People seem to love to categorize things. One of the things we love to categorize is other people. We categorize by sex and gender and race and age and educational level and many many other things.
Men, women.
Masculine, feminine.
Homosexual, heterosexual.
Black, White, Asian….
Senior citizen, generation X, generation Y, boomer.
Graduate, dropout
Democrat, Republican
Conservative, liberal.
Christian, Jew…..
and so on.
Are any of these categories real? Do they “carve nature at its joints”? (I forget who came up with that memorable line)
I doubt it.
There are many people who, when asked “Are you male or female?” can only answer ‘No’. There are people who are masculine or feminine, and there are some who aren’t much of either, and there are some who are so hyper-masculine or feminine that they seem almost parodies of gender roles. A woman where I work is one-quarter Black, one quarter American Indian, one quarter Scottish, and one quarter a mixture of other European countries; pray tell, what should she mark for ‘race/ethnicity’? (oh, and she grew up in a Jewish neighborhood and speaks some Yiddish).
People aren’t born in generations, they’re born in years. And their attitudes don’t necessarily mesh with any particular ‘generation’. I was born in 1959. Does that make me a boomer?
I’ve got a PhD, but I dropped out of law school. My father has a law degree, but no BA. The best professor I had in grad school dropped out of his own PhD program.
I count myself a Democrat, and have only once voted otherwise, but there is that once; others have split tickets or changed parties many times.
I’m very very liberal on social issues, somewhat liberal on most economic issues…. but even conservative on some issues.
I was raised Jewish, but am an atheist; of the religions I’ve studied, I find taoism most appealing, but I can’t really call myself a taoist.
and so on.
Why do we divide?
Divisions define. We define ourselves, in part, by what we are not . But this division process destroys solidarity. Robert Coles studied the moral life of children (in a book of that title) and one of his conclusions is that moral children tend not to see an ‘us’ and a ‘them’, but only ‘us’. When we call some people ‘them’ we become freer to treat ‘them’ badly. “They”, after all, are, by definition, not “us”. This can be an attempt to make ourselves feel good about ourselves by saying that, whatever we are, we are at least not ‘them’ – maybe, if we stop defining a ‘them’ we will start trying to make ourselves feel good by doing good. Instead of digging holes for others, we might build mountains for us all. Being ‘good’ doesn’t necessarily mean being ‘better’ – it’s only when we define ourselves in terms of an ‘us’ and ‘them – an ‘I and thou’ that we need to rate ourselves by comparing ourselves with others.
But if we treat people as existing on various continua, then there is no ‘them’. There is no one to stigmatize, no one to separate out and ignore or defile or defame.
There are only people who are more or less like ourselves. And we are all ourselves; in the words of a Sesame Street song: “We are all earthlings, spinning around together, on a planet of the sun”.
Maybe, if we all start to see ourselves as one ‘us’ we can start treating each other better.
I think it’s worth a shot.
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but have never been able to confirm it.
There’s two kinds of people in the world: those who think there’s two kinds of people in the world, and those who don’t.
that’s all I got, back to jammin with Willie Dixon on youtube.
but don’t the scientists call this “pattern recognition.” I seem to recall learning that our brains do this to categorize the myriads of information that comes in through our senses.
In the movie “What the Bleep” they even went to far as to say that we don’t “see” things that don’t fit a pre-existing pattern.
With all that said, I think that as the world becomes more and more complex, we are tending to rely on our “patterns” way to much. In language I’ve used here before, it becomes a shortcut for treating people as objects rather than subjects.
I know that in my professional field (working with troubled youth and families) the whole medical model of categorizing by diagnosis is taking over a field where we used to rely on relationships for healing. There are a few of us that are fighting that trend, but it gets lonely sometimes.
children to understand continua rather than binaries? That seems to be the crux of the issue, if I’m not mistaken: our divisive worldview comes out of a constant defining of ‘us’ and ‘them’, so if you want to curb it you have to start at the beginning.
Teaching binaries is easy – teaching continua is not. So what do you do?
I’ll also flip this around on you: we read ‘us’ v. ‘them’ as a negative phenomenon, but for minority groups it’s a necessary process to keep from being absorbed into the majority. The process of differentiation allows them to define themselves as unique against the mainstream, which in turn allows for a better understanding of unique identity.
Tricky, tricky.
Competitive people think that another’s gain is automatically their loss. Cooperative people tend to view others’ success as a lift for everyone. I guess we are all a bit of both, but regarding to ideology, policy and of course politics it seems the divide is so sharp as to suggest we have all evolved from two very different tribes.
why we appear to need to pigeonhole people and all their activities is one of my most deep seated questions regarding ‘the meaning of existence’. Right now I need to read the comments and the diary more carefully because this is probably the bedrock foundation of all our prejudices, bigotry, preferences, hopes and fears. It deserves a great deal more attention than either a smart, a dumb, a cursory, or asuperficial quip.
I would like to put forward for discussion though my own pet incomprehension, that is the question of IDENTITY. The hyphenated American, be it race, creed, color, gender, sexual preference et al.
In the face of the extreme possibility in the next 100 years of all of us being citizens of the whole world, or reverted to post apocalypse survivors, this is a subject that interests me hugely.
I am a British born female in the last innings of this game on earth. Of course i do believe in re-incarnation and UFO’s. I subscribe as a rebel to the philosophy of, I think it was Groucho Marx, I wouldn’t want to belong to a club that would accept me. My standards are far higher than that.
Inside
Each time
a class of people
is defined
humanity is divided
hewed like an old log
Just like that log
destruction occurs
at the point
where the axe strikes
But the damage done
to the people
in the path of the cut
is much more serious
than the harm done
to some old wood
Race cuts like a saber
through individuals
of mixed ancestry
Can you feel their pain?
How feels the slice
of the katana
of ethnicity
to someone
whose grandparents
hail from four different cultures?
Blood spurts
from the laceration
of the gender scimitar
through those
not exactly
men or women
I live
on the edge
of that blade
–Robyn Elaine Serven
–March 30, 2006
… destroying exercise by which we cope with information overload.
Definitions don’t carve nature at the joints, except in very rare cases … they point to what seems to be a cluster in the continuum, and name it.
Where they become dangerous is the fact that we, as social animals, require that the behavior of our fellows follows regular patterns, so that we can make enough sense of that behavior to organize our own behavior … we require a social syntax and a social semantics to work together.
And a long time ago, when it was in some places no longer possible to settle disputes in the band by splitting with the dissident group heading off to empty terrain … because there was no longer any empty terrain that could sustain a dissident band … and social definitions started to become part of the network for flows of coercive power, organized in pyramid structures … definitions started to be use to create boundaries between insiders and outsiders.
And things really started to go to hell in a handbasket, and we called it civilization.
answering questions about my “race”. If we are all “equal” then why ask.
I stopped answering questions about my age. Age puts one in the proper marketing demographic and I rank marketing slightly above pedophilia as worthy human endeavors.
Most certainly there is a “them”. “They” want to assign me a label.
those who think there are two types of people in the world, and those who don’t.