A while back, I posted my two cents in phyllo’s thread Science must be “decolonized”. He posted an interesting video (it’s worth taking a trip over there and watching the video, only a few minutes long). The summary: a group of mostly black students that call themselves “fallists” meet with the UCT Science Faculty in Cape Town, South Africa to debate the the merits and utility of Western science, which they claim is a form of white colonization rooted in racism. The thesis they try to defend is to decolonize or “scratch off” Western science in order to make way for a new African science, a science open to magic and witchcraft which, as one fallist claims, is “something that happens.”
Pressed to explain how such phenomena actually “happen,” one member of the science faculty responds: “It’s not true.” ← Big mistake. The chair of the fallist panel immediately stands up with a look of alarm on her face while the speaker and her companion next to her chuckle to each other with gestures that say “you see? That’s what they do!” The chair silences the room and hammers home the point that the faculty member just violated one of the rules of the discourse, and enforces an apology (which he submits to) and to reaffirm his vow to follow the rules. Apparently, saying that a wild claim about witchcraft is not true is a violation of the rules.
Now if you read my long winded response in that thread, you get the idea that I think the fallist panel is utterly insane. But being the multifaceted thinker I am, I always like to ponder things from all sides. One thing that comes to mind, which is the basis for this thread, is that the fallists have a point (though it’s not explicitly said) that the scientific community (Western or otherwise) tends to be quite dogmatic on the point that magic and witchcraft are “not true”. Such claims do tend to be dismissed out of hand by hardnosed scientists and materialists as soon as they’re raised.
Now this is not a thread for defending fallists, or anyone who wishes to dispute skeptical attitudes about magic and witchcraft (although you can if you want)–rather, it is a thread for exploring the roots of our prejudices. Starting with the point that scientists tend to be dogmatic in their dismissal of claims about magic and witchcraft, it got me thinking that maybe the fallists aren’t on such shaky grounds for challenging Western science after all–I’m not going to say their other criticisms–that it is based on racism, that it should be scratch off, that we can claim with equal dogmatism that magic and witchcraft do happen–are backed by solid reasoning or evidence–but what I am going to say is the dogmatisms that we acquire, the ones that ultimately culminate in prejudices and bigotry, always seem to be traceable to similar dogmatisms and prejudices coming from the other side, dogmatisms and prejudices that they had to fight in times past.
It’s almost a tit-for-that game. If you ask one of the fallists: Why are you so militant and dogmatic in your confrontations with the science faculty? They’ll likely respond (after getting over their defensiveness and denial): because we have to be in order to compete with the militancy and dogmatism that the science faculty confront us with. Then you go to the science faculty and ask: why are you so dogmatic in your insistence that magic and witchcraft are just not true? And after getting over their insistence that magic is irrational, that there’s no evidence for it, etc., etc., etc., they might relay to you tales of corrupt religious leaders, cult leaders conning people into believing in the supernatural in order to use them for some purpose. And these tales wouldn’t be wrong, of course–it happens. Western science, after all, has a history of Church persecution–Galileo, Bruno, Descartes, to name a few–they too had to face fierce dogmatisms and prejudices. And what of the Church? Did it not begin with its own persecution? Were not the early Christians martyrs in the ancient Roman empire?
The claim of this thread is that no prejudice is born ex nihilo–anyone you deem to be prejudice in one way or another will, if you ask them, point to certain prejudices in the other group as their reasons for holding their prejudices. And while such accusations are almost certainly guaranteed to be major distortions, maybe even flat out lies, they are almost always borne out of some hardship the group had to endure–perhaps recently, perhaps in the distant past–at the hands of another group. Perhaps that other group simply didn’t care. Perhaps they had no idea the first group was undergoing such hardship. There’s even the possibility that the group claiming to be persecuted hold their prejudices completely on a lie (for example, archaeologists are now saying that the ancient Egyptians never had slaves–but the myth that the ancient Isrealites were freed by Moses from the bonds of slavery would have certainly planted the seeds in the minds of ancient Isrealites of having once been persecuted, and thereby engender certain prejudices towards the allegedly oppressive group). Whether these prejudices are founded on something real and concrete or naively believed because of a lie, they are never brought into existence ex nihilo.
My claim in this thread is that the tit-for-tat approach to resolving the clashes of prejudices never works (except in all out war where you completely annihilate your enemy ← but is that “working”?). At the very least, it is never right. You can’t point to a group and say “they’re the bad guys in this situation” or more to the point: “they started it.” Rather, what we need to do, if we are at all serious about morality, is, first, recognize when we have acquired prejudices of our own, and second, do what we can to rise above them. ← The point here is that we are always going to acquire certain prejudices–no one is immune–sometimes surface prejudices, other times deeply entrenched ones, some we may get over quickly, others may take years–we may go entire years without bearing any ill will or judgements towards other groups and suddenly exposure to certain events or a series of bad experiences instill great prejudices within us. The point is to recognize when this happens–that it has become a prejudice–and to take the implications of that seriously. This is not to say we ignore the ways in which we might have been wronged, or persecuted, or the trauma of bad experiences, but it is to say that there is a difference between having to cope with these wrongs, these persecutions, these traumas, and submitting to a prejudice–a generalization that an entire group of people are inherently bad or wrong, or deserving of some horrible fate, just in virtue of being a member of that group. ← Such a thing is not to be defended, but to be overcome. I wouldn’t even go so far as to say one is wrong to have a prejudice–we are human, we are all susceptible to them–but that we bear the moral responsibility of at least owning up to the fact that we have acquired a prejudice and to exercise at least some effort to rise above it in whatever ways that we can.
^ I think this is the proper response to prejudice–the moral response–not this tit-for-tat game, the who-is-to-blame game, the they-did-it-first game ← that is the road to victim mentality and complete denial of one’s prejudices and dogmatisms. It only sinks our prejudices and dagmatisms deeper and makes them harder to uproot later in life. Rising above our prejudices is strength, it is will power–it is resilience and self-improvement, the will to mental health. The onus is on all groups to recognize this in themselves and to own up to the responsibility to rise above. Only in this way will we remain focused on the only true moral response to the prejudices and dogmatisms we are faced with day to day.
