I had an interesting short conversation with a couple of musician friends recently. A bright young chap doing psychology A-level was talking very sensibly about non-replicability in psychology studies. He mentioned Freudian psychoanalysis as untestable because if you disagree with its findings in your own case, it must be because you have repressed them, not because they are wrong. Astute of him, or his teacher.
I threw in something about that being like the non-falsifiability of Marxism or even Darwinism. A third person, with some instruction in psychology from a progressive background, mentioned the problem of cognitive dissonance. Her example was the person who denies being a racist, but dislikes black people, holding these things in uneasy tension because, in fact, they are simply racist but don’t want to admit it. The only way to resolve the conflict is by admitting to being a racist (as opposed to realising they don’t actually dislike all black people, which is presumably impossible).
Hearing the assured conclusion of this last example, it occurred to me that it explains very little, but manages to resolve the researcher’s cognitive dissonance about the subject by dissolving all nuance into one simple category of “racism,” which is not itself defined or explained. In fact, it can equally well be held to work in reverse, if a person who believes the proposition that “all opposition to illegal immigration is racist” resolves the cognitive dissonance of rape gangs, Islamist attacks or infrastructure-overload by simply dismissing their existence. It appears to be a reality of modern life that, because almost every uncomfortable fact is explained by racism, those with that kind of psychological training end up denying vast chunks of reality, so as not to experience cognitive dissonance.
The epitome of that kind of “neo-Freudian” thinking is the whole concept of “unconscious bias,” especially when it is claimed that simply by virtue of your immutable characteristics, such as being white, male or heterosexual, you are a perpetrator of such bias. White people just are racist, so any counter evidence, such as being married to a black person, or going to jail for opposing apartheid, counts for as little as subjective belief that one is not a racist does. In reality, though, it is a false theory that creates cognitive dissonance in this case. People who remain sure that they don’t secretly hate people based on skin colour, and call the theory out as nonsense on stilts, resolve the dissonance (at least until they are cancelled by the whole of society for some ambiguous tweet), whilst the liberal who doesn’t hate people based on their skin colour resolves the dilemma by accepting he is racist anyway (like my original example) and signalling his conversion to “allyhood” by accusing everyone else of racism. Little benefit accrues to anyone from this.
Let’s return to that first example, for which I picture a number of possible candidates, mostly women, for some reason that is no doubt a result of my unconscious misogyny, repressed transgenderism, oedipal complex, etc. The simplest cause for disliking “the other,” without any prior animosity, is simply unfamiliarity. We are sensibly programmed to be suspicious of novelty before we are welcoming, because novelty is often predatory. A child cries when mother brings home a new hairstyle. African village children poke a white visitor suspiciously, confused about what tribe it comes from. And despite Elizabeth I, Jane Austen and Cheddar Man being purportedly black, in reality Britain was, not long ago, pretty racially homogeneous. I saw my first black man in Exeter only when I was nine, and ran to ask my Granny what I should do. Her reply of “So what?” resolved that particular dissonance, but the uneasiness occurred despite my being perfectly familiar with admirable black people from pictures of Dad’s favourite jazz musicians, Sunday school pictures of Jesus surrounded by kids of all nations, etc. There are still older people, especially in the countryside, with as little experience of ethnic minorities as they have of Chinese food.
A second possibility is the unconscious effect of bad experience with some “type.” A woman who has been raped has every excuse for hating men as a class, though this is technically misandry and therefore reprehensible. It is, indeed, a serious problem, but the label “misandry” helps in no way whatsoever to solve it. In the 1950s my mother was badly fazed by a travelling bearded Asian salesman in an orange turban (at a time when “foreigners” were super-rare) who stuck his foot in the front door when only we two small children were with her. I don’t think it made her sikhophobic (she was more aggrieved at my brother and me for not standing up for her), but if it had, would “precautionary principle” not be a more useful explanation than the label “racism”? Do I expect a child sexually assaulted by an asylum seeker to hang out a sign saying “All Refugees Welcome,” or rather to get anxiety symptoms when she passes someone who looks as if they came from the asylum centre?
Which brings us to the phenomenon of “rational generalisation from trends.” My grandfather disliked, to put it mildly, all Germans, because between 1915 and 1918 he met thousands of them, all of whom wanted to kill him. Some almost succeeded with bullets, poison gas and heavy artillery. In the big picture, in which wars cease and peace lasts longer, that lifelong dislike seems irrational. But are you going to condemn him for the xenophobic nature of his PTSD nightmares? Copy that for British people suspicious of bearded Arab men in hoodies, when so many atrocities have been perpetrated in this country and around the world by Jihadis matching that description. According to progressives, “Islamophobia” is “a form of racism inspired by racism” or some such circular nonsense, but I call that out as their resolving of cognitive dissonance by a denial of reality. Maybe even the Muslims who came up with that crappy definition are also trying to resolve the incompatibility of their “religion of peace” with “slay them wherever you find them.” Like “racism” the “islamophobia” label functions as a neat, though fundamentally useless, way of abolishing the complex messiness of reality.
But in many cases, at least, cognitive dissonance is only adequately understood, and truthfully resolved, by following the adage that, “When you find a contradiction, draw a distinction.” I held the creation account of Genesis in “creative tension” with the scientific theories of origins until I was able to understand the distinctives of the two approaches better, enabling me to bring them together, and identify and reject the elements keeping them apart. If society were to provide a method of distinguishing the genuine asylum seeker from the chancer, it would reduce antagonism to immigrants at a stroke, if only because there would be far fewer of them. If TV adverts actually did mirror the ethnic makeup of Britain, viewers would not be motivated by the suspicion that a takeover is in the offing, and would be more likely to judge individuals by their character. If the ideologies that actually do demonise particular ethnicities on principle were more carefully identified, the world would not seem so full of racism and fascism to the liberals, and they might be surprised by where it does exist.
If the elites didn’t insist that everything ordinary people do is because of hate, there would be much greater clarity of thinking about whom we justifiably hate because they are hateworthy, and who we might benefit from getting to know better.
