But he readily concedes that this may be less a definition than a handy summary of the results of prior discussion: “The precise terms of the definition may be less important than the thinking that went into it. In this sense the broader definition consists of this entire volume and not just the one sentence in which its message is encapsulated.”22
We might reasonably be challenged to show whether we can do any better. This challenge I shall now—cautiously and with a sense of the attendant difficulties sharpened, I hope, by the discussion up to this point—attempt to meet. Before getting on with the business of this chapter, though, there is one last question to be raised concerning the nature of definition itself.
ARE DEFINITIONS INVENTED OR DISCOVERED?
“Some readers,” Marcus notes, “may be inclined to dismiss definitional questions as a matter of arbitrary linguistic conventions that may be selected, revised, or replaced at will and with little consequence.”23 And indeed they may. It is not uncommon, particularly among the more hardheaded media commentators, to think that there can be no objective standard of correctness for definitions and that therefore all definition, per se, is tendentious.
But is that necessarily so? Who or what determines the meaning of terms? Is it merely human stipulation? Or is it, to put it grandly, the nature of things? Philosophers have frequently tended to opt for one or the other of these stories to the exclusion of the other. There is a case to be made, however, for regarding the fabrication of meaning as a joint enterprise in which both play a part. Consider, for example, the biological term of art species. A species is a group of individual organisms capable of mating to produce fertile offspring. So much is stipulation: the term species means that because that is what biologists have collectively decreed that it should mean. Knowing the meaning of species in that sense is, in effect, a matter of knowing what language game (Sprachspiel: Wittgenstein’s term) we human beings have chosen to play with the word: in this case, the game of sorting organisms into groups satisfying that (stipulative) requirement. However, knowing the meaning of a term can also mean knowing how to single out instances of the kinds of thing to which the term applies. And at this point, nature enters the picture. We can’t, in other words, just stipulate that this or that arbitrary collection of individual organisms shall be held to constitute a species. It only constitutes a species if all its members are capable of interacting sexually to produce fertile offspring. And whether a particular group of organisms meets that specification is clearly a factual question: something to be determined not by arbitrary stipulation but by empirical inquiry.
TWO TYPES OF PREJUDICE
Is something of the sort also true of that other abstract term antisemitism? I think that it is. But to see what precisely, we need to go back a step and consider a more fundamental term: prejudice. Let us avail ourselves, as we did earlier, of Gordon Allport’s shrewd definition:
D0. Prejudice is thinking ill of others without sufficient warrant.
So far, everything is indeed “just a matter of arbitrary stipulation.” D0 just records how we English speakers have decided to use (or better, fallen into the habit of using) the term prejudice. But now, by analogy with the question “Which collections of organisms as a matter of fact satisfy the definition of a species?” we can ask, “Which human phenomena turn out as a matter of fact to satisfy D0?” At this point, just as in the other case, we pass abruptly from stipulation to empirical inquiry. And very little reflection on the passing scene is enough to dislodge the thought that there are two general kinds of phenomena (no doubt among others) that do so. I shall label them, respectively, social prejudice and political prejudice.24
By “social prejudice” I have in mind roughly the sort of thing that Langmuir labels “xenophobia” or “ethnic prejudice”: that is to say, prejudice on the part of members of a dominant social group in society against people they consider to be foreigners, aliens, interlopers, upstarts, lower-class vulgarians, or in some other way inferior. Emotionally speaking, it is driven by contempt, and its goal is social exclusion. Its object, that is, is to prevent members of the despised out-group as far as possible from participating in the life of decent society: the society, that is to say, of which members of the dominant in-group consider themselves to be the representatives and guardians.
Social prejudice is characteristically directed not against collective entities but against individuals. It operates, as logicians like to say, distributively. The contempt of the Englishman who despises West Indians, for instance, tends to be focused on West Indians taken, as it were, one by one as individuals; it is not, or not primarily, focused on the West Indian community. Indeed, he may not even grasp that there is such a thing. He does not, that is, find the individual West Indian contemptible because the latter is a member of a despicable community but because of what he is as an individual. On the contrary, if he is in any way allergic to the West Indian community, it will be because it appears to him merely as a rabble of independently despicable individuals.
A further feature of social prejudice is that fear, except very occasionally, in the context of special concerns over matters such as competition over employment, property values, or some immediate threat of physical violence, plays very little part in it. Contempt, after all, tends to drive out fear. We kick into the gutter with confidence those we despise on social grounds because our very contempt for them persuades us that these miserable persons, inferior as they are, are far from possessing either the means or the temerity to fight back.
Social prejudice is apt to justify itself by appeal to what social scientists call stereotypes: disagreeable or contemptible features supposedly shared by all members of the despised group or class. According to such stereotypes, Scots are sanctimonious and incorrigibly mean, Englishmen arrogant and inscrutable, women (as Virginia Woolf makes the socially uneasy and resentfully misogynist young Cambridge don Charles Tansley say in To the Lighthouse) “can’t write, can’t paint.” According to others, money has a way of sticking to Jewish fingers and Jews themselves a habit of becoming dominant, to a degree out of keeping with their numbers in society, in such professions as law, medicine, and academia, while West Indians are equally widely perceived as leading ganja-soaked, noisy, and disorganized lives, and so on.
It is important to notice that contrary to common opinion but in line with Langmuir’s account of xenophobia, what is wrong with such stereotypes is not that they are false, or at least false in the sense of having not the slightest grain of truth in them. There has to be more than a grain of truth in all of them for the simple reason that one cannot intelligibly despise an individual for qualities that he or she simply does not possess. Contempt, to give itself something on which to brood resentfully, has to fasten on something with at least some tenuous connection with reality. Hence, for social prejudice against these groups to get off the ground, there have to be at least some ludicrously bad women writers and painters; at least some self-righteous, penny-pinching Scots; at least some noticeable Jewish presence in the professions over and above what might be accounted for by strict statistical parity in terms of population numbers; at least some Jews with a remarkable capacity for money making; at least some West Indians with a marked love of marijuana and wild parties; and so on.
What is wrong with the stereotypes on which social prejudice feeds is not that they fail of—at least partial—truth but rather that they lack the generality that they claim for themselves. On the one hand, there are plenty of West Indians, Jews, women, Scots, and Englishmen who fail utterly to conform to the usual stereotypes. On the other hand, there are always, equally, plenty of people around who conform exactly to one or other of them but who happen, unfortunately, not to be Jews, West Indians, Scots, Englishmen, or women as the case may be. Sober, productively employed West Indians are in fact as common as marijuana-puffing
