Now that I think of it

I missed the boat on yesterday’s post.

I quoted Elie Wiesel:

“No human race is superior; no religious faith is inferior. All collective judgments are wrong. ”

As I have pondered it more, here’s what I was trying to say, but failed to do so clearly.  Collective judgments are wrong.  They are wrong literally because they are not true.  No matter what _____ is, all African-Americans are not _____.  All Muslims are not _____.  All Caucasians are not _____.  Many may be _____, perhaps even most, but not all.  That would be like saying no one ever wins the lottery.  Granted, the odds may be 1:26,458,224, but someone wins.

Collective judgments are also morally wrong because they shortchange/ underestimate/ discriminate against the entire group based on a perception which is (see above) simply not true.

That said, prejudice and collective judgments are real time-savers – just not factually or morally correct ones.  It becomes easy to default to collective judgment; it seems to require less of me than actually assessing each person for who or what they are.

There, that’s more to my point.