The Danger of Categories

What is it about human culture that makes us gravitate toward binaries? We thrive in the realm of ‘black or white,’ ‘male or female,’ ‘good or bad,’ ‘us or them.’ And it’s the last one, us or them that is presently causing me the most grief. Is it the fault of our language, or the fault of our thought processes as determined by nature or physiology, that leads us to rely so heavily on categorization as a means to organize and understand our perception of the world?

People love groups. We love to group things. This is this type of thing. This is that type of thing. They are this type of people. There are some pretty basic incarnations of this often limiting habit: grocery store aisles, restaurant menus, a phonebook (if anyone remembers what those are.) The danger in accepting this worldview as the norm is not its necessarily inclusion, but exclusion. By including filet mignon on only the ‘dinner’ section of a restaurant menu, we are saying “filet mignon is neither a breakfast food nor a lunch food.” But is that true about filet mignon? Are we not receiving the same amount of calories and nutrition and flavor no matter when in the day we eat filet mignon?

This is where social discrimination comes from. Despite the continuum of human skin color, we see black, white, brown, (and formerly yellow and red). If you are not one, you must be the other. If you are not young, you must be old. If you are not man, you must be woman. But the truth is complex. And it may be in complexity that the problem lies. Is it so easy to view the world categorically that we fall into the habit by way of laziness?

It’s easy to form groups. Waiting in any food service line that’s moving too slowly, doesn’t it become incomparably easy to talk to the stranger in front of or behind you? “This is ridiculous, why is it taking so long?” “I know, right?” Instantly you’re connected because you realize you’re in the same group of people; you’re all in a group of hungry people with things to do other than wait in a line. Dare I mention Team Edward and Team Jacob? It’s easy to create a social ‘other.’ It’s easy to say “I like/dislike people that are/do x.”

But people are more complex than that. We each know that about our individual selves, but find it difficult to see that in our other human companions. We organize in categories, and allow this to inform our view of things that are unable to be categorized. Like, yeah, you can say that lemons and bananas are both Yellow Fruits, but ultimately, one is a lemon, and one is a banana. They serve different functions. They are distinct and unique and individual. We must adopt a means of understanding the world that is as complex as the world we’re trying to understand.