Chapter 5: Discrimination, Beliefs, and Expressions

The more prohibitions you have, the less virtuous people will be.   — Lao Tzu (604–531 BC)

When we discriminate, we make a distinction either in favor of or against a person, thing, or idea based on our personal inclinations. Our preferences can’t ignore our inner prejudices and biases. The ideas expressed in this book will no doubt trigger some of those deeper biases that will lead one to either condemn or endorse them. Life is a mental process of building and rebuilding a foundational philosophy, serving as a guide to gauge and judge our acceptance or rejection of ideas expressed by others. When we hear a political statement, we not only instantly accept or reject it, but often form an instant favorable or unfavorable impression of the speaker as well.

We feel more comfortable with people of a similar culture who speak our language and share our customs than we do with those very different from ourselves. Infants find a face of a different color or unfamiliar features unnatural and alarming, as shown by their increased heart rates.1 The strangeness of people of different cultures or with different features generally fades when they become personally known.

Regardless of the source, it would be naïve to expect certain discriminatory feelings to disappear by prohibiting their expression. Besides, ignoring biases and prejudices in the context of long-term personal relationships would be irrational. Marriage, for example, involves critical gender, age, race, and religious discriminations. We don’t simply propose marriage indiscriminately to the next person we encounter; we choose a mate based on that inner sense that triggers a yea or a nay, even when we don’t necessarily know why or whether the choice is rational.

Nearly everyone would consider it foolish to propose an intimate relationship such as marriage to someone of a race, ethnicity, religion, gender, or age that is not to their liking or preference — or worse, that they despise. Yet, in the workplace, that same selective rationale, if detected or suspected, is punishable by law. When we propose marriage or a job position, we express a preference to associate with that person in a given relationship. Whether or not such preferences are irrational, insensitive, inconsiderate, or downright racist or sexist, they are part and parcel of who we are. Outside the political world, common sense tells us that no one is owed marriage, a job, a friend, or any other relationship.

Although these inner instincts and passions are indeed who we are, we generally keep less tolerant feelings under wraps. The frontal cerebral cortex is our “good housekeeping” management system, keeping in check most inappropriate impulses and temporary pleasures triggered by the amygdala.2 It restrains us from proposing marriage at the first tinge of attraction or punching someone with whom we disagree. Our frontal cortex, not fully developed until around twenty-five years of age, is the long-term pleasure seeker that will generally (hopefully!) override our short-term impulses, risky choices, and outbursts fostered by the amygdala.

Bigotry, racism, and homophobia are certainly not signs of virtue or good character; however, they are passive feelings that do not constitute aggression in themselves. Physical aggression against those peacefully minding their own business is inhumane and uncivil, no matter the feelings from which it stems. Moreover, there are no greater aggressive displays of bigotry, racism, and homophobia than those taking place in the political arena where laws prohibiting as well as enforcing associations paint a sordid historical picture. Laws that prohibit, compel, or license the association of persons of a given gender, kinship, race, nationality, trade, title, religion, or age demonstrate the extent to which political democracy delves into personal affairs. In the nonpolitical world, relationships and associations are voluntary, joint ventures.

There are no stronger or more peaceful means for bonding humans of different cultures than the synergism of open markets, where interactive trading is neither forced nor prohibited. Such trading and bonding were well underway some thirty thousand years ago, with further evidence of trading as early as one hundred thousand years ago. Trading goods also engendered the transfer of ideas between nomadic and settled tribes. As Julia Allison described the process, “They [nomads] functioned as the human equivalent of bees, fostering the ‘cross-pollination of cultures and ideas’ among incongruent societies.”3

As trading gained popularity, cities emerged as grand trading centers, bringing people of different cultures, talents, and specialties together. This emerging division of labor began to replace self-sufficiency, where previously people had to produce for themselves everything they needed to survive. Farmers could concentrate on growing crops, which they traded for clothes, utensils, and tools. Merchants, serving as intermediaries, facilitated these exchanges. Cities grew and prospered, with merchants developing pragmatic rules of conduct based primarily on ostracizing those who failed to meet their promises.4 Eventually, rulers entered the scene — accompanied by taxes, bribes, and wars — gradually reducing many of those once-popular, synergistic trade centers into posts of abandoned edifices. As rulers increased their stranglehold over the trading activity of people in one area, people migrated to less oppressive areas, as remains the pattern today.

Laws that interfere with the natural association of people simply exacerbate animosities and harmful discrimination. As mentioned earlier, pitting people of different color, wealth, and gender against each other to gain political power is sufficient reason in itself to disavow the political process. The history of legal restrictions on immigration, land ownership, and hiring people of selected ancestries is a sad commentary on politics in the United States and other countries.5 ,6

Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) laws invite lawyers to file frivolous claims, because the cost of burdensome discovery and defense, coupled with ambiguities in the law, generally force employers to settle.7 Ironically, an employer accused of discrimination in firing an employee probably did not discriminate when hiring that person: yet after being extorted, the employer will be apt to undetectably modify future considerations when hiring someone.

Laws that prohibit discrimination are inherently discriminatory when applied to only one side of a prospective or existing association. For instance, an employer is prohibited from discriminating when hiring or firing someone, yet a person seeking or quitting a job is free to do so.8 Applying such laws to only one party of a contractual arrangement requires selective discrimination between the parties. Such a double standard is akin to allowing one partner to discriminate in selecting or divorcing a spouse while prohibiting the other from doing the same. Relationships are mutual arrangements that are only hindered when one or the other party is prohibited from expressing his or her preferences.

People shielded from discrimination likely wonder whether their acceptance by others is sincere or staged. When they receive praise, they will be unsure whether it is merited or legally compelled. The most destructive social impact of antidiscrimination laws is fostering an attitude that everyone is owed respect, irrespective of whether it has been earned. The common-sense earning of respect becomes instead a demand for it as an entitlement.

Political censorship has muzzled the free expression of thoughts to the point where any utterance can be claimed to offend someone. Aside from actual slander, adults claiming to be offended by what others think and say about them are either insecure in their own self-image or, very likely, simply using the law to extort or stop someone who dares to openly oppose their political agenda.

In today’s world of politics, celebrities live a precarious life and must always be on guard for fear that their words may trigger an onslaught from a so-called offended group, with their picketers, readily-prepared posters, and hackneyed phrases. Offensive speech claims have gone beyond mere comments about gender, race, and religion to attack any expression, gesture, or object that someone considers offensive — either to themselves or others.9

In his book Kindly Inquisitors, Jonathan Rauch states:

Impelled by the notions that science is oppression and criticism is violence, the central regulation of debate and inquiry is returning to respectability — this time in a humanitarian disguise. In America, in France, in Austria, and Australia and elsewhere, the old principle of the Inquisition is being revived: people who hold wrong and hurtful opinions should be punished for the good of society. If they cannot be put in jail, then they should lose their jobs, be subjected to organized campaigns of vilification, be made to apologize, be pressed to recant. If government cannot do the punishing, then private institutions and pressure groups — thought vigilantes, in effect — should do it.10

On university campuses, politically driven students can muzzle spokespersons and professors from expressing any views incompatible with their own. In politics, demeaning such spokespersons and staging protests replace reasoned and persuasive arguments to refute ideas. Consider how quickly student vigilantes would protest someone scheduled to speak about the negative effect of antidiscrimination laws, and how they would instead welcome another who would speak about their positive effect. They would likely not recognize such preferences to be discriminatory nor sense either their own hate when attacking hate mongers or their lack of tolerance of those they claim to be intolerant.

When protesters prohibit speakers from expressing a belief considered contrary to theirs, they display serious doubts about their own convictions. If they were truly convinced about the validity of their beliefs, they would welcome scrutiny as an opportunity to showcase them and demonstrate the invalidity of the opposing view. Using force to silence those who don’t share a belief is an obvious indication that one’s belief is fallacious.

Aside from their inconsistencies and insecurities, protesters ignore the real world, where censorship and prohibition only increase curiosity. Censor a book, and there’s a good chance it will become a bestseller; prohibit the sale of alcohol, and bootleggers and speakeasies pop up all over the place.

The common-sense perspective that prevails outside the political world rests on the notion that no one owes you anything, including good feelings — that you earn the respect of others and what others think about you is their business. Outside the political world, good manners, tolerance, decency, and common courtesy are encouraged and emulated, but not decreed. Such conduct must emerge from the volitional interaction of people: it is counterproductive to use dicta and punishment to command good behavior and conformity to another’s prescribed standards. The clergy could provide good guidance in these matters, but unfortunately, many engage in politics and endorse laws that condone, and even encourage, conduct contrary to the ideals they otherwise preach.

In Ethnic America, Thomas Sowell points to nine ethnic groups, recounting their struggles as new immigrants and their eventual assimilation into the American mosaic.11 Intergroup animosities slowly (though very rapidly on the evolutionary scale) declined. Jews, who had been excluded from many top university faculties, ultimately came to be overrepresented in them. Professional sports that had once excluded blacks came to be dominated by black athletes. Anti-Asian laws that flourished in California were eventually repealed via referendums. By the mid-twentieth century, the intermarriages of people of Irish, Polish, German, Italian, and Japanese ancestries had increased to around 50 percent.12 I was born in 1929 and grew up in an Italian neighborhood in Indiana, where virtually all my aunts and uncles married Italians. However, their children — my cousins — for the most part married non-Italians. I was one of the exceptions when my wife of Italian ancestry and I married in 1953.

Most likely, long before a few millennia pass, intergroup animosities will largely disappear as cultures and races blend into one another and nation states disappear, along with their inherent divisiveness.

• 1Robert Sapolsky, Biology and Human Behavior: The Neurological Origins of Individuality, 2nd ed. (The Teaching Company).
• 2Ibid.
• 3Julia Allison, “Nomadic versus Settled Societies in World History,” JuliaAllison.com. December 2002, http://juliaallison.com/nomadic-vs-settled-societies-in-world-history/.
• 4Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (New York: Harper Perennial, 2011).
• 5Kevin R. Johnson, “Race, the Immigration Laws, and Domestic Race Relations: A ‘Magic Mirror’ into the Heart of Darkness,” Indiana Law Journal 73, no. 4 (1998).
• 6The Supreme Court upheld the Chinese Exclusion Act and Scott Act in Chae Chan Ping v. United States (1889). It declared that “the power of exclusion of foreigners [is] an incident of sovereignty belonging to the Government of the United States as a part of those sovereign powers delegated by the Constitution.”
• 7Only 6 percent of those filing employment-discrimination lawsuits in federal courts reach trial, where their chances of winning are only one in three. http://www.abajournal.com/files/employment.pdf.
• 8Laws that prohibit discrimination pertain to age, disability, equal pay/compensation, genetic information, harassment, national origin, pregnancy, race/color, religion, retaliation, sex, and sexual harassment.
• 9George Leef, “John Leo on the Political Correctness Mania at Marquette,” September 30, 2014, http://www.nationalreview.com/phi-beta-cons/389148/john-leo-political-correctness-mania-marquette-george-leef.
• 10Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 6.
• 11Thomas Sowell, Ethnic America: A History (New York: Basic Books, 1981).
• 12Ibid., p. 9.