a blog by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

You might ask: what difference does it make how you understand prejudices? What is the value of classifying them in terms of the motivations and purposes they serve rather than in terms of the specific groups targeted? First, by not either treating every instance of prejudice separately or lumping them all into one vague “ethnocentrism,” the motivations classification takes you past the symptoms and right to the basic disease processes. Like a public health program, the motivations classification can be used educationally to help people understand why humans are prejudiced and why they themselves are prejudiced, as the motivations are universal, even if the need to act on the motivations is not, thank god, universal. Understanding motivations can help victim groups recognize the experiences they have in common as well as those that are distinctly theirs. And this scheme can give clues to why one of the prejudice forms usually predominates in a society at a given time —as the obsessional, conspiracy-minded, rather paranoid eliminating form predominates in America just now. Reflecting historically, we can say that obsessional, eliminative prejudice grows when a society has suffered a financial crisis and many people are feeling their money has been sucked out of them and their security invidiously undermined from within. (Many Weimar Germans, already thinking they had been “knifed in the back” at the WWI peace conference, already familiar with anti-Semitic party platforms, already obsessionally organized around their Prussian “family values,” became susceptible to the “international Jewish conspiracy” idea during the Depression.)

Looking at the motivations of prejudices can also show clearly something all prejudices, with their projective dynamics, have in common when they are expressed in the world: they all create and foster inequality. Politically, this is the most important thing to consider. Expansion of equality in the world, between people and among peoples, has always been the mark of political progress, across cultures and historical periods, and prejudices are the key threat to this progress. So they, too, need to be understood in a cross-cultural, trans-historical framework.

The goal of equality among citizens, which presupposes inclusiveness, welcoming of all to citizenship, is the central goal of any polity or (in the modern world) any state or international organization that aspires to be democratic. Other domains of human life have other central goals. But it does seem obvious that in all domains of activity, human beings who appreciate the equality principle have discovered that arrangements which sustain and promote the development and well-being of all are the ones that tend toward equality, the goal that was first articulated in the political domain. The equality principle, which was discovered in the West in the little city-states of Greece in the 5th century BCE, is the principle that needs to emerge in all other domains of human life in order for those domains to become maximally sustaining and meaningful for the maximal number of people.

What the Greeks discovered is that when people acknowledge and treat each other as equals, showing each other what they called “political friendship,” or respect, they bring out the best in each other and all benefit from the flourishing of each. Their word for equality was isonomia, “equal rights,” and it implied “no rulership” (it was not a word with the suffixes “-archy” or “-cracy” in it like monarchy, oligarchy, timocracy, plutocracy). Together, the equals gain power, or ability to act in concert, which makes them as a group more able to agree (or agree to disagree) than any group that is dependent on a ruler or a directorate and is fixedly hierarchical. Directorates tend inevitably to become dominative and corrupt; they centralize, they evolve toward dictatorship. Those who exercise rulership come to think they ought to rule, they deserve to rule (maybe even “forever”), and others should just be quiet and obey. That is, rulers become prejudiced in favor of themselves and against those they rule. And they project all “bad” parts of themselves onto those they rule. Like all people but with greater means of domination, they project in three different ways, depending on their characters, and then they act to eliminate others, or to exploit those they have assigned to a role, or to erase others’ identities.

The Greeks –particularly their historians, more than their philosophers—talked about how the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Two minds are better than one. Dialogue is better than fiat—particularly moral fiat. Put the team ahead of the players. Give yourself to the group and get yourself from the group. Your friend (or political friend) becomes your alter ego and enlarges you. Equality before the law guarantees equality when the law is applied. Power comes from plurality. Might (or violence) does not make right.

The Greeks produced great fans of rulership –like Plato—but in the so-called Golden Age of Pericles, they were constantly reflecting on the equality principle in maxims like those for which I just supplied current English equivalents. Phrased pragmatically, the basic idea was: if you make a deliberative individual contribution (and sometimes a sacrifice) for your city or political alliance you (and future generations) receive things you cannot get on your own. If you did not believe this, you would never willingly fight to defend your city-state, volunteer your time to cultural projects, pay your taxes, criticize your government when you thought it needed reform to better represent what is best in the citizens. Altruism has been acknowledged in philosophical and religious traditions world-wide with the so-called Golden Rule. But the Greeks were the first that we know of to speak about altruism as a political principle, an essential and pragmatic part of the equality principle. Do unto your fellow citizens as you would have them do unto you.

But even though the Greeks discovered the principle that all who were citizens should participate equally in deliberations and actions that concerned the citizen group, they excluded three groups: non-citizen slaves, women, and children. As Aristotle explained in his Politics, these three groups were “by nature” fitted to live only in the domestic or private realm –the oikos, the word for household, from which we get our word economics. The oikos was the realm of production of goods to sustain life and support the male citizens by freeing them up for their political life. And the oikos was the realm of reproduction. Children, who were thought of as owned by their fathers, were birthed by women and educated by slaves or pedagogues who were not citizens. The male children of citizens could outgrow their childhood status and become citizens; girls joined their mothers and the slaves as permanent non-citizens.

It is certainly no exaggeration to say that the limits the Greeks put on their equality principle contributed a great deal to the demise of their grand experiment. They turned to
imperial ventures in which they had no hesitation about making the people they conquered (who were citizens of other cities) into slaves, and breaking up their families, taking the women into concubinage, owning the children. This kind of enslavement seemed natural and normal to them. Right on up through the 19th century European overseas imperial ventures, conquered people were enslaved –only the Romans showed any consciousness that it would be better to open an avenue toward citizenship to their colonials (males only). You can call this racism, the term used now for enslaved people differentiated by color, but it makes more sense to me to use a wider framework and call it exploitation based on assigning a role (non-citizen) to others. (The men the Greeks enslaved were not distinguished by their color, they were distinguished by having been conquered, which meant they were “by nature” inferior.) The sexism at work in defining women as incapable of reason and thus of being citizens is linked to what might be called the childism of defining a child as a possession –both erase identities.

To my way of thinking, one of the most important developments in the two centuries since the Age of Revolutions in the West has been the slow extension of the equality principle into other domains –into the domain of the family, into the domain of religious institutions, into the economic domain (which is no longer centered in households, of course, but spread over the entire planet). Supporting such extensions is, it seems to me, the essence of progressivism, the essence of social democracy.

At first only in Europe, but now world-wide, the Women’s Movement has asserted that equality should be the principle in adult-to-adult family relationships, no matter what the form of the family or how many adults (of which sexes) it includes or what their living arrangements are. The adults in families should take equal responsibility for the family and for raising children. Adults should be equals in their intimate relationships and in their families. If they are, they will bring out the best in each other and make a more powerful union, a more perfect union.

There is, of course, huge resistance to this vision of equality in the family. And that resistance is linked to resistance to acknowledging the equality principle within organized religions. Religions that are organized around worship of one transcendent God have been least acknowledging, as their institutions tend to be hierarchical (in Greek, a hieros is a priest who commands obedience, being closer to the Divinity) and they tend to be prejudiced against women, who are other in gender to the God, who is considered masculine, patriarchal. Polytheists, pantheists, Buddhists, Taoists, Deists, have generally created less hierarchical (and thus less intensely unequal) organizations—although this is a relative statement. Protestant movements usually start out protesting priestly domination and prejudice.

Most of the 18th c. American revolutionaries were Deists who wanted the state kept free of the kind of prejudice they thought typical of Bible-based Christian churchmen. In his preface to the Virginia Act on Religious Freedom (1786), Thomas Jefferson wrote against “the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavoring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world, and through all time…”

The Deists believed that God stayed apart from His world; no priests or rabbis or imans were His representatives in it, commanding obedience as such. Men were in charge of the world, and had been given Reason (not a book of instruction like the Bible) to be their guide, including in their civic life. Nations were “under God” only in the sense that their citizens were to use their God-given Reason. (The idea that the American Founding Fathers founded a “Christian Nation” is a prejudiced fundamentalist Christian tenet designed to justify Bible-based Christian dominance.) Not that the Deists did not have their own prejudices, which were that some men (African slaves, for the most important example) and all women were not given the gift of Reason and therefore should not be citizens. The old Greek prejudices.

In the 19th Century, socialist thinkers of various sorts asserted that equality should be possible in workplaces and factories and farms—the economic domain. Equality could come about in different ways: the means of production could be owned equally by all working in or managing a productive enterprise; or the profits generated by an enterprise could be distributed equally among all involved, each getting a portion reflecting their contribution, or their need. Others spoke of equality of opportunity, and put the stress on people being equally well prepared to compete or participate. But, regardless of which arrangement they thought prepared the way for equality in the economic domain, they all agreed in opposing any arrangement that generated inequality.

In the last forty or so years in America, more inequality in the economic domain than has ever existed in our national history has been generated by a new form of capitalism, which I have called finance capitalism –so, of course, a new form of opposition to this capitalism is struggling to be born. Although those engaged in this struggle are looking for modes appropriate to its task, they know it is fundamentally a struggle for equality. It is premised on the understanding that national and transnational economies are creating inequality, making a two tier society in which people on the lower tier are locked into poverty –for all intents and purposes, enslaved–and those on the upper (and especially the upper-upper) are able to accumulate wealth with support from governments and trade agreements (which is known jokingy as “socialism for the rich”). The equality principle is being erased –that is, there is an identity-erasing prejudice against it. A narcissistic disregard of it that says ‘the rich deserve to be rich,’ or ‘the rich deserve to dictate how the poor shall live.’ The rich deserve, too, to control philanthropy; philanthropy is not a political responsibility any more than fair distribution of wealth is.

The struggle protesting the new global economy is a struggle against use of economic means to express the excluding, exploiting, and erasing prejudices. So far, the clearest front of this anti-inequality struggle is itself economic: the anti-globalization movement. It encompasses the micro-finance movement (which empowers primarily women financially), the local agriculture and food production movement, and various movements for unionization and workplace democracy. And it is becoming more and more linked to the environmental movement (with its principle of equal rights to resources and to a habitable planet). But this is a struggle in process, and it will evolve as the young who join it bring their fresh ideas to it. One of their ideas is that adults who prioritize present accumulation of wealth, present depletion of common resources, present business as usual, are expressing prejudice against the young as a group, a world-wide group, and prejudice against the future. For example, adults who are for cutting public school budgets (or not opening schools to girls) and ignoring the absence of jobs for the young are doing unto the young what they would not have wanted done unto themselves when they were young –and that is a way of describing prejudice as creating and fostering inequality.

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