An Hour with our Prejudices

An Hour with our Prejudices

Samuel M. Crothers portrays the mind as a city whose orderly, modern quarters are accessible to strangers, while its older and more dangerous districts are inhabited by prejudices: inherited opinions, irrational antipathies, and conclusions detached from their reasons. Though prejudice is commonly condemned as judgment made without proper examination, he argues that people cannot wait to investigate every question before forming opinions. Reasons often follow rather than create convictions, and prejudices become part of the mental furniture required for ordinary life. The essay urges tolerance toward the peculiar judgments of others and toward one’s own cherished absurdities. A prejudice is fragile and personal: reasoned opinions can defend themselves with evidence, but a prejudice appeals to its owner’s chivalry because it seems defenseless against hostile facts. Civil conversation therefore depends on making allowances. The best conversationalist does not seek final victory or destroy every heresy, but observes characteristic opinions with genial curiosity, like a photographer taking snapshots of human nature. Crothers illustrates national and individual prejudices through anecdotes involving Prince Bismarck, Max Müller, the Emperor, and others. Such beliefs form connected systems of assumption, like the layers of an onion, and cannot always be corrected by direct argument. Prudence in conversation requires reconnaissance, tact, and an awareness that even benevolent efforts to improve others may provoke resentment. Reformers, teachers, and advisers often discover that people dislike what is proposed as good for them. Tact consists largely in discovering what friends do not wish to be taught. The author also examines the prejudice of gifted or eminent people against mediocrity and against those who appear deferential. Great persons may mistake ordinary spectators for servile dependents, when these supposedly humble people are simply enjoying a public spectacle and retain independent lives and judgments of their own. Many prejudices, he suggests, originate in remote racial custom or in childhood impressions that survive into maturity. His own early reading in the supplementary pages of a Family Bible shaped his ideas of rank, chronology, Stoics, Epicureans, and Samaritans. A childish misunderstanding of “mongrel professors,” for example, created an unwarranted sinister impression of the Samaritans. Other prejudices arise from verbal habits: adjectives attach unfair associations to nouns, so that “smug respectability,” “mere morality,” or excessive praise can make respectable people, moral conduct, and worthy writers seem unattractive. The public often confuses a thinker’s character with the theory named after him, as in judgments of Calvin, Malthus, or Darwin. Some prejudices are harmless private oddities, but others seek power through politics, religion, and race. Political hostility can be moderated by social intercourse and even safely exercised through regular, conventional protests. Religious prejudice is more dangerous because it combines religion with earthly passions while keeping religion itself at a low temperature. Crothers notes signs of increasing tolerance between churches and among slightly differing factions, though even charitable judgments retain traces of old antagonism. Racial prejudice becomes especially harmful when scientific generalizations about groups are applied as fixed judgments upon individuals. Sciences may properly describe races, cults, and social groups, but trouble begins when an average becomes a boundary that no person may cross. Crothers distinguishes the abstract Race, which can endure caricature and broad criticism, from the actual individual who is blamed for the supposed crimes and traits of those who resemble him. This individual is condemned before he can find his place in the world, sacrificed to mental color-blindness that sees only groups instead of persons. The wiser task is not to defend sweeping theories about types, but to recognize and deal justly with each single life.

By Samuel M. Crothers · First published 1910 · Genre: Essay, Literary Nonfiction, Philosophical Essay · 7,973 words

First lines

We may compare the human mind to a city. It has its streets, its places of business and amusement, its citizens of every degree. When one person is introduced to another it is as if the warder drew back the bolts, and the gates were thrown open. If he comes well recommended he is given the freedom of the city. In the exercise of this freedom, however, the stranger should show due caution.

Similar titles

Genres

Tags

prejudice · tolerance · human nature · reason and irrationality · social conversation · tact and civility · opinion and belief · satirical essay · humorous prose · moral philosophy · psychology of belief · childhood impressions

What this Textopian page supports

An Hour with our Prejudices is listed on Textopian as an essay by Samuel M. Crothers, dated 1910 CE.

This source record anchors work identity, reading entry points, and catalog context for checking claims about the work.

Good citation fit

More by Samuel M. Crothers