Pilnmēness nogurdinātie - Right-o

On hearing this, some “Christians” have marked hostile reactions, instantaneously, for example, putting themselves on guard against Mr. Miller’s expected sharp financial practices. That is to say, a “Christian” of this kind confuses his high-level abstraction, “Jew,” with the extensional Mr. Miller and behaves towards Mr. Miller as if he were identical with that abstraction. (See the abstraction ladder, p. 169.)

“Jew” is only one of thousands upon thousands of abstractions which may be applied to Mr. Miller, to whom such terms as “left-hander,” “parent,” “amateur golfer,” “teetotaler,” “Bostonian,” and so on may possibly be equally applied. But the prejudiced person is unaware of all but the one abstraction—perhaps in most contexts the least important one — “Jew.”

Certainly he is unaware that “Jew” is one of the most sloppily constructed abstractions in the language, i.e., one of the most difficult to refer systematically down the abstraction ladder to lower levels of abstraction. (Try it some time. Does “Jew” refer to a “race,” a religion, a nationality, a physical type, a state of mind, a caste? If not these, what?)

Now it happens that the word “Jew” has powerful affective connotations in Christian culture as the result of a number of historical accidents associating “Jews” with money. The kinds of historical accident that resulted in this association will be discussed in a subsequent chapter; for the moment it will suffice to observe the way in which the affective connotations of the word are employed in such expressions as, “He jewed me out of ten dollars,” “Don’t be such a jew,” “I jewed down the price.”

In some circles, it is not uncommon for mothers to discipline disobedient children by saying to them, “If you don’t behave, I’ll sell you to the old Jew man.”

Let us return to our hypothetical Mr. Miller, who has been introduced as a “Jew”. To a person for whom these affective connotations are very much alive—and there are many such—and who habitually confuses that which is inside his nervous system with that which is outside, Mr. Miller is a man “not to be trusted”.

If Mr. Miller succeeds in business, that “proves” that “Jews are smart”(if a Mr. Johansen succeeds in business, it only proves that Mr. Johansen is smart). If Mr. Miller fails in business, it is alleged that he nevertheless has “money salted away somewhere.” If Mr. Miller is strange or foreign in his habits, that “proves” that “Jews don’t assimilate”. If he is thoroughly American — i.e., indistinguishable from other natives — he is “trying to pass himself off as one of us.” If Mr. Miller fails to give to charity, that is because “Jews are tight”; if he gives generously, he is “trying to buy his way into society.” If Mr. Miller lives in the Jewish section of town, that is because “Jews are so clannish”; if he moves to a locality where there are no other Jews, that is because “they try to horn in everywhere.” In short, Mr. Miller is automatically condemned, no matter who he is or what he does.

But Mr. Miller may be, for all we know, rich or poor, a wife beater or a saint, a stamp collector or a violinist, a farmer or a physicist, a lens grinder or an orchestra leader. If, as the result of our automatic reactions, we put ourselves on guard about our money immediately upon meeting Mr. Miller, we offend a man from whom we might have profited financially, morally, or spiritually, or we may fail to notice his attempts to run off with our wife — that is, we shall act with complete inappropriateness to the actual situation at hand. Mr. Miller is not identical with our notion of “Jew,” whatever our notion of “Jew” may be. The “Jew,” created by intensional definition of the word, simply is not there.