| Chapter Introduction: | Introduction to the Handbook on Prejudice |
|
|
chance indeed of being copied. Humans share this disposition with other animals and with mammals in particular, who are also, to a lesser extent, able to transfer and develop memes. This genetically deeply anchored disposition to imitate others lies also at the root of culture.
Although Dawkins has not elaborated this point, his study of memes illuminates many salient features of prejudices: their mass dissemination, their tenacity, their irrational quality. In the transmission of prejudices, there is obviously a strong mimetic factor involved. One of the reasons for their success is their cumulative effect: they are accepted because they have already been widely accepted. Another reason for their tenacity is that they are embedded in clusters of attitudes, practices, habits, orientations. Like the meme of listening to classical music or going to church, prejudices are an intrinsic part of a specific lifestyle and the structure of an identity. They cannot be easily corrected or changed because they cannot be easily isolated and extracted. They are not only part of a cognitive system but are much more deeply intertwined with the structure of personal or group identity.
4.2. Resonance
Another mystery connected with prejudices is their longevity. Depending on the intellectual climate, they can recede and be almost forgotten, but they are also easily revived when the situation is altered. Anti-Semitism, for instance, is a prejudice that has been drastically refuted by historical knowledge and experience. It is kept at bay today by the norms of political correctness. The meme of anti-Semitism, however, has all but become extinct, even in Germany. It can easily be reactivated through age-old images, rhetoric, and patterns of “rationalisation”. The history of anti-Semitism seems to be as old as the history of the Hebrew tribe itself. Its very first mention in the archive of history occurs on the Egyptian stele of pharaoh Meremptah (from the Nineteenth Dynasty at the end of the thirteenth century BC), who reports the successful extermination of hostile tribes, among them the Hebrews. It was refuelled by the Christian Church as anti-Judaism and transformed in the secular nineteenth century into the pseudoscientific doctrine of racism. In other