Leandro Karnal: Prejudice is not natural behavior – 11/12/2023 – Balance

Leandro Karnal: Prejudice is not natural behavior – 11/12/2023 – Balance

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The historical mechanisms behind the construction of prejudices are the theme of the new book by historians Leandro Karnal and Luiz Estevam Fernandes. Although the targets of prejudiced logic can change greatly over space and time, the authors show that some key features of the phenomenon — such as the tendency to divide the world between “us” and “them” and nostalgia for an idealized past — little change.

“We were very impacted, for example, by the extent and universality of misogyny. In the case of Brazil, an equally fundamental type of prejudice is racism, which is very ironic when we consider that the majority of the population is female and of African descent”, says Karnal in a video interview, in which the work’s co-author also participated.

In fact, discrimination against women is dubbed in the book with the dubious honor of “the first of prejudices”. In addition to misogyny and racism, the chapters also address homophobia and other forms of discrimination linked to gender identity, xenophobia, ageism and fatphobia.

“One of the criteria for arriving at this list was precisely to think about the mechanism of prejudice”, explains Fernandes. “Resentful speech, the formation of identity in opposition to the other, are easy elements to apply to other phenomena of this type.”

Religious discrimination, for example, appears as a justifying and facilitating element of misogyny and homophobia throughout Western history in the duo’s narrative. It is the third book in which the historians collaborate, after “History of the United States”, in which other authors also participated, and “Santos Fortes”.

Although they address aspects of the human evolutionary trajectory and even neuroscience to understand the depth of the roots of prejudice, historians view with some skepticism the attempt to understand its functioning based on experiments, such as those designed by pioneers in the field of social psychology from mid 20th century.

Some of these experiments seemed to show that it would be enough to randomly divide two groups of volunteers — simply by throwing odd or even or heads or tails — for an incipient prejudice to emerge from one group against the other.

“An important influence that is present in the book is the work of Jonathan Haidt, who is a social psychologist and uses the analogy of the elephant and his rider [a ideia de que a razão humana seria equivalente ao pequeno condutor de um elefante, com pouca capacidade de controlar o paquiderme, equivalente às emoções e instintos]. The central issue here is that truth is often not the goal, not the scope: what people want is to belong [a um grupo]”, says Karnal.

“But I confess that there is a fear on our part, when exploring this idea of ​​reproducing all human behaviors in the laboratory, which is that we will end up naturalizing the idea of ​​prejudice. And we participate in the assumption that it is a human creation that meets the social demands and the dominance of certain groups. Therefore, it is not natural”, he argues.

Paradoxically, the historical contingencies that lead to the formulation of a specific type of prejudice are revealed even when it is painted as natural, for different reasons.

“I’m going to paraphrase a colleague of ours who said that in the 16th century the Church predominated and, in the 19th century, the laboratory. I complement this sentence by saying that, in the 19th century, the laboratory and the nation predominated”, says Luiz Estevam Fernandes.

“If you think about the country, it has its own anthem, people die and live for it, there are altars — the religious vocabulary is transferred to it. And then the laboratory confirms a series of these beliefs based on a white intelligence, European, which is seen as the source of truth.”

This mechanism, for the authors, is behind “scientific” racism or the transformation of “sodomy” from the Middle Ages, a generic term that designated sexual sins that included homosexuality, into the pathologization of sexual relations by 19th century doctors.

“How many times, for example, have we heard about research trying to investigate whether homosexuality has genetic origins or not? If there had been a body promoting science in Greece or Rome in Antiquity, this question would not have even become a topic of research , because there was no conception of homosexuality as something separate from the rest of human sexual behavior”, concludes Fernandes.

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