In defence of stereotypes Being incomparable has its downsides

There’s a belief on the streets of Belfast and Derry that you can tell whether someone is a Catholic or Protestant simply by looking at them, a conviction that all good liberals would naturally find outrageous. Even so, there’s something in it. By and large, Ulster Catholics and Protestants belong to different ethnic groups, either Irish Gaels or Scottish Gaels, and generally speaking these groups have different physical characteristics, just as Swedes and Chinese do. A women with black hair and blue eyes is likely to be an Irish Gael, and thus Catholic in background, while a short, ginger-haired man is probably of Scottish origin, and thus of Protestant lineage. There may well be black-haired, blue-eyed women in Ulster who burn pictures of the Pope, as well as short, ginger-haired men who are prepared to die for him, but to think that this refutes the point is simply to misunderstand what a stereotype is.

Ulster Presbyterians are not renowned for their zany, surrealist wit or darkly iconoclastic sense of humour, but this is because of their Scottish Puritan heritage, not because of their genes. British sangfroid says less about the nature of the British mind than about the need not to betray weakness in the eyes of your colonial subjects. Norwegians are typically taller than the Welsh. Black working-class Britons have a far higher chance of becoming mentally ill than Keira Knightley, a fact suppressed by those who refuse to put people in boxes. The citizens of Bute, Montana, don’t typically go around dressed in long crimson garments while declaiming from Dante’s Purgatorio, or at least those who do are advised to walk warily at night.

We can deduce a great deal about individuals from the sparsest bits of information about them. Men are far more likely to throw people through windows than women, and most readers of The New York Times are unlikely to believe that the best way to rid Los Angeles of gang warfare is to detonate a small nuclear weapon over the city. Until recently, Americans were more likely to use your first name on first meeting than the English, though this is changing. When I was a student at Cambridge, my tutor called me “Mr Eagleton” in my first year, “Terence” in my second, and “Terry” in my third. Who knows what teasingly erotic nickname he might have come up with had I stayed on at his college?

Labelling people can be useful. Nobody likes being called Fatso, but plenty of people are glad to be called anti-racist. Critics of stereotyping feel that it reduces the rich complexity of individuals to a crude category, but nobody thinks that being anti-racist is all there is to say about you. It is true that some stereotypes are odiously offensive, but there is nothing wrong with offensiveness as such. No doubt there are those who feel that Jesus should have moderated his language when he denounced the Pharisees as a brood of vipers, but he seems not to have been constrained by modern middle-class etiquette.

Other stereotypes aren’t so much abusive as absurd. Some 19th-century phrenologists held that nations with smaller heads were more easily conquered than those with large ones, while the founder of phrenology, Franz Gall, believed that the moral and religious faculties were located at the top of the brain, this being the area of the skull closest to God.

“Everybody’s different” is a popular slogan these days, intended as an antidote to stereotyping. The only problem is that it isn’t true. If everyone differed from everyone else, there could, for example, be no mental health services, since psychiatry assumes certain uniform patterns of behaviour. Economics would become impossible, and so would sociology. Why are queues at supermarket checkpoints always roughly the same length? Because you can take it as given that people have no great zest for performing certain tedious but necessary domestic tasks, and you can deduce from this that they will gravitate to the shortest queue, thus evening the queues out.

To be an individual is to be incomparable — the mistake is to imagine that the incomparable is always valuable. Oswald Mosley was unique, but many would consider that we would have been better off without him. The same goes in my view for J. Edgar Hoover, whose birth an all-seeing Deity might mercifully have prevented. There won’t be another Jimmy Savile, which is heartening news. William McGonagall’s poem “The Tay Bridge Disaster” is incomparable in the sense of being incomparably bad.

Nor is what we have in common always to be devalued. Having a set of stereotypes at our disposal allows us to form the kind of rough expectations of others without which social existence might grind to a halt. It’s hard to conduct a conversation with your bank manager if he is dressed in a gorilla costume. Freedom isn’t a matter of being free from conventions, but free from oppressive ones.

The problem with capitalist society is that it treats individuals as exchangeable in economic terms but unique in ideological ones. Nobody cares about your incomparable individuality when you apply for a job as a cleaner, but our civilisation is loud with rhetorical appeals to the preciousness of each person, the dangers of reducing them to a dead level and the soullessness of stereotyping. It’s a contradiction neatly caught in a quarrel between Willy Loman and his son Biff in Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman. Biff angrily urges his deluded father to back off from his fruitless search for individual recognition with the cry “Pop, I’m a dime a dozen and so are you!” To which Willy returns the dignified response “I am not a dime a dozen! I am Willy Loman and you are Biff Loman!” And of course they are both right.