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In defence of stereotypes Being incomparable has its downsides

'A short, ginger-haired man is probably of Scottish origin, and thus of Protestant lineage.' (William Thomas Cain/Getty Images)

'A short, ginger-haired man is probably of Scottish origin, and thus of Protestant lineage.' (William Thomas Cain/Getty Images)


September 10, 2024   5 mins

Everyone seems to agree that you shouldnā€™t put people in boxes. Men and women are uniquely individual, and therefore not to be stereotyped. Why not, however, isnā€™t so clear. It canā€™t be because all stereotypes are negative and offensive. The Irish, for example, have sometimes been seen as feckless, bone-headed and belligerent, but also as charming, witty and hospitable. This doesnā€™t necessarily make stereotyping any more acceptable, but it does suggest that itā€™s a more complex affair than its critics assume.

Some stereotypes contain a grain of truth in grossly distorted form. The Irish ā€” to stick with them for a moment ā€” are sometimes thought to be indolent as well as anarchic; and though neither accusation is of course true (it was Irishmen who built many of Britainā€™s roads, railways and canals), both have some basis in historical reality.

Planting potatoes, which is how a lot of the Irish traditionally survived, demands no great labour; and on a rented smallholding hard work might not be particularly profitable for the tenant, since what mattered was the size of your farm rather than your rate of productivity. All this might well have looked like laziness to the industrially disciplined masses of Britain. As for the charge that the Irish are a lawless crew, itā€™s worth recalling that for several centuries the law which governed them was imposed by a colonial power largely in the name of its own interests. If the common people were occasionally somewhat cavalier about it, itā€™s hardly surprising.

Thereā€™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, thereā€™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, donā€™t typically go around dressed in long crimson garments while declaiming from Danteā€™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 ā€œMr Eagletonā€ in my first year, ā€œTerenceā€ in my second, and ā€œTerryā€ 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.

“Nobody likes being called Fatso, but plenty of people are glad to be called anti-racist.”

Other stereotypes arenā€™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.

ā€œEverybodyā€™s differentā€ is a popular slogan these days, intended as an antidote to stereotyping. The only problem is that it isnā€™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 ā€” 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 wonā€™t be another Jimmy Savile, which is heartening news. William McGonagallā€™s poem ā€œThe Tay Bridge Disasterā€ 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. Itā€™s hard to conduct a conversation with your bank manager if he is dressed in a gorilla costume. Freedom isnā€™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. Itā€™s a contradiction neatly caught in a quarrel between Willy Loman and his son Biff in Arthur Millerā€™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 ā€œPop, Iā€™m a dime a dozen and so are you!ā€ To which Willy returns the dignified response ā€œI am not a dime a dozen! I am Willy Loman and you are Biff Loman!ā€ And of course they are both right.


Terry EagletonĀ is a critic, literary theorist, and UnHerd columnist.


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Tony Taylor
Tony Taylor
3 months ago

My motto: Stereotypes save time.

Gordon Black
Gordon Black
3 months ago
Reply to  Tony Taylor

Yes, I have been on many induction courses prior to working in another culture. All the strict etiquettes and taboos regarding the foreign mores and customs were taught: The content based on “all tarred with the same brush” stereotypical behaviour appeared a bit ‘racist’ but was in fact very good advice, especially ‘how to stay safe’ and ‘save time’.

Bret Larson
Bret Larson
3 months ago

What pap.

Brett H
Brett H
3 months ago
Reply to  Bret Larson

Yes. I guess bills must be paid.

Seb Dakin
Seb Dakin
3 months ago

Weird, flimsy essay.
“To be an individual is to be incomparable.” That’s utter nonsense – anyone can be compared to anyone else.
And economics exists to solve/address the problem of scarcity. If everyone was different then it just means they have different preferences, which is entirely why the free market system is so good, and command economies are so awful.
You wouldn’t want a bank manager in a gorilla costume because ideally you’d want him or her to take their role and your money seriously. It’s got nothing to do with stereotyping.
I could go on.

John Tyler
John Tyler
3 months ago
Reply to  Seb Dakin

Stereotypes give us certain expectations.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
2 months ago
Reply to  Seb Dakin

That is the problem of wokness.

Andrew R
Andrew R
3 months ago

Representativeness heuristic.

Rasmus Fogh
Rasmus Fogh
3 months ago

Good, sensible article (if a little meandering). The biggest point is this one:

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. 

Stereotypes (like social conventions) allow us a rough, first-approximation idea that we can use to deal with strangers, and we need that for everyday life to work. If we had to have a deep, intimate knowledge of people’s personality before we could buy a shirt or ask the way to the station, social life would be impossible.
Moreover, stereotypes would tend to be based on some kernel of truth – even if it is not always the one you think it is. Deborah Tannen, the psycholinguist, found that populations stereotyped as slow and stupid tended to be those where custom dictated that you should speak slowly and leave pauses, whereas those stereotyped as pushy and aggressive (New York Jews?) were those where the custom was to talk fast and interrupt. Neither of which speak to the underlying intelligence or level of aggression.

Bret Larson
Bret Larson
3 months ago
Reply to  Rasmus Fogh

Stereotypes contain kernels of untruth which is the problem.

Benedict Waterson
Benedict Waterson
3 months ago
Reply to  Rasmus Fogh

Burkean

Saul D
Saul D
3 months ago

All Olympic sprinters run fast. Therefore they are all the same…

Jon Barrow
Jon Barrow
3 months ago
Reply to  Saul D

Yes, at running fast.

Don Lightband
Don Lightband
3 months ago

Frankly i can’t think of anyone who might bring life joy and colour.back to Britain than he who Mr Eagleton calls “another Jimmy Savile”

George Davies
George Davies
3 months ago

The proper use of the word discrimination means choosing based on rational preconceptions derived from past knowledge or experience.

Martin Goodfellow
Martin Goodfellow
3 months ago

I loved the image of a bank manager in a gorilla costume. It’s not stereotypical, but it does sound like fun! No doubt, someone who would dress like that would be likely to give you a loan.

Lancashire Lad
Lancashire Lad
3 months ago

I agree… but when was the last time anyone actually consulted a bank manager about anything?

Simon Blanchard
Simon Blanchard
3 months ago
Reply to  Lancashire Lad

Thatā€™s why bank managers have been done away with.

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
3 months ago

Stereotypes tend to be grounded in a measure of truth.

Benedict Waterson
Benedict Waterson
3 months ago
Reply to  Alex Lekas

There are some bad ones, but the liberal bien pensant idea that all stereotypes are always bad is ironically just a stereotype šŸ˜‰

John Tyler
John Tyler
3 months ago

Unlike some fellow readers, I rather enjoyed the article. It is gently humourous yet makes a serious point: stereotypes are not harmful or demeaning per se.

Benedict Waterson
Benedict Waterson
3 months ago

Nice essay, Mr. Eagleton.
But I love William Mcgonagall

Andrea Rudenko
Andrea Rudenko
3 months ago

Does this essay say anything that isn’t self evident? That contributes to our greater understanding of anything? What, exactly, was the author’s point in writing this? UnHerd must be desperate for content.

Christopher Barclay
Christopher Barclay
3 months ago

For once an interesting Terry Eagleton article that defies the stereotype.

Geoff W
Geoff W
3 months ago

“Planting potatoes, which is how a lot of the Irish traditionally survived, demands no great labour.”
I doubt that Prof. Eagleton is speaking from personal experience.

Tyler Durden
Tyler Durden
3 months ago

I’m not sure why this should come from the Left because stereotypes perpetuate racism and bigotry finds much in group identities to justify such attitudes..
However, stereotypical evaluationss of human nature also prop up socialism so I see how he got there.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
2 months ago

I never ever had the idea that the Irish were lazy. In America we do not have this idea about the Irish. They were pulled off ships and inducted into the Army to fight in the Civil War and along with the Chinese built the railroads, not forgetting the skyscrapers of the East. What I know is, according to my grandfather, you could always identify an English farm in Minnesota as it was unkept. He considered them indolent; he was of Irish background.

Richard Craven
Richard Craven
2 months ago

One man’s stereotype is another man’s heuristic.