My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 3 #35, March 2, 1998

CATEGORICAL DENIAL

I have an e-mail friend I have never met, who lives in a place I have never seen, southwestern Colorado. When he tells me about the places he visits in his day to day life, I have a devil of a time figuring out where they are, because they are as likely to be in New Mexico or Arizona or Utah as in Colorado. His life is spread over four separate maps in my atlas, widely separated from each other by alphabetical order. What I needed was a map of the whole Four Corners area, which he sent me when he realized how truly foggy I was about his environs.

This is one of those case where displaying a continent by one category, political boundaries, meets one need but not others. It's useful enough for anybody traveling within that state, but not at all useful for somebody who needs to cross those arbitrary boundaries. Nor is this the only case where our categories end up getting in the way of understanding.

Categories have their uses, God knows. It was a clear evolutionary advantage for us to notice that whenever anybody ate a particular kind of mushroom they went into convulsions and died, and therefore conclude that that KIND of mushroom was poisonous. Being able to generalize knowledge from the specific to the group level is what suggests to us it is advisable to avoid pitbulls, and what makes us reasonably sure that a size 7AA shoe will fit and that food in Mexican restaurants will be spicy. Our categories impose a sense of order on the world, making it possible to propose explanations and make predictions.

But when they obscure the genuine messiness of reality, they can get us in trouble, as when a white woman at an elegant party hands her coat to a well-dressed black man--who is also a guest. Our categories may make it difficult for us to see all the other possibilities outside the box. Students think of research, for instance, as "what you do inside libraries." But if you're going to research the economic downturn in the Quad-Cities in the 1980's, as one of our students is doing, there are places BESIDES libraries that in all likelihood have relevant documents--labor unions, food pantries, welfare agencies, even the companies that were forced to lay workers off.

Sometimes our categories are based on formal considerations. The internet comes to us by way of computers, so people assume computer techies are the people who know how to find information on the net. I beg to differ. The people who know how to find information, regardless of the form it comes in, are librarians. The computer professionals I know are way too busy installing equipment and fixing people's problems to have had time to find anything on the net except maybe all the good Linux sites.

Sometimes our categories are the names we give things. There was a treasure hunt once where the thing that utterly stumped most of the players was "a board about 6' by 3'." They asked at house after house, and nobody had one. Except, of course, everybody had several, had they been willing to take one of them off its hinges. What is a door, after all, but a polished board, about 6' by 3', with a little hardware on it?

There's a snobbishness about our categories in art and literature--they're used to define what is "serious" and what is not. Consider the gorgeous art work in children's picture books--the Escher-like fantasies of Mitsumatsa Anno, Sendak's fantasmagorical wild things, Brian Wildsmith's exercise in color as design in Materlinck's Blue Bird. And yet, because it is done for children, it is never thought of as being REAL art. In The Dark Crystal, Jim Henson and Brian Froude made up an entire planet, creating from pure imagination its astronomy and animals and landscapes and races of people. Their built from scratch world was surreally beautiful, but the film was not even nominated for best art design--because, I think, it was thought of as a "children's movie," not a REAL movie.

There are plenty of other categories that prevent art from being taken seriously. It took years for Kurt Vonnegut to be appreciated as a serious writer because his novels dealt with machines and with the future, and therefore were "science fiction," not literature. And while they say "Dying is easy. Comedy is hard," comic acting is almost never viewed as real acting--how often does a best actor award go to somebody like Jack Lemmon or Walter Matthau for a comic performance?

The worst thing we do with our categories, though, is attach fixed attributes to groups of people--women are nurturing, men don't get it, old people are senile. It's an insidious way of limiting people's possibilities. In this country, educators often assume that an IQ of 90 means children CAN'T grasp difficult subjects, so they teach them less, demand less achievement from them. In Japan, it is assumed that all children can master any subject if they work hard enough. In each case, children live up to, or down to, their teachers' expectations.

Our categories are double-edged weapons. In important ways, they enable our thinking; science, after all, is a way of thinking that is built on generalizing from the specific, and testing our generalizations. But there is a long time lag between when a groundbreaking, category-shattering theory is proposed and when it is generally accepted, because a whole lot of scientists who believe in their existing categories have to die first and get out of the way.

Overly broad categories are the essence of bumper-sticker politics--and my response to soundbites and bumper-stickers is always , "well, yes, but...". If you can say it in ten words or less, it's engaging, it's simple, it's sweeping, and it's at least partly wrong. The trick becomes to use all our our categories while keeping in mind that they are useful lies, that allow us to assume certain things, and make predictions, without explaining everything about every individual within the categories. While we use them we need to keep one corner of our mind nudging us, saying, "well, yes, but..."