophical distillation of the ideas behind Theodore Dalrymple's most well-known books: namely, that modern Western intellectuals (and the general public who have been persuaded by them) have gone too far in their embrace of rationalism and have thus used the power of reason to overturn long-held ideas that were both true and necessary for a healthy society. In this work, Dalrymple doesn't linger on the negative repercussions of all this intellectual foolishness to the same extent as he did in the essays collected in "Life at the Bottom" and "Our Culture, What's Left of It", and thus this book is not quite as voyeuristically entertaining. The purpose of many of those earlier essays was to show modern intellectuals how their rejection of traditional beliefs have made the lives of the lower classes a living hell. While he does discuss illegitimacy and teenage pregnancy in this book, he also explores less gruesome repercussions, such as passengers putting their feet on the seats in trains and people dressing informally at funerals. Most interesting to me was his "Law of Conservation of Righteous Indignation" and his discussion of how there is often no good philosophical justification for social limits we all know are desirable. Dalrymple has often been criticized for not providing more solutions, an unfair criticism in my eyes, since after all, isn't it obvious? Here, he p

"Open-Minded, Or Just Empty Headed?"

"I know I'm prejudiced in this matter," Mark Twain once announced, quickly adding, "But I'd be ashamed of myself if I weren't." In a similar vein, Theodore Dalrymple in this clever series of short essays looks at the curious reprobative force directed in our time against such words as "prejudice," "discrimination," and "judgmental." Through his knowledge of cultural history and his excellent rhetorical skills of concession and rebuttal, Dalrymple makes wholly clear his own disassociation from any of the mean-spirited, invidious behaviors these words, used negatively, quite rightly condemn. At the same time, he shows how our wholesale abandonment of any positive connotations for such words is a failure in analysis, a classic case of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Looking at the "thoughts" of contemporary men in the street, he sees, sadly, the unintended, distorted consequences of Descartes' and John Stuart Mill's thinking, as it has filtered down to the masses. It would appear from their defiant bumper stickers and proffered rationalizations for bad behavior that contemporary men have become largely their own carvers. Shrewdly and wittily, Dalrymple asks whether thinking out everything for ourselves each day, while rejecting the past and all authority - such modern men's apparent social "philosophy" - is, in fact, a societal ideal of any real worth, or just a ground for social deterioration. Should every person take nothing on authority to the point of daily reinventing the wheel? Should the mind of an adult be just a perpetual tabula rasa? Dalrymple thinks, in our commendable zeal not to be unduly narrow or overlook any new evidence, we may have forgotten the difference between being genuinely open-minded and being merely empty-headed. Preconceived ideas, from which many of us shy away, he sees as necessary to genuine adults, who, through education and experience, have become "fixed in principle." Consequently, they approach experience, sifting the new or presumably new, not as intellectual zeroes, but as persons "who see more because they stand on the shoulders of giants."

So much wisdom, so few pages

In the late 1950s in high school it was for me the easily accessable "The True Believer" by Eric Hoffer. Today in my late 60' it's Theodore Dalrymple's "In Praise of Prejudice - the Necessity of Preconceived Ideas." Seldom have I seen so much wisdom in so few pages. Any three page chapter condenses the wisdom of a bookshelf of more wordy and tedious works. And such great sentences. After a short introduction to a ten line extract from Rene Descartes, Dalrymple opens the next chapter with this marvelious sentence: "We may inquire why it is that there are now so many Descartes in the world, when in the seventeenth century there was only one." The explanation of this sentence and its consequences proceeds. The last sentence of this two page chapter goes: "Then all the resources of philosophy are available to them [skeptics] in a flash, and are used to undermine the moral authority of custom, law, and the wisdom of ages." The book requires careful reading and attention as each sentence must be intellectually unpacked but it is worth it. So much insight and so much wisdom for so few dollars.