The Anatomy of Prejudices. - Review - book review

The Anatomy of Prejudices By Elisabeth Young-Bruehl (Harvard University Press, 1996. 632 pp. $35.)

Prejudice is one of those human enterprises, like crime and corruption, that never seem to abate fully. Prejudices, in different forms and with differing victims, remain common. No matter how sophisticated the modern world has become about superstition, propaganda, and dogma, we still inflict and suffer from prejudicial acts--a tradition hardly reasoned. The intellectual and civilizing activities that separated humans from other animals created modern society. Among these, science-based work in the social sciences identified and cataloged forms and practices of prejudice, and provided a basis for social policy and educational programs that research suggested could reduce or eliminate it. But prejudices do not appear to have diminished, despite policy changes and educational efforts over a long period.

Human intellectual pursuits have also given rise to post-modern criticisms of science, its paradigms, and its social consequences. Although we may assume that we have a more scientific understanding of human characteristics and behavior, post-modernists argue that our science may be merely another type of superstition and dogma: a class-, race-, and/or gender-based secular religion. That critique may offer a better explanation of the failure of research into prejudice and applied programs of prejudice reduction. This book tries the critique and the explanation.

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl examines a broad body of literature, submitting that traditional social science work was faulty as it classified prejudice as a singular entity, rather than a complex of significantly different prejudices. Further, she argues that this faulty literature has had deleterious consequences for social science, social policy, and education. The defining and differentiation of prejudices, in contrast with the social science framework within which they have been contained, is the anatomical dissection called for in her book's title

Young-Bruehl is a professor at Haverford College and a psychotherapist. In a prologue, she notes the genesis of the book: teaching some four hundred students in a series of courses at Wesleyan University and at Haverford, exploring the large social scientific and humanistic literature on prejudice This book is partly a critique of that literature and partly the development of a different theoretical construct to explain prejudice(s). More particularly, her book treats antisemitism, racism, sexism, and homophobia and her effort to distinguish among them, allowing her theoretical claim that "different prejudices are characteristic of different psychic or character types" and that "different social conditions promote different character types and their corresponding prejudices." She presents her theory as a "diagnostic answer" for her students, based on a tri-partite framework from psychoanalysis, a Max Weberian sociological theory of ideal types, and an adaptation of Hannah Arendt's methodology. This mix of psychology, sociology, and political philosophy represents a large canvas of social science for her analysis and synthesis.

Central to Young. Bruehl's critique of existing social scientific literature on prejudice is its overgeneralization, the unitary quality of the most widely accepted definition of prejudice, as a single phenomenon that appears in many shadings. She argues that little in the literature examines the way theodes of prejudice have evolved and that the early work describing prejudice as a single concept has continued to dominate the discourses about prejudice while hiding its complexity. This inclusivity conception, as traced by Young-Bruehl through such classic authors as Max Horkheimer, Gordon Allport, and Gunnar Myrdal, has come to be accepted in academe and in public as though it were true One example she reports is Allport's thesis that people who are prejudiced against one out-group will tend to be prejudiced against any out-group; it is a "generalized" attitude That synthetic view "helped him doom all subsequent social scientific studies in prejudice to superficialities about the very different prejudices--like antisemitism, racism, and sexism." This social science account provides that antisemitism is not significantly different from white racism or sexism in any time period and that all outgroups are scapegoats that allow people to project their fears and foreboding.

For education and social policy, this has meant a generalized set of ideas that support a singular approach to eliminating or mitigating all prejudice Two examples represent this thinking: 1) assimilation programs that intend to bring about a melting-pot and 2) intracultural education designed to make out-groups more acceptable to the in-group by diminishing differences These approaches to the reduction of prejudice differ significantly from the pluralist ideas of mukicultural education where separate groups seek to retain their own identities and desire recognition for their differences, not for their blending. Young-Bruehl notes that the idea of multicultural education incorporates a distrust of the standard social science view of a singular form of prejudice, and she contends that many of the critics of multicultural education do not understand the significance of this distinction and the distrust it connotes.

Among the interesting points made in this book are that three competing forms of language used in the discourse on prejudice have emerged and that, often, those that use one language do not understand the others. Young-Bruehl identifies one lan. guage as deriving from the postwar discussions of Nazism and antisemitism, where the battle between democracy and totalitarianism framed the discourse and where minority rights were a focus. A second language arose out of the experiences of colonialism and American racism. This language was based on nationalism or liberationism, a rebellion of people against oppressors and the oppressors' view that they were inferior. The third language noted by Young-Bruehl developed from the women's liberation movement, where the battle was between private and public spheres of life Men not only controlled public life, they extended their power into domestic life exerting domination as over servants.

These three languages indicate different forms and approaches, rather than a singular prejudice From the social-psychological literature, Young-Bruehl draws three broad character types--obsessional, hysterical, and narcissistic--to indicate distinctions among the personality characteristics that underlie the primary forms of prejudice Antisemitism, she argues, represents an obsessional type of prejudice. This is the form for "rigid, superego-dominated"people. Obsessional prejudice in America followed this pattern in McCarthyperiod anticommunism and in the current bashing of Japan for its commercial tactics. Racism, says YoungBruehl, is an example of hysterical prejudice, rooted in ideas of sexual repression and fantasy. And sexism, she says, involves a narcissistic characteristic, wherein the prejudice is against those who are not the same anatomically. Its purpose is control over female sexuality and reproduction.

In critical theory fashion, YoungBruehl deconstructs the existing 50 years of social scientific work on prejudice, then constructs her own theoretical structure that prejudice is multiple in causation, form, and consequence This is a book of fine critiques of many of the standing pillars of a social scientific age With clarity and understanding, she deftly carves the works of such notables as Otto Klineberg, Emory Bogardus, C. Vann Woodward, Lester Thurow, Bruno Bettelheim, Wilhelm Reich, and Kenneth Clark, among others. Her book, if nothing else, is a worthy educational endeavor for sampling a rich body of work, however faulty she finds it. Her critique of that literature is well done and provocative, much in the form of postwar critiques of functionalism and its domination over social science and of postmodern critiques of positivism. The critiques are, from my view, the best part of the book.

Her theory of multiple causation, form, and results of prejudice seems reasoned and reasonable, but her elaboration of the character and ideal types that she thinks account for the distinctions among prejudices falls into similar social scientific categories that, themselves, are subject to critical examination, another deconstruction. This makes the theory less substantial and less compelling. How do we know that the psychological typologies of obsessionism, hystericalism, and narcissism are more than contrived ideas similar to superstition? What justifies each of these social scientific categories as unitary concepts, rather than as additional examples of false conscious constructs that hide more important phenomena about personality and prejudice? Presenting categories for individual and societal behavior that use fuzzy-edged clinical psychology titles, after faulting much of the socio-psychology literature, does not make the reader leap to embrace the new theory. Is not the same critique used by Young-Bruehl usable on YoungBruehl's work? Are there not more than three essential prejudices, and how far can they be reduced?

This book raises more than theoretical concerns. Democracy, as Aristotle, John Locke, John Dewey, and the popular American creed proclaim, is the form of society that most requires a presumption of rationality, equality, and justice among peers. To prejudge, making decisions about others without the benefit of knowledge, and to act on those prejudgments without benefit of better knowledge, would be out of place in a society that claims to be a democracy. Further, democracy, more than any other form, demands an educated populace, and a well educated populace should offer no haven for prejudice. Young-Bruehl's critique also raises important questions about democracy and education, and it lodges a serious criticism of the bases for much of the social policy and educational efforts designed to deal with the prejudices that afflict American society. If the formulation of prejudice as a single entity is defective, the programs depending on that idea are also defective

Most of the evidence we have is that schools, for example, have not been very good at dealing with prejudice by treating it as a single concept. Nor have policy changes such as campus speech codes that prohibit sexist, religious, or ethnic slurs while they limit free speech had a demonstrable effect on prejudice(s). Many prejudice reduction programs suffer from a moralistic simplicity similar to that of the failed drug abuse admonition, "Just say No." The parallel idea in prejudice- reduction policy and education is often "Just be nice" or "Just be a good citizen."

The explanation in this book suggests a reason for the apparent failure of such programs. Young-Bruehl presents an epilogue that addresses some of the practical implications of her work, but it is the shortest chapter and suffers from overgeneralization. One hopes that she will produce another volume elaborating a set of recommendations to change social policy and education to meet the defects she clearly shows in existing theory, a volume that presents her own theory more tinily in its implications for practice What we do in schools, and in public policy, to address prejudices is extremely important; this work contributes significantly to the theory, but does less well in grounding our changes in practice

Dr. Jack L. Nelson, a professor of education at Rutgers University, has been a visiting scholar at Stanford, California at Berkeley, Cambridge (England) and other universities. He has written 15 books and numerous articles and reviews, many of which have examined civil rights and civil liberties issues.

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