Why a history of prejudice?
Article by SIR PETER USTINOV
On the signing of the agreement to establish the Sir Peter Ustinov Centre, Budapest University of Technology and Economics.
8 November 2001
Although, prejudice has been with us about as long as the human race, its history, as such, is relatively short. The reason for this is that, for centuries, it has been accepted as a normal, and even, at times, desirable element in a social structure.
And why almost as long as the human race? Well, another word for prejudice might will be "inherited opinion". There was nothing to inherit at the very outset of the human adventure. George Bush junior is a Republican president of the United States. So was his father, George Bush senior. If the son had been a Democrat, it might well have indicated an evident, perhaps even painful difference with his domestic role model. The fact that their loyalties are identical does not, of course, prove that they are in agreement about everything, but it does not suggest either, as the alternative case does, that the youngest man had thought for himself. In fact, in such a case - with political parties as nebulous in definition and as vague in regional antagonism, with the left wings of both close to each other than they are to their own right wings - the differences are often no greater than that between two football teams and call forth allegiance rather than conviction.
Curiously enough, prejudice is incubated in the young person by those institutions most praised by conventional wisdom as the harbingers of all that is noble, and therefore desirable, in the formative years. I refer to school, church and family. It is from there scenes that not only learning and ethical conduct flow, but also any amount of inherited opinion. And the fabric of inherited opinion hardens with the years and centuries into traditional opinion.
Perhaps it will consolidate my thesis if I give you a quick resumé of events that have led me to my conclusions. Born eighty years ago in London, but with a generous diversity of blood in my veins, but without a drop of the English, I went to school for the first time at the age of six, in other words, in 1927. On the wall of my first classroom there was a large oleograph of Jesus Christ, depicted with the flowing locks, well-trimmed beard, and trace of feminine sensibility in the manner of illustrated bibles of the period. He extended an avuncular hand to an overwhelmed boy-scout, while pointing out with his other hand, the extent of the British Empire on the map. The expression on Jesus face left no doubt about what side he was on.
I protested that Jesus was an universal symbol and could not be mobilized by one side at the expense of others. I was told not to be blasphemous, and that the picture was patriotic, and therefore desirable. The authorities were lenient with me, putting down my rebellious outburst to an obvious, and unfortunate, foreignness.
Later, I came across a quote from Cecil Rhodes, the creator of Rhodesia, and pioneer of the diamond industry. He said to a friend, "Remember that you are an Englishman, and have therefore won first prize in the lottery of life." Life changes with its seasons, as do its lotteries. No man, no dictator, no guru, can ever affect the unforeseeable, and today the country which so proudly carried the name of its founding father is called Zimbabwe, and labours under completely different prejudices, which are not eternal either.
A little later in my life, I was conscripted into the British Army. I spent four and a half years as a private soldier, being taught by non-commissioned officers - who seemed closer to the Crimean War than to the century we were in - that the "Only good German is a dead German" and other heart-warming bits of vintage prejudice. They showed us how to attack a sand-bag with a bayonet, screaming as eerily as Arab woman bewailing a catastrophe, and shouting with a momentary sharpening of focus, "In, Out, On-guard!" This effort to make brutal zombies out of human beings failed as miserably as it was bound to, but it was an ideal college in which to recognise prejudice as the leading influence on those without the moral fibre to think for themselves. I can honestly say I never wasted as much of my own time or that of other people as I did in the Army, and it was symptomatic of things to come that life in uniform was safer than life as a civilian.
Right at the end of what I may laughingly call my military career, I was a patient in a hospital that was also the temporary home to a few prisoners of war. One morning I encountered a German General in the grounds, going for his morning "constitutional". I had not practised my German for years, and asked him how he was. He was amazed to come across an ostensibly British soldier who spoke his language. We had not exchanged these sentences, however, before I was seized and bundled into the guardhouse, where I was cross - examined about the nature of the confidence we had exchanged. I was told I had contravened a regulation about non-fraternisation then applicable to others in Germany, but of which I had never heard. Like so many things taken seriously then, it may well appear absurd today. After all, I had been caught talking about the weather to a live German, and therefore, by the sergeant’s definition, a bad one.
Initially, I suggested that the history of prejudice as such is recent. During the same war, it was in order for Herr Goebbels’ Ministry to be called the "Reichspropagandaministerium". In other words, Ministry of Fabrications, of lies. Even then, the British equivalent was called the Ministry of information, as any such office has to be called in those early days of "political correctness". This is an unpleasant phrase, inferring a thin-lipped piety in its application, but the very fact of its existence proclaims that every utterance must be free of prejudice. This is the first public acknowledgement of the danger of prejudice rather than a mere acknowledgement of its existence.
We live in an epoch of unprecedented progress. For centuries, the fastest thing on Earth was a man on a horse. Then, at first slowly, there appeared the steam-engine, the paddle steamer, the internal combustion engine to be followed by the aeroplane, radio, telephone, television, right up to the bewildering daily advances in the fields of information, communication and convenience. The span of human existence on this earth, in the region of 6,000,000 years, was marked by slow, stately advances, but with times of retrogression, "Dark Ages", in which conservative thinking was possible, and often logical. Today could be compared with yesterday with no great difficulty, since the changes were minimal, and what tomorrow would bring could be guessed without much risk. And what is the measure of the change today? With the whole of human history as a yardstick, the difference in time between the Wright Brothers’ first hazardous flight thirty feet above the ground and the Moonwalk of American astronauts is infinitesimal, and the bewildering speed of progress grows with every passing day. In fact, it is far too rapid for a collective comprehension.
The Internet has opened on, as yet uncharted ocean far greater than those negotiated by Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Magellan and the like, and now, as then, we are in desperate need of cartographers to bring this immensity down to a workable scale.
And with globalization come other challenges. Obviously the first field of activity to embrace the idea of globalization is that of commerce, more willing than other fields to encourage the by-passing of national regulations and other restrictions to megalomania. Today several conglomerates have budgets greater than those of fair-sized industrial countries. The evident beneficiaries of this are not necessarily the consumers, but organized crime, that lives like a parasite on the back of commerce, and unfailingly prospers. The world criminal court is another urgent necessity.
The really wonderful and striking fact to emerge from this immense stride forward into the unknown is that mankind has responded with an astonishing increase in its capacity for lucid thoughts and a balanced appreciation of the world around it.
The first Russian Revolution in 1917 was an important historical fact, accompanied by enormous bloodshed and untold misery. The second Russian Revolution, 1991, was a studied avoidance of conflict, even if the misery could not be excluded altogether. Spain, as strikingly, passed from fascism to democracy overnight in its case, the triumph of tourism over autocracy. As human awareness grows often by means as controversial as television as well as the ability of far more people to travel for pleasure than in the past, contacts with other ways of life, other cultures, has increased enormously. Sport has made an important contribution to this improvement in understanding. It is, in its way, the logical modern alternative to war, appealing to the same tribal loyalties latent in most hearts, and have them satisfied without carnage, which is a resort to the baser instincts, masquerading as honour.
It is the general and remarkable improvement in the intellectual level of the so-called man (and naturally woman) in the street, that has begun slowly by react to the savage onslaught of war technologies. We are on the way to destroying distance with spoken and written words. Perhaps we are at last on the way to finding better words to say or write to one another: It is that which is really important.
Prejudice has been identified, after centuries of subversive life, like a mole in the midst of communities, as one of the principle villains in history’s cast of characters. It is responsible for a misrepresentation about nations and religions other than one’s own, as well as an uncritical appraisal of one’s own religion and nation, using as its weapon, sheer unadulterated ignorance.
I suggested earlier on that the three areas in which prejudice was allowed to burgeon are church, school and family. I have already demonstrated the way it could be allowed to spread its poison, a kind of chloroform to the growing mind, in my schooldays (less today, although national history is still too far separated from world history to retain a necessary balance in assessment). Family is generally praised as the only valid unit, although great abnormalities have sprouted in modern times that are a sign that to some family spells prison, or even hell. Certainly the Victorians’ prejudice that children should be seen but not heard is hardly an indication of domestic bliss. As for religion, I once said that religion opens a window, religions, in the plural, shut it again. Most religions, like human nature itself, are most remarkable for their similarities than their differences. Ecumenical services are more and more usual, and they present no unsurmountable problems. And yet in the hands of human interpreters, each tries to win a few points of advantage over the other.
Opinion is an essential result of contemplation, but inherited opinion (in other words, prejudice) is a negation of personal contemplation. And when inherited turns to traditional, it becomes lethal, as in the mindless activities of the Moslem fundamentalists, or the absurd antagonism between so-called Catholics and so-called Protestants in Northern Ireland. These fanatics have been indoctrinated into certain patterns of behaviours which has prevented even the limited functioning of their own brains. The brain is a wonderful God-given instrument, which is given each individual to be used to the full, not to be dragooned into particular patterns of behaviour.
When the Pope made that surprising and welcome admission of the Church’s errors during the Inquisition, the burning of heretics, and the enforced conversion of illiterate natives - all the brutalities typical of a past period in history - there was a general appreciation of his stature as a person, his goodness and magnanimity. His endless efforts at conciliation and collaboration between the churches is another proof of human as well as more esoteric religious qualities. Then comes the suave voice of Cardinal Ratzinger to remind us all that however laudable such efforts are the Church of Rome is still the mother of all churches. This is another debate which has no place here, but it does show how cunningly inherited opinion can infiltrate into opinion itself.
Opinion is essential, and it is designed to change, otherwise it is of no use to democracy. And finally, opinion, like religious belief, is the responsibility, and reflects the dignity of the individual. Inherited opinion, or prejudice, is a negation of opinion itself, being reserved for those unable or unwilling to take advantage of the great birthright of a brain.
As for traditional opinion, it is reserved for those too timorous and yet too energetic to do anything but act in concert with others.
The noise of a common footfall gives them the kind of courage lacking when they are alone – and the shouting of slogans in a disciplined unison makes them believe they are vital cogs in a well-oiled and invincible machine. Their show of physical strength is as menacing as their pretensions are dispiriting and hollow.
Talibans, Gauleiters, Preachers of the Jihad, Propagators of the Master Race, are birds of a feather, cannon fodder in the making, born, but never recognising the gifts of life for what it is, gravitating still in unison, towards an early death, without having learned anything on the way.
But one thing the passing years and its tragedies have taught the rest of us, is that prejudice is the villain of the piece, the pollution in the atmosphere, the poison in the well. It deserves recognition, isolation, and sterilization in the interest of the essential interdependence of the people on this planet.
