W
William Flax
Guest
To understand the hate that those who seek to internationalize the United States, through a flood of third world immigration, display whenever they are challenged, and in particular their tendency to project their own intolerance on others, while pretending to be the apostles of toleration, it might be well to consider the influence of the notorious Gordon Allport, a Harvard Professor, who in the last century was used to try to persuade College students that their normal human preferences were really nasty prejudices to be rejected. We append our note from the Conservative Debate Handbook, Chapter 16, on Gordon Allport:
<h2><center><font color="darkgreen">Gordon W. Allport--Undermining Heritage In The Name Of Toleration</font></center></h2>
We have discussed the tactics of the ADL (Anti-Defamation League), both in Chapter 13 and in a separate essay on <i>Civil War, Reconstruction & Creating Hate In America Today</i>. We have suggested that that Fabian Socialist organization might be deliberately trying to stir up antagonism against American Jews--by making exaggerated, broad-brush accusations, and employing the most outrageous vilification by association--in the guise of fighting anti-semitism, in order to promote a Socialist agenda. But the ADL is an organization. Its antics, for good or ill, represent a collusion of various players. It can to some extent hide behind the committee approach to policy. Harvard Professor of Psychology Gordon W. Allport personified the same tactic, but with more finesse; and sought to give it intellectual respectability.
In this it must be observed that not all of Allport's approach is flawed. He is effective because he uses some credible analytic techniques, but then interjects other assumptions that only seem to flow from them. Yet there is evidence, a plenty, that the Professor is NO unprejudiced student of "prejudice" or, as is more often the case in what he is really talking about, of human preferences.
In his book, <i>The Nature Of Prejudice</i>, Addison-Wesley, 1954, 1966, Professor Allport offers some clear insights as to his attitude towards social issues: <i>... we stated briefly ... the Marxist view that prejudice is fostered by capitalists in order to keep control over the proletariat which they exploit. This theory improves in credibility if we enlarge it to mean that exploitation occurs in many ways in addition to the economic and that any form of exploitation brings prejudice in its train.</i>
He tells us: <i>The fact is that not all communist values are opposed by all Americans. On the contrary, "better economic and social conditions" are desired by most. Sensing the fact that some Russian reforms were both desirable and successful, many American intellectuals, especially during the 1920's, were enthusiastically pro-Soviet. Their ardor cooled as it became evident that civil liberties were nonexistent within what was presumably a democratic people's movement.</i> (p. 256.) [Just a harmless error, the Professor suggests, being aligned to people who started out by murdering the old leadership, and progressed by starving to death perhaps 10,000,000 farmers, whose only crime was a desire to farm their own land. But Communism from its inception was about seizing other people's property. No one who thought that that would result in <u>better economic and social conditions</u> understood or believed in the American system.]
The Professor, of course, decries "guilt by association" at some length, where it derives from association with Communism. Yet we shall see that he is not so scrupulous where <i>guilt</i> is associated on other bases. But he sums up the immediate point:
<i>Finally, reds are scapegoats because of the specific exploitative advantage that can be obtained from that arrangement. A demagogue deliberately excites rage and fear against communists in order that people may rally round the demagogue to secure safety and protection.</i> (p. 257.)
Allport acknowledges that some of those who are intolerant of what he deems "intolerance" are themselves zealots, and distinguishes between vigor of <i>conviction</i> and <i>prejudice</i> (p. 430)--although he is never so sensitive about the possibility that those whom he treats as "bigots," may also have <i>conviction</i> rather than <i>prejudice.</i> He goes on to state, <i>Whether the tolerant person is militant or pacifistic, he is very likely to be liberal in his political views. Prejudiced individuals are more often conservatives.... A "liberal" is a person who is critical of the status quo, who wants progressive social change. He de-emphasizes the importance of rugged individualism and business success; he would diminish the power of business by increasing the role of labor and of government in economic life.</i> (p. 431.) [In other words, a Socialist! Allport's description of such person as "liberal," clearly demonstrates the Fabian approach.]
The Professor goes on to distinguish the radical as the person more motivated by hatred of a system than a "desire to improve the condition of minorities." On the other hand, <i>The liberal-equalitarian may feel that improvements are needed in order to reinforce respect for the person, whether the person is suffering from poverty, ill health, or the handicap of minority group membership. ....The fact that liberalism and radicalism both correlate positively with ethnic tolerance places a strong weapon in the hands of bigots (who are likely to be political conservatives).</i> (p. 432.)] [Try to persuade any Virginia or Carolinian Caucasian that the virtually incessant attack on his ethnic heritage, in recent years, comes from "political conservatives." Try to find an attack on any ethnic heritage, which originates with political conservatives, at all comparable in pure venom, with the abuse that has been heaped on those who honor the cultural, religious and ethnic traditions of the Old South in America!]
Allport shows no understanding that the American ethic, which his version of "Liberalism" rejects, actually does more towards accomplishing those "liberal-equalitarian" objectives than any form of Socialism yet devised. But he gives more insight into his own bias:
<i>The person with character-conditioned prejudice likes order, but especially <u>social</u> order. In his clear-cut institutional memberships, he finds the safety and the definiteness he needs. Lodges, schools, churches, the nation, may serve as a defense against the disquiet in his personal life. To lean on them saves him from leaning on himself.</i> [This patronizing view of normal people, does not square with that opinion, above, as to the unprejudiced "liberal" being the foe of rugged individualism.]<br>
<i>Research shows that, by and large, prejudiced people are more devoted to institutions than are the unprejudiced. Anti-Semitic college girls are more wrapped up in their sororities; they are more institutionally religious; they are more intensely "patriotic."</i> (p. 404.) [And of course, whether those sorority girls are actually "prejudiced" and "Anti-Semitic," might just depend upon the subjectivity of the investigator studying their responses to perhaps very loaded questions. We are not privileged to know whether Allport's investigator talked to one or two, or many in each sorority; whether this "anti-semitism" was expressed in some egregious form, such as a wish for death camps in America, or for the confiscation of Jewish property, or the exclusion of Jews from the professions; or simply in an individual coed's stated preference for her own Faith, or her rejection of a particular suitor. We are not told whether any of the girls had even expressed a dislike for Jews, or merely a preference for gentiles. In short, all we have is a vague aspersion, which serves no purpose but to alienate those Jews who have feelings of insecurity from mainstream values.]
<i>Schools have always inculcated patriotism, but the terms of allegiance are often narrowly conceived. The fact that loyalty to the nation requires loyalty to all subgroups within the nation is seldom pointed out.</i> [Nor does such suggestion make any sense, beyond a possible reciprocity of respect. Did Allport feel loyalty to some of the Conservative-American groups, whom he aspersed; or is he admitting that he felt no loyalty to America?]....<i>The teaching of exclusive loyalty, whether to nation, school, fraternity, or family--is a method of instilling prejudice.</i> (p. 513.)
There is an incredible arrogance in calling other people's normal human preferences "prejudice" and "bigotry." When Allport lumps devotion to family and nation ("exclusive loyalty") with "prejudice," he gives the game away. What he is attacking is not "prejudice," but a rational recognition of a sense of kinship and common interest and purpose--the sort of preference, which rational people have recognized as normal <i>allegiance</i> since the dawn of history.
Allport and those, who continue to this day to foist his dogma upon inexperienced undergraduates, are the <i>bigots</i>. Their cause springs from an almost pathological mindset, which seeks to redefine reality, and force normal people to accept a contrived dispensation that denies the natural ties, which provide personal identification and sustain a sense of ongoing purpose. The real target of Professor Allport was the freedom of the individual human to make distinctions and form alliances, important to that individual. In a very compelling sense, that target was freedom itself.
As the Veritas Foundation Staff stated in its excellent book, <i>The Great Deceit--Social Pseudo-Sciences</i>, Veritas Foundation, 1964, p. 114:
<i>Using the symbol of "social science" to combat "patriotism" and "loyalty" is a crude attempt to implement the old socialist-communist line of undermining patriotism and family loyalties.</i>
Absent a very tightly defined and controlled study, against clearly measurable evaluations of both the persons being judged and those who are accused of misjudging them, terms such as <i>prejudice, bigotry</i> and <i>exploitation,</i> always involve very subjective judgments. Since such controlled studies are virtually never attempted, opinions such as those of Professor Allport habitually <i>beg the questions</i> being addressed, and are dependent upon tactics that play upon the fears and doubts of the susceptible.
What Allport repeatedly cites in place of such controlled study are the instances of individuals and groups, where someone actually does cross a line and indulge in a rant against some ethnic group or religion, as extreme as one of Ashley Montagu's against scientists studying racial difference. He then implies that there is an affinity between such individual feelings of animosity and those who merely agree with the one obsessed on other issues. This is "guilt by association" with a vengeance. While it was not acceptable to this apostle of "tolerance" that people lump those who thought Communism idealistic, with the actual Communists; it is apparently quite all right to lump people, who merely agree with someone who has Conservative views on other issues, with an off-the-wall opinion that that person may also hold.
[Yet Communism starts--it does not just include--a complete denial of the most basic of all Civil Liberties, the right to pass on the fruits of one's own labor to one's family. No one embraced Communism, or travelled along a sympathetic road, who did not at some time reject that most basic of all civilized rights. That is quite a different thing from being stuck with the untoward opinion of someone, you may happen to agree with on other issues.]
Allport's is the ADL technique, adverted to earlier, and it is the most successful method ever devised to increase the amount of real prejudice in our Society. People being smeared do not respond with goodwill; nor do people being frightened by "evidence" that others hate them.
Consider a multiple choice question. Which result could NOT be expected from Professor Allport's approach to the psychological dynamics of inter-group relations:
A. Confident American Conservatives will experience increased negative perceptions of minorities.
B. Members of minorities will experience increased suspicion and hostility towards Conservatives.
C. People lacking self-confidence will experience increased guilt and doubt, with a decrease in their commitment to family values.
D. There will be an increase in good will and mutual respect among all Americans.
While Academia is full of those who allow fear or guilt to override better judgment--<i>dysrons</i>, born with normal intelligence but rendered dysfunctional by their compulsions--Gordon Allport is not of their number. Professor Allport understood exactly what he was doing. In the same book, he tells us at page 43:
<i>Such an image implies that a world-loyalty is the most difficult to achieve....There seems ...special difficulty in fashioning an in-group out of an entity as embracing as mankind. Even the ardent believer in One World has trouble....After all, his nation's way of life is <u>his</u> way of life--and he cannot lightly abrogate the ground of his whole existence. Such almost reflex preference for the familiar grips us all. ...artificial props are needed. They require <u>symbols</u>... in order to make the human in-group seem real. Nations have flags, parks, schools ... holidays, armies, historical documents. Only gradually and with small publicity are a few of these symbols of unity evolving on an international scale. They are greatly needed...to provide mental anchorage points around which the idea of world-loyalty may develop.</i> (p.44.)
The Professor had earlier left a considerable track record to help identify his ideological roots. He showed up as early as January, 1933, in signing a Petition of the Fellowship of Reconciliation calling for the recognition of Communist Russia. He appeared on the letterhead of an interesting sounding group, the <i>Medical Bureau and North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy</i>, as a member of a psychologists committee, in July, 1938, in support of the Communist side in the Spanish Civil War. He was reported on January 2, 1939, in the Communist newspaper, the <i>Daily Worker</i>, as a supporter of a conference of the <i>North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy</i>. And when it was clear that the Communists had been defeated in the Spanish Civil War, he appeared as a sponsor of the <i>Medical Aid Division of the Spanish Refugee Relief Campaign</i>, on November 16, 1939, in aid of the defeated Leftists.
Professor Allport's name showed up in numerous other reported involvements with pro-Communist and other extreme Leftwing causes, which had nothing to do with any sincere interest in improving inter-group relationships within the United States, long before his widespread acceptance in academia as an expert on "prejudice."
<br><center> </center>
Now, do you begin to see a pattern in the line the internationalists take on the web today? While Allport was only one of many Leftist academics promoting this distorted line of thinking, his influence was considerable; and years after his death, his work was still being assigned to College students all over the United States.
William Flax
<h2><center><font color="darkgreen">Gordon W. Allport--Undermining Heritage In The Name Of Toleration</font></center></h2>
We have discussed the tactics of the ADL (Anti-Defamation League), both in Chapter 13 and in a separate essay on <i>Civil War, Reconstruction & Creating Hate In America Today</i>. We have suggested that that Fabian Socialist organization might be deliberately trying to stir up antagonism against American Jews--by making exaggerated, broad-brush accusations, and employing the most outrageous vilification by association--in the guise of fighting anti-semitism, in order to promote a Socialist agenda. But the ADL is an organization. Its antics, for good or ill, represent a collusion of various players. It can to some extent hide behind the committee approach to policy. Harvard Professor of Psychology Gordon W. Allport personified the same tactic, but with more finesse; and sought to give it intellectual respectability.
In this it must be observed that not all of Allport's approach is flawed. He is effective because he uses some credible analytic techniques, but then interjects other assumptions that only seem to flow from them. Yet there is evidence, a plenty, that the Professor is NO unprejudiced student of "prejudice" or, as is more often the case in what he is really talking about, of human preferences.
In his book, <i>The Nature Of Prejudice</i>, Addison-Wesley, 1954, 1966, Professor Allport offers some clear insights as to his attitude towards social issues: <i>... we stated briefly ... the Marxist view that prejudice is fostered by capitalists in order to keep control over the proletariat which they exploit. This theory improves in credibility if we enlarge it to mean that exploitation occurs in many ways in addition to the economic and that any form of exploitation brings prejudice in its train.</i>
He tells us: <i>The fact is that not all communist values are opposed by all Americans. On the contrary, "better economic and social conditions" are desired by most. Sensing the fact that some Russian reforms were both desirable and successful, many American intellectuals, especially during the 1920's, were enthusiastically pro-Soviet. Their ardor cooled as it became evident that civil liberties were nonexistent within what was presumably a democratic people's movement.</i> (p. 256.) [Just a harmless error, the Professor suggests, being aligned to people who started out by murdering the old leadership, and progressed by starving to death perhaps 10,000,000 farmers, whose only crime was a desire to farm their own land. But Communism from its inception was about seizing other people's property. No one who thought that that would result in <u>better economic and social conditions</u> understood or believed in the American system.]
The Professor, of course, decries "guilt by association" at some length, where it derives from association with Communism. Yet we shall see that he is not so scrupulous where <i>guilt</i> is associated on other bases. But he sums up the immediate point:
<i>Finally, reds are scapegoats because of the specific exploitative advantage that can be obtained from that arrangement. A demagogue deliberately excites rage and fear against communists in order that people may rally round the demagogue to secure safety and protection.</i> (p. 257.)
Allport acknowledges that some of those who are intolerant of what he deems "intolerance" are themselves zealots, and distinguishes between vigor of <i>conviction</i> and <i>prejudice</i> (p. 430)--although he is never so sensitive about the possibility that those whom he treats as "bigots," may also have <i>conviction</i> rather than <i>prejudice.</i> He goes on to state, <i>Whether the tolerant person is militant or pacifistic, he is very likely to be liberal in his political views. Prejudiced individuals are more often conservatives.... A "liberal" is a person who is critical of the status quo, who wants progressive social change. He de-emphasizes the importance of rugged individualism and business success; he would diminish the power of business by increasing the role of labor and of government in economic life.</i> (p. 431.) [In other words, a Socialist! Allport's description of such person as "liberal," clearly demonstrates the Fabian approach.]
The Professor goes on to distinguish the radical as the person more motivated by hatred of a system than a "desire to improve the condition of minorities." On the other hand, <i>The liberal-equalitarian may feel that improvements are needed in order to reinforce respect for the person, whether the person is suffering from poverty, ill health, or the handicap of minority group membership. ....The fact that liberalism and radicalism both correlate positively with ethnic tolerance places a strong weapon in the hands of bigots (who are likely to be political conservatives).</i> (p. 432.)] [Try to persuade any Virginia or Carolinian Caucasian that the virtually incessant attack on his ethnic heritage, in recent years, comes from "political conservatives." Try to find an attack on any ethnic heritage, which originates with political conservatives, at all comparable in pure venom, with the abuse that has been heaped on those who honor the cultural, religious and ethnic traditions of the Old South in America!]
Allport shows no understanding that the American ethic, which his version of "Liberalism" rejects, actually does more towards accomplishing those "liberal-equalitarian" objectives than any form of Socialism yet devised. But he gives more insight into his own bias:
<i>The person with character-conditioned prejudice likes order, but especially <u>social</u> order. In his clear-cut institutional memberships, he finds the safety and the definiteness he needs. Lodges, schools, churches, the nation, may serve as a defense against the disquiet in his personal life. To lean on them saves him from leaning on himself.</i> [This patronizing view of normal people, does not square with that opinion, above, as to the unprejudiced "liberal" being the foe of rugged individualism.]<br>
<i>Research shows that, by and large, prejudiced people are more devoted to institutions than are the unprejudiced. Anti-Semitic college girls are more wrapped up in their sororities; they are more institutionally religious; they are more intensely "patriotic."</i> (p. 404.) [And of course, whether those sorority girls are actually "prejudiced" and "Anti-Semitic," might just depend upon the subjectivity of the investigator studying their responses to perhaps very loaded questions. We are not privileged to know whether Allport's investigator talked to one or two, or many in each sorority; whether this "anti-semitism" was expressed in some egregious form, such as a wish for death camps in America, or for the confiscation of Jewish property, or the exclusion of Jews from the professions; or simply in an individual coed's stated preference for her own Faith, or her rejection of a particular suitor. We are not told whether any of the girls had even expressed a dislike for Jews, or merely a preference for gentiles. In short, all we have is a vague aspersion, which serves no purpose but to alienate those Jews who have feelings of insecurity from mainstream values.]
<i>Schools have always inculcated patriotism, but the terms of allegiance are often narrowly conceived. The fact that loyalty to the nation requires loyalty to all subgroups within the nation is seldom pointed out.</i> [Nor does such suggestion make any sense, beyond a possible reciprocity of respect. Did Allport feel loyalty to some of the Conservative-American groups, whom he aspersed; or is he admitting that he felt no loyalty to America?]....<i>The teaching of exclusive loyalty, whether to nation, school, fraternity, or family--is a method of instilling prejudice.</i> (p. 513.)
There is an incredible arrogance in calling other people's normal human preferences "prejudice" and "bigotry." When Allport lumps devotion to family and nation ("exclusive loyalty") with "prejudice," he gives the game away. What he is attacking is not "prejudice," but a rational recognition of a sense of kinship and common interest and purpose--the sort of preference, which rational people have recognized as normal <i>allegiance</i> since the dawn of history.
Allport and those, who continue to this day to foist his dogma upon inexperienced undergraduates, are the <i>bigots</i>. Their cause springs from an almost pathological mindset, which seeks to redefine reality, and force normal people to accept a contrived dispensation that denies the natural ties, which provide personal identification and sustain a sense of ongoing purpose. The real target of Professor Allport was the freedom of the individual human to make distinctions and form alliances, important to that individual. In a very compelling sense, that target was freedom itself.
As the Veritas Foundation Staff stated in its excellent book, <i>The Great Deceit--Social Pseudo-Sciences</i>, Veritas Foundation, 1964, p. 114:
<i>Using the symbol of "social science" to combat "patriotism" and "loyalty" is a crude attempt to implement the old socialist-communist line of undermining patriotism and family loyalties.</i>
Absent a very tightly defined and controlled study, against clearly measurable evaluations of both the persons being judged and those who are accused of misjudging them, terms such as <i>prejudice, bigotry</i> and <i>exploitation,</i> always involve very subjective judgments. Since such controlled studies are virtually never attempted, opinions such as those of Professor Allport habitually <i>beg the questions</i> being addressed, and are dependent upon tactics that play upon the fears and doubts of the susceptible.
What Allport repeatedly cites in place of such controlled study are the instances of individuals and groups, where someone actually does cross a line and indulge in a rant against some ethnic group or religion, as extreme as one of Ashley Montagu's against scientists studying racial difference. He then implies that there is an affinity between such individual feelings of animosity and those who merely agree with the one obsessed on other issues. This is "guilt by association" with a vengeance. While it was not acceptable to this apostle of "tolerance" that people lump those who thought Communism idealistic, with the actual Communists; it is apparently quite all right to lump people, who merely agree with someone who has Conservative views on other issues, with an off-the-wall opinion that that person may also hold.
[Yet Communism starts--it does not just include--a complete denial of the most basic of all Civil Liberties, the right to pass on the fruits of one's own labor to one's family. No one embraced Communism, or travelled along a sympathetic road, who did not at some time reject that most basic of all civilized rights. That is quite a different thing from being stuck with the untoward opinion of someone, you may happen to agree with on other issues.]
Allport's is the ADL technique, adverted to earlier, and it is the most successful method ever devised to increase the amount of real prejudice in our Society. People being smeared do not respond with goodwill; nor do people being frightened by "evidence" that others hate them.
Consider a multiple choice question. Which result could NOT be expected from Professor Allport's approach to the psychological dynamics of inter-group relations:
A. Confident American Conservatives will experience increased negative perceptions of minorities.
B. Members of minorities will experience increased suspicion and hostility towards Conservatives.
C. People lacking self-confidence will experience increased guilt and doubt, with a decrease in their commitment to family values.
D. There will be an increase in good will and mutual respect among all Americans.
While Academia is full of those who allow fear or guilt to override better judgment--<i>dysrons</i>, born with normal intelligence but rendered dysfunctional by their compulsions--Gordon Allport is not of their number. Professor Allport understood exactly what he was doing. In the same book, he tells us at page 43:
<i>Such an image implies that a world-loyalty is the most difficult to achieve....There seems ...special difficulty in fashioning an in-group out of an entity as embracing as mankind. Even the ardent believer in One World has trouble....After all, his nation's way of life is <u>his</u> way of life--and he cannot lightly abrogate the ground of his whole existence. Such almost reflex preference for the familiar grips us all. ...artificial props are needed. They require <u>symbols</u>... in order to make the human in-group seem real. Nations have flags, parks, schools ... holidays, armies, historical documents. Only gradually and with small publicity are a few of these symbols of unity evolving on an international scale. They are greatly needed...to provide mental anchorage points around which the idea of world-loyalty may develop.</i> (p.44.)
The Professor had earlier left a considerable track record to help identify his ideological roots. He showed up as early as January, 1933, in signing a Petition of the Fellowship of Reconciliation calling for the recognition of Communist Russia. He appeared on the letterhead of an interesting sounding group, the <i>Medical Bureau and North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy</i>, as a member of a psychologists committee, in July, 1938, in support of the Communist side in the Spanish Civil War. He was reported on January 2, 1939, in the Communist newspaper, the <i>Daily Worker</i>, as a supporter of a conference of the <i>North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy</i>. And when it was clear that the Communists had been defeated in the Spanish Civil War, he appeared as a sponsor of the <i>Medical Aid Division of the Spanish Refugee Relief Campaign</i>, on November 16, 1939, in aid of the defeated Leftists.
Professor Allport's name showed up in numerous other reported involvements with pro-Communist and other extreme Leftwing causes, which had nothing to do with any sincere interest in improving inter-group relationships within the United States, long before his widespread acceptance in academia as an expert on "prejudice."
<br><center> </center>
Now, do you begin to see a pattern in the line the internationalists take on the web today? While Allport was only one of many Leftist academics promoting this distorted line of thinking, his influence was considerable; and years after his death, his work was still being assigned to College students all over the United States.
William Flax