Groups or Categories?

David Brin, one of my favorite science fiction writers, has a post on, among other things, how the left tends to view "nurture" as predominant and the right tends to view "nature" as predominant in the old "nature/nurture" debate http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2005/08/emotional-roots-for-hypocricies-of.html. The left sees mankind as infinitely malleable, and the right sees mankind as hard wired for success or failure, a rationalization for prejudice against the poor or members of other ethnic categories or creeds. For Brin, the modernist recognizes that nature AND nurture are at work on mankind in a complex dynamic. We are born with certain dispositions, but we are also highly adaptable, and neither an appeal to nature or to nurture can justify oppression, either from the left or the right.

Part of the post touched on one of my interests, the tendency to lump other people into "groups" and to treat them other than as individuals. I reckon that this is an innate disposition, this lumping behavior, and it makes some sense as an algorithm for dealing with strangers. We can't really know everyone we encounter, and it may make sense to extrapolate from experience with similar people. (If the people with the curly hair attacked you last time, it is prudent to give any curly haired people a wide berth.) It is amazing to me how readily we group people on the basis of relatively superficial characteristics: tattoos, hairstyles, clothing styles, skin pigmentation, apparent age, musical tastes, consumption patterns, etc. And we not only group them, we attribute to them a complete set of values, attitudes, beliefs and dispositions. We remember the times we seemed to be right, and we conveniently forget any of the evidence that our stereotypes were wrong. It is really idiotic when such stereotyping becomes the basis for legislation and public policy decisions.

In anthropology, the word "group" connotes an organization with members. "Category" denotes an aggregation of individuals possessing one or more common characteristics but having no real organization. The "Knights of Columbus" is a group; "Catholic men" is a category. "NOW" is a group; "women" is a category. "NAACP" is a group; "Americans of African descent" is a category. "US Government" is a group; "subjects of the USG" is a category. Where we frequently go wrong in social interaction is when we take a category and treat it as a group. This allows us to talk about "black/white people", "the French", "rich/poor people", "upper/lower/middle class" and any category along any dimension as if they represented a collective body and as if they shared characteristics and interests beyond the dimensions on which the purported "group" is predicated. It makes as much sense to speak of "thousand island dressing eaters" as a meaningful aggregate. If we talk about the "1000 island eaters" enough, we will start to "reify" the category as a real world social phenomenon. It makes sense to talk about categories when these have significance, eg if I sell 1000 island dressing and want to market my product, if I want to study disparate effects of drugs on racial categories, or if I am working on a "class theory". Otherwise, the generalizations are not all that useful and, in fact, may be harmful.

One of the good points of libertarianism is that it explicitly recognizes each of us as an individual rather than as a member of a collective. Group membership is necessarily a voluntary act, and this stance should make it somewhat more difficult for a libertarian to fall into the cognitive "lumping" trap than it is for folks with some other ideology. Libertarianism also entails peaceful coexistence with and a high degree of tolerance of folks who differ from us in a variety of ways. Accordingly, even if we irrationally lump people into groups when we are really dealing with categories, we can't do as much harm as statists who would not hesitate to use coercion to promote or outlaw the "group" or some of its putative characteristics. Statists have used racial categories as a basis for enslavement and disenfranchisement and slaughter. They have used nationality as a basis for killing or deporting or interning people. They have used ethnic categories for preferential treatment, and they have used them to profile for criminality. In the hands of statists, the lumping tendency is a dangerous cognitive disorder that can be used to get people to tolerate almost any invasion of freedom in the name of security against the malevolent "other" or in the name of protecting the shiftless and improvident "other" from themselves.

Fight the cognitive disorder. Try not to think of me as a Honda driving, bleu cheese dressing eating, churchgoing, early middle-aged, caucasian/Amerindian, married, straight, male, southern born, dog loving, libertarian, history buff with asthma and a hiatal hernia. Think of me as your unique conspecific who might just surprise you by stepping out of my "demographic". I will try to do the same for you.