Hear ye, Hear ye! The stereotypes are coming!

Liberal orthodoxy dictates that stereotypes are necessarily evil; manifestations of lazy thinking and unfair generalisations - which lead inevitably to prejudice against groups and consequent discrimination. I remember vividly sitting with two hundred addle-minded girls in an undergraduate social psychology lecture theatre as a flow chart demonstrating this very progression was displayed in full Orwellian splendour on the big screen up front. (Let me underline, before going on, that they weren’t addle-minded because they were girls – it just happens that social psych students tend to lack critical thinking, and also happen to be overwhelmingly female. If your eyes are disdainfully rolling already, this piece is probably going to irritate you).

Nevertheless, we’re taught that stereotypes are not merely destructive (e.g. a prevailing belief among men that women lack critical thinking capabilities), but that they are necessarily wrong. This always bugged me. Such dogma seems predicated on the fantasy that there is some subterranean factory someplace where Machiavellian little toads rub their hands in glee, whispering, “What injury can we cause to group X today? What dastardly untruth shall we concoct and how best can we disseminate it to the unthinking masses?”

This theory – albeit deliberately absurd – has never seemed at all satisfactory. Stereotypes are neither malevolently constructed nor arbitrary. It may very well be that some do cause hurt in some situations. But a line must be drawn between group stereotypes on the one hand (“Americans understand less about the world outside their country than most other nationalities do”), and on the other, downright falsehoods for evil ends (“Jews drink babies’ blood”; “Muslims value life less than us”).

My point – which I have taken a laborious route in arriving at – is that stereotypes for the most part have basis in fact. A de facto social peer review means that the collective observations of outsiders are honed and passed on and modified and affirmed until they become prevailing wisdom. This doesn’t make them wrong. Whenever a broad statement is made, (“men are rubbish at interpersonal communication compared with women”; “women are usually incapable of reading maps”), the familiar retort from the listener (“Tut tut…that’s such a generalisation!”) drives me round the bend. Of course it’s a generalisation! Of course there are many exceptions! Are we to add a defensive caveat or footnote every time we opine on group characteristics? Has political correctness watered down the expression of opinion such that we speak in tortured parentheses?

It drives me bloody mad.

Anyway, this is all by way of saying that I seldom find stereotypes to be outrightly unjust. Having just spent a week in Switzerland (one of the few European countries I had never spent any proper time in before) and having been in both the French and Germans regions and both urban and rural, I have this to conclude: The Swiss really are as everyone imagines. Exceptionally organised, professional and impressive at virtually everything they do. They seem fanatical about cleanliness, (I’m writing on the train at the moment, I just popped to the toilet with the usual miserable apprehension one has when approaching a public convenience in a moving vehicle and found it so clean one would have no justified compunction sleeping there – space notwithstanding), they’re rather isolationist, deeply protestant and very proud of their country.

To digress for a moment – it’s been a particularly interesting week to be here. The general elections are next month and the Swiss People’s Party (you can probably guess their position on the spectrum – why do all fringe groups have such self-reverentially populist names?) has been plastering posters all over the country, depicting a group of white sheep standing on a Swiss flag, kicking a sole black sheep off of it. Subtle – à la “Are you thinking what we’re thinking?”(Tory Party, 2005) – it is not. And it is the kind of overtly racist populism that would provoke a vociferous outcry in any Anglo-Saxon country.

It’s made the foreign press (it was in fact my father in Australia who alerted me to it) and my impromptu anecdotal research into the issue (haranguing baristas, a couple of interviewees and friends’ friends to understand more) has led me to the conclusion that:

1. The Swiss do think that the Swiss are racist;
2. But the urban Swiss think it’s only the rural hillbillies; and
3. The French Swiss blame the German Swiss and vice versa.

The outside opinion of the Swiss is, I think, that their cultural and ideological isolation is probably a function of their geography and history. Topographically impenetrable to armies, the Swiss have never troubled themselves with trifles such as membership of international organisations or military coalitions. And the extraordinary wealth of the country – particularly in the two major cities – is a relatively modern thing. Aside from the astonishing, almost eye-watering natural beauty of alpine Switzerland, Geneva and Zurich’s streets are paved with gold Because Of The War. Something they don’t like to talk about very much.

I should wrap up because there are Americans reading this and we all know they have the attention spans of gnats with ADD, so I’ll finish with my splendid discovery last week that the Germans refer to the Dutch as Kaaskoppen (sic) – “Cheeseheads” – and that the Dutch call the Germans the Moffen (sic again) – an acronym-made-collective-noun for “People Without Friends”. I mention this only to observe that national stereotypes are really no different from general pejoratives. You take them with a pinch of salt, you laugh at the recognition that the Germans are friendless, the Italians idle, the French arrogant in a way which nowadays covers up a real lack of national self-esteem, the English either desperately stiff or mortifyingly ill-behaved, the Americans big-hearted but without irony or nuance, and the Australians friendly and simple larrikins.

I could go on, but it would only invite further indignation from the aforementioned among you. Suffice to say that – as far as I’m concerned – I love stereotypes. I love it when they’re affirmed. I love it when they’re resisted. I love learning new ones. I love discovering what different peoples think of each other. I love how the macrosocial machine comes up with easy ways to lump people together. I love being vindicated and I love being surprised. And travel is the only way to love it all, to learn it all, to drink it all in, even if you end up with conclusions which invite opprobrium from those who never questioned the prevailing orthodoxy that Stereotypes are Evil.

So all you addle-minded girls can just fuck right off.