In Praise of Prejudice. Theodore Dalrymple

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       6

       Prejudice Necessary to Family Life

      THERE USED TO BE a prejudice, almost throughout society, that families should sit down together to eat around a table. It was a ritual that was entirely normal, or perhaps I should say second-nature, to them. (Habit is behavioral prejudice.) I doubt whether more than one in a hundred such families could have provided anything like a coherent argument for conducting their meals as they did, or oppose counter-arguments to anyone who might argue the contrary. It is doubtful whether they ever thought about it; they did what they did because it was what people like themselves did.

      This unthinking ritual, however, has eroded rapidly under the assault of rationalist criticism, to the point where children in more than a third of British households never eat meals at a table with other members of their family. Indeed, the possibility of doing so does not arise, since there is no longer a dining table in the household. In my experience as a doctor visiting households in less favored urban areas, I found very little evidence, not only of meals having been taken in common within them, but of cooking ever having taken place within them. The re-heating of prepared foods was the nearest many residents came to cooking. Many of the prisoners in the prison in which I worked as a doctor had never, in their entire lives, sat down to eat at a table with another human being: they did not know what it was to do so. From childhood, they had grazed when and where they felt like it, as herbivores on a savannah—though their grazing was solitary rather than in herds. The Englishman’s street is now his dining room, and helps to explain why the streets are so littered, the detritus of fast food being discarded where it is solipsistically consumed.

      The prejudice in favor of family meals as the means by which people should, for preference, take their sustenance, broke down because of insistent criticism. First was criticism of the family itself. For well over a century, the unhappiness of families has been an important—perhaps the most important—subject of literature. As Tolstoy justly remarked, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way; here, then, is a theme with an infinite number of variations. (Happy families, being all happy in the same way, offer no such inexhaustible theme.) Ibsen, and even more Strindberg, gave to the family an entirely new connotation, that of domestic guerrilla warfare that ceases only with divorce or death. Who can forget the marital sniping of Strindberg’s The Dance of Death, so convincingly portrayed that one is almost immediately convinced that all close relations between men and women must end in this fashion, or at least be disguised versions of it? And of course it is a matter of common observation that there are few fates in life, short of famine and civil war, more wretched than that of an unhappy marriage. Before the days of easy divorce, husband and wife were often chained together as if by iron. Unless they were able to console themselves elsewhere, sexually or otherwise, their lives were a living hell.

      Such criticism did not fail in its effect. A prejudice in favor of family life was gradually transmuted into a prejudice against it. The cruelty and wickedness of another prejudice, which had gone hand-in-hand with that in favor of the family, was discovered: the prejudice against illegitimate children. Illegitimate children were often unjustly stigmatized—as if they could have chosen their mode of entry into the world—and the mothers treated as outcasts. A medical colleague of mine was once charged with the task of emptying an old Victorian lunatic asylum of its inmates (partly from motives of humanity, and partly from those of economy, so that property developers could transform the outwardly splendid buildings into luxury flats for the sane and upwardly mobile). My colleague discovered, in one of the back wards where the doctors seldom ventured, an inmate of nearly seventy years’ residence, whose only madness had been to give birth to an illegitimate child all those years ago. Here was a life blasted by a censorious, unthinking, and cruel prejudice. A murderer, provided he was not one of the small minority to be executed, would not have been treated so harshly, and for so many years.

      The horror of unhappy marriage, and the cruelty of the prejudice against illegitimate children and those who gave birth to them, became truths universally, and even joyfully, acknowledged. That they were partial truths was lost sight of by reformers; the part was taken for the whole, and a universal remedy sought so that no such evil should ever occur again. The reformers lost sight of the imperfectability of human existence; since all miseries had specific causes, misery as such must be capable of abolition, without the introduction of new evils to replace the old.

      The solution, then, was to destroy the prejudice—philosophical, social, and economic—in favor of the family structure that wrought so much harm. All would be well if people were allowed to choose their own forms of close association, unbiased by any social or economic pressure to conform to any particular pattern. Affection would then be unconstrained, rather than forced, and therefore false. All responsibilities would be freely entered into, and would thus partake of real or true morality rather than mere social convention. (Not long ago, I watched an old British comedy film from the 1950s, in which a young man of the upper-middle class had made a working-class girl pregnant. The girl’s indignant father demanded that the young man should marry his daughter, a demand whose justice he understood and at once agreed to. The audience howled with laughter at the primitive idea that the future birth of a child created an inescapable obligation on the part of the father. In less than half a century, the prejudice of centuries had been overturned, made to appear ridiculous, and replaced by another, the unedifying practical consequences of which I saw daily in my work as a doctor.)