POST-JUDICE

By Tom Kando
  
   (written on July 19, 2008)

We have been told for a century or so that prejudice is evil. True.

Pre-judice means: you judge someone BEFORE you know him. (From “pre” =  before, and “judicium” =  judgement).  This is bad. Plus, you generalize one individual’s characteristic(s) to his entire group (stereotyping). Also bad.

So today I thought, what about postjudice? If prejudice is bad, then its opposite - postjudice - must be good. And this is true. You judge something after you know the facts, after you know what it is that you are judging. Great. As  I have  told my students many times: information must precede opinion.

So then I thought: when we judge a group of people negatively, is it always prejudice, or is it sometimes postjudice? I have to tread  very careful now. Before I  know it, I could be called a bigot. But let me proceed anyway - carefully:

Sometimes, the members of a particular group are “over-represented” in some bad behavior. Or a particular group misbehaves collectively. Example: the Nazis (always the safe example). So then we conclude that this is a bad group of people. In 1945, we concluded that there had been an awful lot of bad Germans. Postjudice, not prejudice.

So the difference between prejudice and postjudice is clear: One is based on ignorance, the other one on experience.

For a long time, the most obvious victims of prejudice have been ethnic minorities. In America,   blacks have been the foremost recipients of negative labeling. Of course, this  analysis is strictly limited to the US. Elsewhere, ethnic prejudice is often the mirror opposite. In quite a few  circles, the  boogeyman is Satan America.

In America, a new group has been vying for the top spot as boogeyman since 9-11: Arabs and other Muslims (especially when they are bearded).

After that  you get,  in  descending order, Mexican-Americans, Asians, Eastern Europeans and other former communist  people (Poles, Russians, Hungarians, and don’t forget those ridiculous Kazakhstanis in the movie  Borat), various Mediterranean peoples (Greeks and Italians, but Greeks rank  a little bit lower), the Irish, the Jews (still), the French, but also the Germans, the Scotts, even the English...

So negative generalizations are made about every single group - by the members of  other groups.

    * * * * *

It’s easy to say, “just stop generalizing. Just judge each individual on his own merits.” But if we were to follow this precept, we would have to abolish Sociology, which is the business of generalizing about groups. In fact, we should abolish all the social sciences - psychology, anthropology, history, political science, economics, all of them. After all, anthropologists study cultures, right? They describe the behaviors  and the  values which the members of one tribe or one  society share with each other and which distinguish them from other  groups. It’s called  “Cultural identity.”  Psychologists also generalize  about categories of people - extroverts, introverts, type-A personalities, women, men,  etc.

So it is clear that generalizations are the essence of social science - as they are the essence of all science. After all, doesn’t science try to discover laws with general applicability?

    * * * * *
Does this leave us in a quandary? Maybe not:

Generalization is okay, but it  must be based on post-judgement, not pre-judgement (prejudice). Fine.

But maybe not everything that  has been passed off as prejudice is prejudice. Maybe some of it is postjudice, i.e. based on experience. If a disproportionate number of thefts and robberies are
committed by gypsies, then does it not make sense for a tourist to be weary of gypsies who approach him on a Paris sidewalk or a Rome subway?

 If the vast majority of terrorists in the 21st century are Muslim fundamentalists, then is it wrong to suspect that the next terrorist attack is more likely to be committed by a member of that group than by a Buddhist or a Jew or a Christian?
Yes, yes, even if many terrorists are Muslims, this does not mean that most Muslims are terrorists. Very true. Still, probabilities are what matters in life. I’ll repeat: it is more likely that the next terrorist attack will be committed by a Muslim fundamentalist than by a Lutheran from Scandinavia (oops, I almost forgot the enormous example of an exception that confirms the rule: In 2012, the Norwegian  monster Anders Breivik murdered more than 77 people, mostly children).

    * * * * *
Now don’t get huffy: Nothing is for ever. This Muslim terrorism business is just for now. As recently as the 1980s, most terrorists were European Sociology students (remember  the German Baader-Meinhof  Gang? the Italian Red Brigades? the French Action Directe? The Red Army Faction?)  This, too, shall pass.  No group has a  permanent corner on misbehavior.  If you believe that they do, then you are, indeed, a racist.

Still, at any given time, some groups misbehave more than others. And that is what people often react to, when they generalize and when they react negatively to members of certain groups and categories.
Maybe in the future, the Japanese will be the most frequent pickpockets, Norwegians will disproportionately engage in terrorist acts and Jews will have the highest  rate of rape. Then, it will be time to be aware of this,  to hold on to your wallet when you cross paths with a Japanese, to keep an eye on that tall blond Scandinavian passenger sitting next to you, and to make sure that  your daughter doesn’t date a Jewish boy without supervision.

But let’s face it: At least some of what is viewed as prejudice is in fact postjudice. The common people aren’t as dumb as liberal professors and journalists make them out to be. Sometimes their reactions are  based on experience.

© Tom Kando 2014

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