Dear J-
There’s a thread on the dpreview.com discussion forum — if you’re looking for a fight, there’s always a good bone to be picked there — regarding Japanese tourists and their photographic habits. Suffice it to say that the original poster has responded only once to the hand grenade he threw, and the original post started off with a phrase to the effect of “I don’t consider myself racist but …” and you can get the gist from that. There’s no surer way to ensure that the next words coming out will be offensive in some way; it’s the grown-up equivalent of saying “it’s just a joke.”
While it’s easy to dismiss it as an isolated, ugly incident on an Internet discussion forum, it’s symptomatic of a deeper unease and willingness to generalize. Disagree with the viewpoint and you’re swatted with cries that it’s just the truth, you left-leaning politcally-correct liberal. It’s fascinating to watch the tortured logic at work, applying generalization to people because of the actions of a few has never been a cogent argument; the importance of individuality is somehow less valid when applying it to anyone else. It’s intellectually lazy to say that, say, all Swedes are great hockey players on the basis of a few (Foppa, Lidstrom, even Sundin) and yet we have no problems applying that to far more important issues. I know I’m guilty of it — have been, am, and probably will be, though I promise to try harder.
So you think it’s just a little thing, limited to a few people and then you learn things like, oh, the government has interned all the Japanese — 1942 — or, 2008-style, has started to keep dossiers on people of Arabic descent. It’s like something out of a bad novel: it’s only immoral, it’s only illegal if you get caught with your hand in the jar. Think of the benefits! We choose to abridge our freedoms and fail to realize everything we give up now is not guaranteed to come back. The justification — the reasons given for our trade will always be valid. World’s not safe enough. Can’t trust them. When do we realize that it-can’t-happen-here already has?
Mike
Tags: government, prejudice, profiling, trust
26 November 2008 at 9:30 pm
The depressing part is that some of this kind of thinking may be congenital for all of us; our brains are fashioned in such a way as to attempt to make sense of patterns, to organize like unto like and to tease logic out of our anecdotal observations based on our hardwired tendency to believe in supervening patterns that organize and explain all activity. I think David Hume wrote a lot about this type of epistemological problem (and wikipedia backs me up – way to go Intarwebs!)
To an extent, then, we will always and forever be trapped in our own minds this way. I don’t, of course, mean to excuse racism on this basis; a human need to force patterns upon things doesn’t sanction immoral choices.
28 November 2008 at 9:49 pm
The biological predisposition to generalize (surely our memories can’t hold every single detail of every single person in every single instance) must have been useful to our cavepeople ancestors; it makes things easier, after all. It makes sense, and it also makes sense, realizing our limitations, that we can then work to move past them.