Heroes Not Zombies

What colour is the sea? Is it sea green?

Is it deep blue?

Is it dark grey?

Is it fiery red?

Of course the answer is – all of the above – and more.

I’m not a fan of labels. I understand the value of classification to organise our thoughts or our filing cabinets, but labels hide so much more than they reveal.

We develop a mental habit based on re-cognition – we say, I know what that is, I’ve seen one like it before. It’s an incredibly useful skill, and we can’t really function without it. But the danger is that we use this ability to stop instead of seeing it as a start.

Yes, it’s really helpful to recognise something and put it in a box with a label on it (literally or metaphorically) but we never fully see, so never completely know, anything or anyone. So, recognition is a good starting place, but we have to be ready to let go of those initial assessments as we start to see more detail, start to see the particular, not just the general.

I was taught this as a core skill – taught to make a diagnosis by recognising certain signs, symptoms and patterns, but always exploring further to move from seeing the disease to seeing the person who was ill.

I often think of this when people divide others into groups, dismissing them because they have put them in a particular box labelled with a political party, a religion, a skin colour or a sexual orientation.

There’s enormous danger in recognising, classifying, labelling and generalising. It leads to all kinds of prejudice (pre-judging) and, frankly, to the de-humanising of individuals.

I always want to know more about someone than I already do. I always want to be surprised as I discover that nobody fits neatly into any labelled box.

There’s a teaching from the “General Semanticists” – “Judgement stops thought” – which alerts us to the danger of using labels.

Everyone and everything is richer, deeper, more nuanced, more multifaceted than first appears.