"As a teenager, I spent quite a lot of time trying to re-educate Grandmother. I explained that racism was unacceptable and that she simply had to change her views. Sometimes I made myself cry with outrage. Grandmother would invariably smile sweetly, sip her dry Amontillado sherry and say something even more eye-wateringly offensive.
After a while, to her great disappointment, I gave up the struggle. I put her views down to a colonial mindset and an understandable desire to aggravate po-faced, Lefty grandchildren and we talked about what was on television instead.
A few weeks ago, I heard another explanation for racism from an American scientist, William von Hippel. For the past decade, he has been trying to work out why elderly people are more likely to be prejudiced than young people. And if his research is right, it's not just because they grew up in a different era, because Blair's Britain is a sink pit of immigrant crime, or because old people are brave enough to fly in the face of political correctness. A bit of their brain is missing.
According to von Hippel and other psychologists working in the same field, whatever age we are, our immediate thoughts are formed by cultural stereotypes. This means we instinctively think inappropriate and unfriendly things about each other. Try it out. However tolerant you imagine yourself to be, a moment honestly monitoring your stream of consciousness on public transport should prove von Hippel's point.
Freeze-frame your thoughts as they emerge and black men in hooded tops are aggressive, young Muslims are potential terrorists and that fat white bloke opposite should be made to pay for two seats.
For a highly social species, the ability to keep these thoughts to oneself is crucial, so we have developed a special part of our brains – a mesh of connections between the prefrontal lobes and the limbic system – to inhibit and temper them.
A fair amount of attention has already been devoted to this piece of grey matter. It has been noted, for instance, that people who accidentally bash it often behave in an unrestrained and egocentric way.
Where von Hippel's research is new is in suggesting that older people's brains often suffer the same sort of damage. They become prejudiced because they lack the power to inhibit the stereotypes that form our instinctive thoughts."
-- William T Goodall Mail : [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web : http://www.wtgab.demon.co.uk Blog : http://radio.weblogs.com/0111221/
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it. -- Donald E. Knuth
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