Biases are based
Bias is an integral component of humanity.
If to err is human, then to be biased is evidence of the capacity to be human.
The animal brain, generally speaking, is naturally wired to see the self as the most significant aspect of reality; all information garnered by the brain is filtered through the conception of self in order to mark-up significant pieces of information against insignificant pieces, by a simple filter: what I experience is more important and what affects me is most important.
This is simply how the brain absorbs, compresses and processes information — a crucial function if one is invested in the activity of survival. New information is encoded by its closeness to existing information; and the root of existing information is the fundamental sense of familiarity one has with oneself.
Identity, thus, is the basis of reality; and bias, therein, is the building-block of identity, extended slowly from the fundamental bias of I, the egocentric root of subjective reality, into intersections and interactions of the bounds of that conception with the broader 'world' one experiences to produce that familiar sense of shared/objective reality.
Simply put, we must process information efficiently rather than with absolute authenticity; and how efficiently one processes information determines how well-equipped one is for survival.
Humans, apart from their unusual brains, are also made distinct from other creatures by our incredibly sophisticated and nuanced social cultures. Our societies are naturally designed to amplify the information processed and produced by the individual — into a web of significant but intangible phenomena we refer to as knowledge. And knowledge is, effectively, an additional layer of reality competing with the more-rigid sense of subjective reality (identity) and the shared material reality we experience operating within. To such an extent, that our social (and/or cognitive) maturity takes longer even than our closes mammalian cousins.
And so, it becomes crucial to us add another layer of information processing: one still rooted in the goal of efficiency but that draws away from it to accommodate greater authenticity. (This may well be manifest in that distinct artistic/creative impulse to pursue truth and beauty; or, at least, what one considers true and beautiful.)
Otherwise, by the very nature of sophistication, we become entrapped in a limited reality informed directly by our propensity to qualify personal experience as absolute truth.
We see this most clearly in discussions (and defense) of discrimination and privilege. Without this accommodation for authenticity, one is prone to consider that if one has not experienced discrimination — as dispenser or recipient — then one lives in a world where no consideration for discrimination is necessary.
And as one seeks to expand the veracity of this observation, one is prone to consider it only in degrees of the people and perspectives that one is privy too — such sources/provisions that are often already invisibly constrained by the same spheres of circumstance and influence that one experiences oneself.
If I don't discriminate against queer people and my friends don't, then discrimination (against queer people) does not exist in (my) world. If I don't feel discriminated against and my friends and family don't discriminate against me for being queer, then discrimination does not exist in (my experience of) the world.
We see already that parentheses were required to demarcate the full extent and implications of the statement itself. It is precisely what is contained within those parentheses that becomes effectively invisible in these considerations. This is precisely the root of the problem.
What this leads to is a perception that the reality one experiences is the absolute reality; so, if it does not exist in (my) reality then, obviously, it doesn't exist at all. If I don't experience (the effects of) discrimination then no one experiences discrimination.
Already, we see the blinding effect of ignorance — that an ignorance of ignorance perpetuates ignorance. If I don't see it, it doesn't happen. Not in sight, never in mind.
Already, we have forgotten, that more often than not, one is not even the subject of discrimination; and that this, perhaps, means that the perspective of a person actually subject to discrimination may have no overlap with one's own perspective or even any intersection with one's life. Bias, thus, in the subconscious darkness of the underground, has already taken root.
Yet, the function of bias is neither explicitly positive nor explicitly negative. Implicitly, bias has a positive effect on (individual) survival; whereas, its negative implications arise only in consideration of the spheres beyond just survival — to wit, the spheres of social life.
The function of bias, thus, is to erase the distinction between what 'I experience' and what 'experience itself' entails.
And, to a large extent, if we were like other creatures, the implications would end there. Bias serves individual survival and that is all that is paramount. (Albeit, other social creatures like ants and meerkats, even if less sophisticated, do not benefit from this perspective and, thus, evidently do not adopt it. But that is more nuance than necessary for this discussion.)
If we lived as solitary animals where the vast extents of our actions and decisions began and ended with us, this is all the concern we would ever have to ascribe to the role of bias — namely, none.
However, this has never been the case for humans. And now more than ever, when we have the power to cast our thoughts and words and decisions across the world the flex of a few fingers and the flick of a thumb, it is even lesser the case.
And it is not just the digital world that draws significance to the consideration of biases. Our real, economic, material world is also now more intertwined than ever. Our industries and corporations span continents. Their decisions and goals affect millions with the sweep of a hand — a power not even realised with such ease by the royals of great civilizations in ages past.
Our workplaces are no longer islands, isolated from the rest of the world and ineffective/irrelevant beyond immediate residential concerns. Instead, they are robust networks of globe-spanning archipelagos that affect the economic and ecosystemic state of population well beyond their physical bounds.
All this while we've been trained to believe that we are simply cogs in a machine, inconsequential in the grand scheme of things — a notion that, not coincidentally, serves and nourishes the willful inconsideration of biases.
Yet, these same corporations that sever empathy for operational efficiency would not think twice to cut off individuals that signal even the slightest inefficiency in (serving) their designated purpose.
A cog in a machine may be but a small part but it is never an insignificant part. Every cog in a machine serves its operation and is crucial to it. The ineffectiveness of any cog affects the operation of the whole. The parts are crucial to any simulation of a whole.
Even as a cog in the machine you actively contribute to those globe-spanning decisions that these corporations are able to realise. Your biases, thus, become amplified not just in the collaborative environment of your immediate workplace but amplified also through the impact of the decisions of the corporation whose whose seemingly divine capacity to enact these decisions your labour enables and sustains. A rusty cog would simply be extracted from the machinery and tossed aside; if you still draw a salary, you have yet to accumulate sufficient rust so as to become an impediment to this corporate capacity.
As we dissolve boundaries in the evolution of society, and tear down age-old walls in the progress and progressive interconnection of culture, we also create a civilizational grassland prone to invasion. And these tracts of open land will be invaded by the progeny of the biases seemingly seeded only in our own minds.
Biases no longer begin and end within the concerns of ones survival because even the concerns of ones survival now span the globe and all those operating under its shared climate.
However, in all this we must keep in mind that biases are as witchcraft.
In other words, if we begin to lynch those who betray their own biases or betray any hint of ignorance of their own biases, then we are not acting in our own best interest. Rather, it simply becomes a witch-hunt with a different MacGuffin.
Merely becoming aware of one's biases is also no sign of enlightenment. In fact, awareness by itself offers little by way of reform or even assurance.
If I'm walking down the street and I see a lion, it would be foolish of me to enact an awareness of my biases against lions and choose not to run in the opposite direction. We are biased against lions because we are biased towards survival.
However, it would be equally foolish for me to then give into these biases as absolute reality and consider that all lions everywhere are a threat to me — and that I will, thus, invest all my energy, whatever form that may take, in campaign for the eradication of all lions from the face of the planet.
One must be free to hold and to act on ones biases to the extent that they do not impede on the freedom of another to hold and to act on their biases. The constraints for the permissible ignorance of ones own biases must be proportional to the degree of influence one cultivates and intentionally sustains over ones peers.
We can use the same principle of bias itself for the mitigation of bias: to the extent that one is not affected by the reality of a bias, one need not contest its existence; and to the extent that ones own actions do not impede the capacity to act of another, in good faith, then one may remain ignorant of the same.
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