`A Prejudice Against Prejudice'

The arrival in the mail of a book I have ordered approximates the consummated sense of greed I felt as a boy on birthdays and Christmases. Proust taught us that anticipation of pleasure exceeds pleasure – but not always. On Thursday, the drab cardboard shell containing a book from Amazon.com poked from the mailbox. It was slender and compact, promising density of pleasure, and I was not disappointed. In Praise of Prejudice: In Pursuit of Preconceived Ideas, by Theodore Dalrymple, contains all the good sense, honesty, learning and compassion we expect from our finest essayist. The good news begins with his choice of epigraphs. First, from Boswell’s Life of Johnson:

“He said, `Macaulay, who writes the account of St. Kilda, set out with a prejudice against prejudice, and wanted to be a smart modern thinker; and yet it affirms for a truth [what everyone already knows], that when a ship arrives there all the inhabitants are seized with a cold.”

Dalrymple adds: “A.D. 1768, Aetat 59.” In other words, this was written by a man approaching the outer limits of middle age and entering the environs of old age. Young people seldom think this way. We might also note than Dalrymple, or rather Anthony Daniels, was born in 1949.

St. Kilda is an archipelago on the north coast of Scotland, and a book about it by the Rev. Kenneth Macaulay, The History of St. Kilda, was published in 1764. Macaulay and his book show up twice in the Life of Johnson. Dalrymple quotes the first mention and here is the second, about 60 pages later:

“He had said in the morning, that `Macaulay’s History of St. Kilda’ was very well written, except some foppery about liberty and slavery. I mentioned to him that Macaulay told me, he was advised to leave out of his book the wonderful story that upon the approach of a stranger all the inhabitants catch cold; but that it had been so well authenticated, he determined to retain it. JOHNSON. `Sir, to leave things out of a book, merely because people tell you they will not be believed, is a meanness. Macaulay acted with more magnanimity.”

Dalrymple’s reasons for choosing the first citation are obvious, but a little homework shows the second also resonates rather nicely. I suspect he, like Johnson, leaves nothing out of his books because they tempt incredulity by readers. Dalrymple transcends simple politics. He is not a political writer. If he were, I would probably not read him because I have no interest in politics. Like Johnson, his concerns are timeless because he is devoted, as a thinker and writer, to the essentials of human nature, which have changed little in millennia. Such matters have nothing to do with liberal or conservative or any convenient, inexact label of the day. Here’s what Dalrymple has to say about Dr. Johnson in the new book:

“As is so often, though not always, the case, Doctor Johnson has something profound to say on the matter [of the inevitability of prejudice and the dangers of its absence]. Nothing could be further removed from modern sensibility, with its insistence that at each moment, at each junction in the road of life, each individual must stand alone as a totally original self-creation, than Doctor Johnson’s combination of ruthless honesty, profound introspection, and deep common sense. No one could suspect Doctor Johnson himself of a lack of individuality, or of blind conformity; indeed, it would be difficult to think of any more distinctive individual than he.”

There’s much self-disclosing in this passage.

I almost forgot: Dalrymple’s second epigraph is from Dostoevsky’s prophetic The Devils (also translated as The Possessed and Demons):

“Starting from unlimited freedom I arrive at unlimited despotism.”