Prejudices

Knowingly or not, our finest essayist, Theodore Dalrymple, borrowed a theme and a misunderstood word from H.L. Mencken when he titled his new book In Praise of Prejudice: The Necessity of Preconceived Ideas. Between 1919 and 1927, Mencken published his essays in six volumes, each titled Prejudices. In The Skeptic, his biography of Mencken, Terry Teachout called it “the perfect title.” In “Scientific Examination of a Popular Virtue,” from the second collection in the series, Mencken writes:

“One may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one will be able to go to hell without perspiring.”

Compare Mencken’s thought to Dalrymple’s in an interview he recently gave The Washington Times:

“The attempt to live as if one were unprejudiced is dangerous. It leads one to disregard the most obvious considerations about people, for example that their manner and appearance is aggressive. In my work I was often consulted by people who failed to take notice of the signs that a person gave because to do so would be to `stereotype’ him, and they suffered the consequences.”

Offending people today is child’s play: Merely state the obvious. I’ve ordered Dalrymple’s book and look forward to its imminent arrival. Like Mencken, Dalrymple writes to be read. He wishes to convey ideas, not to put on a distracting show or dazzle with cleverness, and he respects his readers enough to write clearly and stylishly – in the great English tradition of the plain style (Defoe, Johnson, Cobbett, Orwell). Self-deprecatingly, he says in the interview:

“My book was written for that elusive person, the general reader. I tend to assume that the general reader is interested in the same things as I. So far, sales have always proved me wrong.”

The interviewer, Robert Stacy McCain, mentions that Dalrymple cites, among other thinkers, David Hume. Longtime Dalrymple readers will recall his often expressed admiration for the great Scottish writer, as in this essay published last March in the New English Review:

“In my opinion, the great philosopher David Hume understood why human self-understanding was forever beyond our reach. It is not a coincidence that he always expressed himself with irony, for the deepest irony possible is that of the existence of a creature, Man, who forever seeks something that is beyond his understanding.

“Hume was simultaneously a figure of the enlightenment and the anti-enlightenment. He saw that reason and consideration of the evidence are all that a rational man can rely upon, yet they are eternally insufficient for Man as he is situated. In short, there cannot be such a thing as the wholly rational man. Reason, he said, is the slave of the passions; and in addition, no statement of value follows logically from any statement of fact. But we cannot live without evaluations.

“Ergo, self-understanding is not around the corner and never will be. We shall never be able seamlessly to join knowledge and action. To which I add, not in any religious sense: thank God.”

Sound like uncommon common sense? Learning tempered by life? I agree. Consider what Hume had to say on the subject, in “Of Essay-Writing”:

“…Learning has been as great a Loser by being shut up in Colleges and Cells, and secluded from the World and good Company. By that Means, every Thing of what we call Belles Lettres became totally barbarous, being cultivated by Men without a Taste of Life or Manners, and without that Liberty and Facility of Thought and Expression, which can only be acquir’d by Conversation. Even Philosophy went to the Wrack by this moaping recluse Method of Study, and became as chimerical in her Conclusions as she was unintelligible in her Stile and Manner of Delivery. And indeed, what cou’d be expected from Men who never consulted Experience in any of their Reasonings, or who never search’d for that Experience, where alone it is to be found, in common Life and Conversation?”

Bonus: By happy serendipity, Dalrymple (aka Anthony Daniels) has just published “The Cure for Bernard Shaw” in the October issue of The New Criterion. Shaw is a writer whose alleged charms have never overcome my immunity against lies, monomania and sloganeering. Here, Dr. Daniels takes on Shaw the medical crank. A sample:

“In fact, there is almost no end to Shaw’s idiocy, so that perhaps it is hardly surprising that he did not see through Mussolini, Hitler, or Stalin: it would have required a degree of common sense and some preference for truth over self-advertisement to do so. Shaw hated Lister and Pasteur—he wrote of them with real venom—for the same reason that Tolstoy hated Shakespeare, namely that Lister and Pasteur were greater, better men than Shaw, as Shakespeare was a greater writer than Tolstoy.”