On the triviality and falseness of American left-liberal notions of prejudice

There surely is such a thing as right attitude. Religion knows a practice that cultivates the right attitudes or states of thought and feeling: prayer. Jewish theologian and civil rights activist Abraham Joshua Heschel famously said, “Prayer cannot bring water to parched fields, or mend a broken bridge, or rebuild a ruined city; but prayer can water an arid soul, mend a broken heart, and rebuild a weakened will.”

Nothing is more rightly guilt-inducing among attitudes than “prejudices,” or wrong attitudes about race or other minority statuses. And by the same measure, no attempt to “heal” society’s divisions and disaffections or improve its weal is so circumscribed as to affect only the morals of correct thinking as interdictions of racism and other prejudices as opinion and attitude. If Americans wanted to rebuild ruined cities, and not just a water cooler Gemeinschaftgefühl (community feeling, an idea once important, now infamously, in a segment of European culture), it might not be enough to police corporate office manners.

Zizek is right: When you meet someone who manifestly belongs to a different social group, the appropriate thing for each of you to say is, "What I have never liked about you people is....." Of course, that is prejudice, or rather, it is prejudice placed on the line, and therefore revisable. We know from Hans-Georg Gadamer that there is no not having prejudices--unless people do not have qualities, and they do--but only allowing them to be questioned, developed, or changed, or not.

The dead-end of opposing all prejudice so that it cannot be expressed has minimized conflict in our corporate culture while rendered it irreconcilable in social life. And that has led to reverse racism and violence.

Even people like the philosopher George Yancy claim, wrongly, that black Americans are oppressed by "white people," a category that conveniently links true "white supremacists" like the Klan and neo-Nazis to the non-existent social entity those extremists claim to represent.  It is only too bad that history and politics are not that easy.

If it were so easy, then political contestation and social experiments in art could all be reduced to simple moral injunctions that are readily enforced. Like: treat as 'racist' any white person who speaks to you in a harsh or dissenting tone, by pretending that he or she is not showing you the deference called "respect."

America isn't "white," it is a capitalist police state whose dominant ideologies including therapeutic spirituality and violent barbarism. Through something like ideology, most people actively and enthusiastically help to reproduce the social institutions and practices that their own lives, too, are made poorer and more violent by.

Speech can only be policed through interdictions when discussion is prohibited. Then instead of telling someone that you think they are wrong in what they say, and offering a reason and argument, and so an opening to a discussion, one simply objects that they should not have said it. Statements are not now true or false, but permitted or prohibited, measured against some imaginary dictionary of received opinions.

In such contexts, artworks are prosecuted for their morals while citizens can only succeed or fail at performances evaluated on aesthetic grounds. As Marx once said, relationships between things come to be treated as like relationships among people, and those between people take on the character of things.

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At the origin of this perhaps is a (capitalist) professional culture in which nothing important can usually be said, because explicit statements tend to place on the line the desires, interests, or motives of those making them. If you doubt this idea, flaunt it, at your peril. Social life then begins to take on a character relying primarily on an “unsaid,” as all truths about social life acquire both the “obvious” character of common sense and the correlative exigency to “figure it out” (because everything is supposed to obvious and not need thinking, and what it is you must understand is, in part just for this reason, never so clear),
which is sustained by faux intellectual observations of folk anthropology of what (“the”) people (below) are like, such that an evolutionary biology that functions like Adam Smith’s “invisible hand of the market” that is indifferent to the desires and sufferings of persons, and the endless appeal to young people in the managerial/professional class to recognize both a universal duty to “communicate” (including with oneself, yielding most “therapy”) and a relegation of these to the not-yet-linguistic appearances of “body language,” which may be what barbarism tries to retain of civility. Nothing important is said: In the business world there are social norms and rules; the enormous pop management literature in this country extends the business school graduate’s recognition that how to get things done (the subject matter of all business, for-profit or not) is a matter for a science because the rules and norms must always be inferred, as in the “reflective judgments” central to understanding art in the philosophy of Kant. Violate a norm or rule of this unsayable kind, and you will likely be put in a position, or place, where all you can do is try to figure it out. (To reinforce this demand beyond the happenstance of finding yourself suddenly fired, authorities may be happy to call you criminal or crazy in some way that also cannot be clarified, except that whatever this is a truth of, it must be of you and you alone). Imagine the cost saved to workers and consumers that otherwise would be borne by companies were this not the case. The conditions of a universal ethics of “communication,” fictional projected ideal of a managerial culture, are precisely its absence and impossibility.