Yes, it takes more than legislation to keep things civilized. But that in itself hardly vindicates prejudice per se. Nor does it justify clinging to prejudice even after it is countered by evidence and reason. Nor does it mean that the replacement of prejudice with legislation is necessarily a bad thing. And it certainly doesn't justify clinging to the particular prejudices that have become the hobby-horses of contemporary social conservatism.

Some of Nathanael's statements are just baffling. For example: Are we really to believe that the "breakdown of old prejudices may ease the social pressures to conform to standards of behavior, but the consequences are grim"?

Grim indeed. I'm sure Nathanael will agree that life in societies still saturated with the old prejudices — say, some dusty village in the mountains of Pakistan where tradition and prejudice ensure that the little girls marry the old men that their fathers tell them to marry — is MUCH better than life in some grim, licentious hellhole like Denver or San Diego. (All those tired complaints about reason and modernity can make sense — until you actually contemplate living in premodernity.)

And is it really true that "people refuse to recognize any authority between themselves and the law"? Do you really think that's true, Nathanael? Do you think Americans are NOT flocking to their churches, and engaging in civil disobedience in the name of a higher law? Do you think Mike Huckabee is NOT a serious presidential contender? Do you think millions of Americans do NOT respect the authority of science and medicine and engineering?

Of course, respect for the authority of science and medicine and engineering is not a "prejudice." It's a rational judgment based on demonstrated success. The masses might not know much about how science and technology actually work their marvels, but they can see that the car starts and the bridge doesn't fall down and the pneumonia goes away. To that extent, their beliefs are not "prejudices." They're not based irrationally on the authority of the "man in the white coat," but quite rationally on the evidence itself.

The point is that many people (to one degree or another, all of us) quite rationally respect many kinds of authority that come "between themselves and the law." They respect the authority of the telephone repairman because he fixes their phone. They respect the authority of the engineer because she builds bridges that don't fall down. They respect the authority of their broker because she makes them money. We don't need laws forcing people to respect telephone repairmen and engineers and brokers, and we don't need social prejudices to achieve that end either. Evidence and rationality do just fine, thank you very much. Of course you're right that we are "incapable of functioning in a FULLY rational manner," but we shouldn't ignore the considerable degree to which evidence and rationality DO justify our beliefs.

FWIW, the recent "prejudice" against smoking, combined with "government force," has sharply reduced the incidence of smoking and saved thousands of lives. I put "prejudice" in scare quotes here because the animus against smoking is founded in the light of evidence and reason and therefore not a prejudice at all.

It's symptomatic of conservative moralists that the "problem" they address is so often the moral behavior of the individual (and usually the sexual behavior of the individual), and so rarely the behavior of, say, the corporation.

Thus when conservative moralists go looking for the anecdotes out of which they construct their false generalizations, they latch onto things like the middle-class sexual mores of the 1950s. But they DON'T latch onto the moral laxity of, say, the tobacco industry. Yet at the same time that virtuous 1950s teenagers were quaintly plighting their troth out on the front porch swing, the tobacco companies were dressing actors up as doctors and lying through their smoke-stained teeth, telling those same teenagers that smoking was good for them. But conservatives remember only the lost morality of Annette Funicello, not the defeated evil of RJ Reynolds.

Back in those "good old days," there was some social prejudice pressuring the tobacco industry to abandon its murderous behavior — but certainly nothing comparable to the pressure on teenage girls to keep their knees together. Gradually, as has happened periodically in American history, an anti-smoking "prejudice" did develop, but by itself did not prove enough to counter the profit motive and constrain the tobacco industry. Instead, the "prejudice" found it could only succeed through legislation. The prejudice against smoking remains strong — stronger than it has ever been, I would wager — but it will not be effective against the forces of advertising without the backing of legislation. (I suspect that previous smoking bans failed because they didn't rein in the industry's advertising machine.) We're not looking at a case where "prejudice" was eroded by the evil liberals and was then replaced by law; we're looking at a case where the prejudice alone was never enough, but managed to succeed in tandem with the law. And now that so many state laws direct cigarette taxes to be used to fund anti-smoking education, "prejudice" and law are not so easily separable.

Anyway, it will hardly do to say "the elimination of social prejudices necessarily leads to a more authoritarian state, as people refuse to recognize any authority between themselves and the law. The restraint that people formerly exercised because they had internalized the standards of community, family, church, and the like, must now be externally applied by government force."

It simply will not do to oppose social pressure and legislative force in this way. Consider that in the "good old days" there was considerable social prejudice against racial intermarriage AND laws against intermarriage. In the Puritan colonies there was considerable social prejudice in favor of attending church AND laws requiring attendance. There was social pressure against divorce AND laws against divorce. Etc.

I think this is also quite telling: When social conservatives need an example of how the breakdown of social prejudices leads to state authoritarianism, they cite the laws against littering — as if today's litter laws are more authoritarian than yesterday's Jim Crow laws! (BTW, I doubt there's any reason to believe there's any less social prejudice against littering today than there was in the past.)

After the Civil War, there was considerable social prejudice (and not just among Southern whites) working to keep those "uppity" freedmen "in their place." But Reconstruction eroded those social prejudices, and after 1877 (true to your model) the prejudices wound up being supplanted by the authoritarian Jim Crow laws. On the other hand, in the decades before the Civil Rights era, the social prejudices against black people weakened again, but instead of leading to authoritarian laws, that weakening flowered into the Civil Rights Act. Once again, legislation has replaced social prejudice — but do we really call the Civil Rights Act "authoritarian"? (Yes, I know that Jesse Helms and many other conservatives did, but would we?)

This "In Praise of Prejudice" model seems simplistic, at odds with the evidence, and tendentiously cobbled together by the selective use of anecdotes. Sounds like a good approach to selling books, but really.

Let's not praise prejudice. Instead, whenever we have the opportunity, let's strive to replace it with judgment. The fact that no one can be without prejudice (the "necessity," as Dalrymple puts it, "of preconceived ideas") is no excuse for retaining prejudice when evidence and reason can offer something better.

What do we do with matters where we have no experience. The engineer's authority regarding the bridge is confirmed when we drive over it and it doesn't fall. But how does a 15-year-old girl confirm her parents' command that she keep her legs crossed? Prejudice is simply another form of tradition, which is the accumulated experiential knowledge of the community. I won't deny that it may often be mistaken, but it's better than having each person start reasoning from their own small stock of wisdom.

I'm not following here. So if society gets to a point where, say, a Huckabee doesn't equate Pakistani terrorists to a need to keep mexicans out of the country, because they are sneaking in because they look the same, or say, a Romney staffer doesn't say we need to chase all muslims back into their caves, then we as a society will no longer give up a seat on the bus to an elderly or pregnant woman? Funny, I thought we did that kind of thing simply because it was nice. Seems to me it was a white man asking an older black woman to give up her seat on the bus that was the catalyst for our quantum leap in race relations and prejudice.

Surfcity, you're in way over your head here. You would try and make a story about bubble gum into an attack, hate filled message, wouldn't you? You really need to get a life...

I await your usual nonsensical reply with the following "hate", "republicans", war crimes", "blood for oil" -- ok, have it.

You think that was "hate-filled" twin? Just asking a question? Do you have an answer for me, or just more drivel? I was just trying to understand where a lack of compassion for little old ladies fits into Nate's world without prejudice. You frighty-righties find hate wherever you want, you thrive on it. Don't be a hata twin.