Interlude

When I was young, I was specifically raised by my parents to be "un-prejudiced" racially. But growing up as I did in the 70's, there was a lot of talk, but little solid info for a kid like me.

Sometime in my teens, prejudice became a central focus...I wanted to really understand, what it was, and what it was not. I remember one of the first ideas that began to dawn on me as a kid, was that situations like Germany under Hitler were very, very similar to a rather dangerous virus.

I discovered Milgram, and suspected that infection could result in many ways, more than one of them without the individual even knowing how thoroughly they had been infected by an external agent. And of course I ended up reading such classics as Vonnegut's "Breakfast of Champions".

But, Milgram, while doing some pretty terrifying research that implicated mankinds susceptibility to suggestion, also held out hope that some still experienced something at least akin to free will on a fundamental level. I remember being influenced by some studies I had seen about this, that were similar to Milgram's without the ethical problems that upset so many. They usually involved subtly encouraging a subject through group pressure, to misstate the length of 3 lines on a board (subject would be last asked, lines would be clearly different length).

Through those studies, some rough numbers, as well as Milgram's, added to some personal anecdotes, I became convinced that it was safe (in a poker playing odds kind of way) to assume that 1/3 of people always give in to group pressure, 1/3 lean towards the group but either know they are doing it, or are still open to changing their minds if the evidence presents itself in a palatable enough kind of way, and one third would attempt to make their own decision. By "poker playing kind of way" means that if I played these odds, I believed that I would be right the majority of the time. I feel, through my own life experience of the last 30 years that I have been correct with these assumptions the majority of the time. Purely subjective, in the end.

I also came to believe that people would prefer to believe that they were acting correctly at any given time, and would begin to assert these things as true to control inner dissonance (a whole different set of items led me there...)...so as well as assuming that 1/3 were extraordinarily susceptible, I also suspected that they were also potentially dangerous if you caused them dissonance or interfered in their ability to identify with the herd.

In many ways my study of prejudice when I was young leads me now to say, I am prejudiced in favor of these numbers, even if they are completely off.

Which finally brings me to the rambling round and round point.

At Marginal Revolution today, I found the following post, which I love for what it tells us about people...More reason to have patience with large cultures.

Tyler Cowen relates the following passages from an article in the August issue of Gourmet magazine:

...this is my first visit to Thomas Keller's temple of haute cuisine in Yountville, California, and I can't wait to see whether it lives up to its reputation. More importantly, however, my dining companions are three outstanding chefs from Sichuan province, a heartland of Chinese gastronomy...None of them has ever been to the West before, or had any real encounters with what is known in China as "Western food," and I am as much interested in their reactions to the meal as my own.

Driving down Highway 29 to the restaurant, I had prepared my guests by casually remarking, "You're very lucky, because we are going to visit one of the best restaurants in the world."

In the world? asked Lan Guijun. "According to whom?"

..as I warm up to the pleasures of this utterly satisfying dinner, I can't help noticing that my companions are having a rather different experience. Yu Bo, the most adventurous of the three, is intent of savoring every mouthful and studying the composition of our meal. He is solemn in his concentration. But the other two are simply soldiering on. And for all three of them, I realize with devastating clarity, this is a most difficult, a most alien, a most challenging experience.

Yu Bo, to my great satisfaction, is pleasantly impressed with the first raw oyster of his life, and even ventures to take a second. When I ask him how they taste, he nods furiously in approval. "Not bad, not bad; a bit like jellyfish."

Well, obviously this fulfills my "prejudice" towards my own bias. The 1/3 rule I call it.

But, it fulfills another bias I have. When I was young I didn't like shrimp, wouldn't eat it, and it wasn't around in my life that much. Subsequently, it wasn't till I was 15, and confronted by a shrimp dinner at the home of a Jewish friend of mine (there is a reason for that mention of race), and I loved it! I had been absolutely convinced prior to that moment that I had hated shrimp. After that I began to tell people, LOOK...racism is like not liking shrimp....blah...blah...blah (and I would explain my experience).

Now, at the time I had been fairly well educated in the minutiae of the Christian New Testament, but not nearly as much as the old testament. I think it was that very night, later as we were talking (I loved my friends parents, still do...some of the few adults willing to have such conversations back then)...they had pulled out a bible and told me I was going to love this...they showed me the biblical injuction in Leviticus against eating shell fish...shrimp.

So of course you can guess where this lead me...

I now believe that anyone who doesn't eat shrimp is prejudiced....;)

No, not quite, but I do draw connections between the suggestion that being open to new foods, is not unrelated to being open to new people, like maybe Mexican new people, or White/Black new people, or Gay new people. (After all, it is in that book of the bible, along side condemning the practice of these ungodly shrimp eaters, that you find one of the few injuctions against homosexuality, the only other one that I am usually referred is in Romans, part of the new testament).

I love that Mr. Cowen pointed that out to me, I'll probably get a copy to read. But I disagree with him, (my prejudice), I think that is a condition of humanity, much, much older than "large" cultures.