Prejudice I

Integration and Prejudice, A Thought Experiment
First of a series on the elimination of prejudice.

By John Taylor; 2007 August 17

An article appeared a few months ago that has prompted me to take another look at the Baha'i principle of elimination of prejudice. It is called, "Are we born prejudiced?" (Mark Buchanan, New Scientist, 17 March 2007, p. 40), and sums up discoveries about the mechanisms of prejudice by various branches of science, including genetic and behavioral research, as well as mathematical game theory that have been made over the past few decades. Here is its opening paragraph,

"In 1992, during the war between Serbia and Croatia, The Washington Post ran an interview with a Croatian farmer named Adem, who had a horrific story to tell. Over the previous year, Adem said, discourse between local Serbs and Croats had deteriorated, as individual identities dissolved into a menacing fog of "us" versus "them". Then group animosity turned into something far worse. Serbs from a neighbouring village abruptly rounded up 35 men from Adem's village and slit their throats. The summer before, the killers had helped their victims harvest their crops."

Prejudice is a spark to tinder, it catches flame where you least expect it; it converts ill thoughts into violence like lightning. Its blood spilling is out of control before you know it. My favorite example is the Second World War. But even quicker and in some ways more hideously shocking was the massive bloodletting in Rwanda. The atrocities there are mentioned only in passing in this article.

Lately I watched the film "Hotel Rwanda," and I highly recommend it. I had drawn back from seeing the film when it first came out for the same reason that I avoid most heavy dramas. Life is depressing enough without rubbing my nose in its excrement. The killing of millions of people by machetes I do not consider to be a highlight of human history.

What finally prompted me to grit my teeth and watch it was when I ran across a newspaper advice column for bosses and managers recommending the central figure of this movie as an exemplar of the finest leadership skills in dire adversity. Sure enough when I did see this filmed version of events that really happened, I was not only inspired but absolutely blown away by the integrity of that ordinary hotel manager changed by extraordinary events into a moral superman. Here is an intelligent guy, himself a victim of racial prejudice, who goes out on a limb for his neighbors. He risks everything in order to do the right thing. By the grace of God he somehow manages to survive. Run through those events again and 999 times out of a thousand he would be just another victim, a nameless martyr to injustice. Providence saved him in order to demonstrate to the likes of me what moral nebbishes we really are. Put me into that situation and you would see me running off flailing my arms, screaming hysterically into the sunset in the first reel.

The prejudice article then mentions the kafuffle caused by racist comments against a Bollywood starlet on the British reality television show "Big Brother." This,

"provoked thousands of shocked viewers to write letters of complaint. There was a media frenzy. Questions were asked in Parliament. Even the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, who happened to be on a visit to India, felt he had to comment on the affair."

Hardly an atrocity on the order of WWII or Rwanda, but this is exactly how both of those massive wrongs began, with casual words of hate uttered by ordinary people about others of a different color, religion, tribe or other group allegiance. At least people are sensitive today as to what a dire threat racist comments pose to the survival of an open society. The more freedom we have the more people of different backgrounds will rub elbows, and the more dangerous prejudice will become.

But what do you expect to hear when you put ordinary people into a room with someone of a different race? What can you expect when our schools avidly pump kids heads full of ephemeral facts while neglecting to teach an iota of pride in our common humanity, or to instill in them a sense of what an honor it is to be a creation of God and a member of the human race? Since we are talking about the emerald isle, I was reminded of a comment that Bill Clinton made in a speech in England not long after 9-11. He said,

"The central reality of the twenty-first century world, as the spread of terrorism and the vulnerability of the United States to it demonstrate, is that our era is globally interdependent but far from integrated." (The Observer, September 8, 2002, http://www.observer.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,788135,00.html)

Integration is the key word here. The only way ever to get a handle on prejudice would be to integrate knowledge by agreeing upon a universal core curriculum and teaching it everywhere, not only in schools but everywhere. This core would establish a body of common knowledge that every human child, no matter who they are or where they live, must learn.

Think of it like this.

Imagine me in a television documentary, like my hero, Jacob Bronowski in The Ascent of Man. I am standing by one of those restaurant play places where toddlers jump into a pit and wade around up to their necks in a pile of multi-colored plastic balls. I jump in holding what looks like a suitcase in my hand. I slowly, clumsily wade, knee deep in balls, out to the center of the pit. I say,

"How would a core body of knowledge help integrate things for the human race? Well, imagine that these balls are you and me. Each ball is a person. Not only that, imagine that every group we ever get involved in throughout our lives is also a ball. Your school, your workplace, your special interest groups, your circle of friends, each one is a ball. I am standing in an infinity of balls here. Right now each ball is separate, weak, non-integrated. If I kick them, they act like a liquid, except that they do not splash, nor am I ever likely to get wet. I can move a ball wherever I please. I can take this ball, and throw it over there. Anybody can come in here and put any ball alongside any other balls in order to suit his own purposes, be they good or evil. Anybody else can come in five minutes later and move my balls somewhere else, ruining whatever it was that I was trying to do with my arrangement. But watch what happens when I do this..."

I then pull a string on the object I am holding. It turns out that it was not a suitcase but an inflatable life raft. It explodes into a huge blow up boat, filling the entire space of the play area. I am violently pushed against a wall and the floor. I cannot move a muscle, so tight is the fit between the skin of the life raft and the wall. I continue,

"Now, if I try to move one of these balls... Ugh ... I cannot. They are rock solid. Nor can I move myself very well... Here we can get a picture of the effect that a little common knowledge would have on our world. Note that the life raft is only touching these little spheres at one small point, but consider what an effect that touch has! Now they are a solid mass, immovable, steady. Nobody is going to manipulate them now because the skin of that boat is keeping them tight against it. Now they are in tension with each other too."

That is how a world curriculum would integrate the human race.