Rebecca Solnit wrote, “Categories too often become where thought goes to die. That is, there’s a widespread tendency to act as if once something has been categorised, no further consideration is required. But, often, it is.”
When I read this I thought of some of the writings of the General Semanticists, especially the phrase, “Judgement stops thought”.
We humans have a tendency to privilege the work of our left cerebral hemisphere which is our powerhouse for stripping out details, generalising what it encounters and applying labels, before setting its work into categories…..neat, separate, distinct, categories.
The trouble is, once we’ve done that, and once we start putting whatever we encounter into one of those categories, we stop seeing the uniqueness of “here and now”. We stop seeing the uniqueness of this particular person. We stop seeing a person at all.
There was a strong element of this in my training at Medical School, where they taught us pathologies before they taught us about people. Teachers and students would say things like “Have you seen the hepatomegaly in Ward 2”, or “Have you listened to the heart murmur in bed 14?” I first encountered cirrhosis of the liver in pathology class. It was in a perspex box filled with formalin so the diseased liver inside wouldn’t deteriorate any further. It was a good three years later before I encountered a human being suffering from cirrhosis of the liver (in Ward 2). This kind of thinking is still pretty dominant in Clinical Medicine. When I was a visiting a relative in hospital I overheard a nurse in the corridor say to a colleague “Have you taken blood from bed six yet?” (and I thought, good luck with that, getting blood out of a bed!)
I recently read an interview with a Paris-based oncologist, who was describing how he was using “Integrative Medicine”. He said he realised that all his chemotherapy, his radiotherapy and his surgical procedures were directed at pathology, but nothing he was doing was specifically directed towards patients. So, he began to explore, learn about, and use, a variety of interventions which engaged with the individual, unique patients, to hear their stories, to understand what they were experiencing in their lives, and to support their recovery and healing. This isn’t a new idea, but it still gets reported as if it is new.
The tendency to label and categorise seems to be on the rise. “Asylum seekers” become “illegal immigrants” become “immigrants” who should be denied the rights and privileges of those whose ancestors arrived in the country before them. In the apparently increasingly divided USA, billionaires, politicians, and evangelicals, talk about “Good vs Evil”. The President frequently applies the label “hard Left” to anyone who disagrees with his policies. Derogatory labels like “libtard” are thrown around. People are accused of being “woke”, although it seems nigh impossible to get anyone who uses that term to describe exactly what it means…..and so on. All of these terms, all of this way of thinking, tends to dehumanise….and that makes it easier to hate, easier to be cruel, easier to make life difficult for whoever is being targeted.
What’s the way out of this?
I suspect it will involve using our whole brain instead of only half of it.
The right hemisphere helps us to appreciate the whole, helps us to see connections and contexts. Looking for connections and contexts is a great way to punch holes in the labelled boxes. It’s a great way to make impermeable categories, leaky and permeable.
The reality is we are not all separate, living in entirely different boxes. We are unique, and that uniqueness arises from our individual complex web of connections and relationships. When we start to look for connections, we see the ways out of the separated boxes. We start to see humans again.
But it isn’t just uniqueness which emerges from these connections and relationships, it’s a discovery of what we have in common, of what we share. It’s a realisation that our similarities matter just as much as our differences, and, luckily, our brains have evolved to be able to handle such paradoxes magnificently…if only we would resort to using our whole brains and not stopping thought at labels and categories.
Heroes Not Zombies 