Imagine you’re on a bus in London. Now, stretch a bit and imagine everyone around you seems like an upstanding citizen. Nobody’s got a machete. Nobody’s naked, and nobody’s harassing the elderly.
The bus stops, and a young woman gets on. She sets down her bag, settles into her chair, and then puts her feet up on the seat in front of her.
What will the reaction to this be? The answer depends on time.
If this were to happen in 1996, the passengers would notice, some would mumble to themselves, and at least one person would ask her to put her feet down. And, in 1996, she would.
If this were to happen in 2006 — as it did to writer Theodore Dalrymple — and someone were curmudgeonly enough to ask her to put her feet down, he would be met with protest, “Why? I’m not hurting anyone. There’s no law against it. No one is even sitting there.”
And if this were to happen in 2026, no one would even notice because they were too busy looking out for that naked guy with a machete.
What changed? Well, for one, prejudices changed.
Dalrymple grew up in a country in which putting your feet up on an empty bus seat was unseemly. When he saw someone break this unspoken rule, he responded as he did. The woman, though, grew up in a country in which the position of one’s feet was a matter of self-expression. The only thing that limits that self-expression is harm to others and the strong arm of the law. This was her assumption going into this — and I assume every other — interaction. She didn’t feel the need to justify her assumption, her prejudice, but demanded that Dalrymple justify his. And because he wasn’t able to give a full PowerPoint presentation as to why she shouldn’t put her feet on the seat, her feet stayed.
This story illustrates several points. First, everyone has prejudices. Second, prejudices can be good or bad. And third, collective prejudice is just another word for culture.
Let’s use Russell Kirk’s definition of prejudice:
Prejudice is pre-judgment, the answer with which intuition and ancestral consensus of opinion supply a man when he lacks either time or knowledge to arrive at a decision predicated upon pure reason.
It’s what some might call a “gut instinct” — intuitive, automatic, and prerational, but not necessarily irrational.
Everyone Has Prejudices
The War on Prejudice as such is probably best exemplified by the French Revolutionaries, who, in a 1794 Decree of the Committee of Public Safety (what a name), said: “The transition of an oppressed nation to democracy is like the effort by which nature rose from nothingness to existence. You must entirely refashion a people whom you wish to make free, destroy its prejudices, alter its habits, limit its necessities, root up its vices, purify its desires.”
They wanted to turn the French people into a blank slate and thereby “make them free.” Burn it all down so they could Build Back Better.
These days, nobody believes in the blank slate as a reality. But too many of us believe in it as an ideal. “Wouldn’t it be nice,” we think, “if people had no preconceived ideas.” We can each be a little Descartes with no inherited beliefs — only capital “R” Reason. It may flatter you, but it’s an illusion.
In the words of Richard Weaver, “Life without prejudice, were it ever to be tried, would soon reveal itself to be a life without principle. For prejudices … are often built-in principles. They are the extract which the mind has made of experience.”
If we say that we have no prejudices, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.
Prejudices: Good and Bad
So prejudice is an inescapable concept. We all have prejudices. The question is, are they the right ones?
It used to be a broadly held prejudice that families should have meals together. If the average Dad or Mom were asked to justify this practice from first principles, they couldn’t do it. Even so, generations of families did this every night. And the more widespread it was, the less they’d feel the need to justify it at all. Only as it came under assault did people have to make arguments for it.
This prejudice in favor of the family meal was replaced — not with nothing — but with a prejudice against it. These days, the popular picture of a family dinner is a place of flavorless food and barely concealed hatred. So, naturally, people don’t do it.
Again, neither of these things happened because people ran the numbers, looked at the data, and made an objective scientific decision. They’re prerational — or at least nonrational — views of what family dinners are. Here, one prejudice was swapped out for another.
We’ll throw out any prejudice just because it’s old. “Sure, people used to do X, but come on, man. It’s the ’90s, it’s Hammer time.” This is the exact opposite of Burke’s approach:
You see, Sir, that in this enlightened age I am bold enough to confess that we are generally men of untaught feelings: that, instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree; and, to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted, and the more generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them. We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that the 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. … 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.
This isn’t just true at the individual level.
Prejudice as Culture
Really, “culture” is just another word for the collective prejudices of a people. Or, we might say, the “common sense” of a people.
I said prejudice is prerational. But that’s true only at the level of the individual. In another sense, it is post-rational. Other people reasoned this out or learned a lesson from experience. This saves us a lot of trouble. To quote Thomas Sowell, culture exists “to spare the next generation the costly and dangerous process of learning everything all over again from scratch through trial and error — including fatal errors.”
It’s not the height of reason to make each generation discover fire for themselves — or that you shouldn’t use that fire to burn widows. But we’re too good for that kind of thinking.
Here’s G.K. Chesterton:
If the modern man is indeed the heir of all the ages, he is often the kind of heir who tells the family solicitor to sell the whole damned estate, lock, stock, and barrel, and give him a little ready money to throw away at the races or the nightclubs.
We’re living in the aftermath of this process. Our inheritance is long since spent, which is not great news for us if we want to cultivate healthy prejudices. If the decay were less advanced, we could just stop being stupid and fall back on the culture’s good instincts. But we’re not so lucky.
Why We Stink at This
Even if we’ve woken up to the fact that we all have prejudices, and that we’d better strengthen our good ones, we’re in a tough spot. Our prejudices no longer come from trusted elders, our immediate social circle, or our experience in the world, but from mass media — in most of our cases, algorithms.
We like to make fun of the libs who were radicalized by Disney Plus shows to assault law enforcement or the MSNBC Americans holding signs and playing djembe drums in the town square. They are playing a character in a drama that in no way resembles reality. When they watch cable news, they’re watching an entertainment product, dressed up as information, that exists as a way to sell ED pills and pocket catheters.
But that doesn’t mean you’re better off watching content curated by an algorithm. When you do, you aren’t looking at an unvarnished picture of the world. You’re looking at a picture of the world designed to fit you based on your revealed preferences. There is no algorithm designed to give you Burke’s “general bank and capital of nations and of ages.”
And we’re no closer to the real world just because our slop was filmed on phone cameras. The internet — especially algorithm-based social media — is a distraction machine, and distraction destroys memory.
And to quote Nicholas Carr, “Personal memory shapes and sustains the ‘collective memory’ that underpins culture. … Culture is sustained in our synapses.”
How can a collective memory form today? You spend hours a day consuming content tailored to your appetites and then look around at other people who have been doing the same. In short, the internet has had the same effect on our common memory and common sense as the French Revolution sought to have on the French populace. This makes us vulnerable, not only to the whims of the elites but also to other stronger cultures.
The West has very little holding it together. Culture, common sense, folk wisdom, unwritten rules — these are core things that make a nation cohere. But that’s not as much of a problem in other places. Yes, the internet goes everywhere, but the effects haven’t been as destructive everywhere. Our culture was already hollowed out by the time the internet came around.
On the other hand, the Islamic world hadn’t been weakening itself for the last century. Neither had the Hindu world. These cultures with a stronger sense of self will swallow up a weakened West if we don’t get our act together.
In 2024, a 90-foot statue of a Hindu god known as “Hanuman the Monkey King” was unveiled in Sugar Land, Texas.
Also in 2024, EPIC City was announced in Texas, with EPIC standing for “East Plano Islamic Center.” It’s a 402-acre plot that would be a self-sustained Islamic city about 40 minutes from where I used to live. Closer to my home in Texas than my church was.
The reaction of conservative Americans was, of course, outrage. They went scrambling, looking for a law they could use to argue against it. They debated the “true meaning” of the First Amendment but to no avail.
They were like the opposing team in Air Bud when the dog walks onto the basketball court. Surely this can’t be allowed. It’s insane. But as we all know, “Ain’t no rule says a dog can’t play basketball.”
So I guess that settles it.
I guess we have to drive past 90-foot monkey statues on the way to work.
I guess we have to live 40 minutes from a colony of muslims.
I guess we have to play basketball with a dog.
Throughout the controversy, no one just said, “No, thanks. That’s not how we do things here.” Because really, who’s to say how we do things here? What is “we” anyway? What is “here”?
They’re not hurting anyone. There’s no law against it. And there’s no one sitting in that bus seat.
This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends.
