Hillary Rodham Clinmton, Royal Festival Hall, London, Octiber, 2017. Dominic Lipinski/ Press Association. All rights reserved. Have we developed a habit that handicaps our ability to understand the world? This habit, it seems to me, is the impulse for people to try to quickly categorize what they encounter, as though categorization is entirely synonymous with understanding things. It appears to me that people seem to be falling into a trap of thinking that once you have found the “box” to put something in, you understand it. Categorizing a phenomenon may be an integral part of the process of understanding it. But it is disastrous, in my view, to assume that they are one and the same.
This appears in many different ways. One way is that, in response to a person’s actions, people look to a category that the person fits into to explain those actions, while doing so in a way that adds very little to their understanding of the phenomenon of interest. For example, around the 2016 election in the US, a friend of mine made some critical comments about Hillary Clinton. His family members, who were Hillary Clinton supporters, quickly asked him if he was a Bernie Sanders supporter, because, in their eyes, this would explain why he would criticize their preferred candidate. To explain his actions, they looked for a category to put him in which only confirmed their prejudices. To them, their way of making sense of things was not to look at the substance, but about looking at a category to explain things in a way that fits what they already knew about the world.
The categorization impulse manifests itself in many ways that don’t seem to be a problem, at least on the surface. Another example – I am frequently overseas, and often travel and work simultaneously. Someone recently asked me what I do and before I had the chance to explain very much, he asked, “So you are a digital nomad?” I didn’t quite know what this meant; I thought maybe he was talking about Mongolian yurt-dwellers with cell phones or the Sami in Lapland that order supplies on Amazon. When I finally understood, I said that perhaps I fit that definition, yes. But from my perspective, this category didn’t actually provide much information about myself and it probably obscured just about everything that I felt was interesting or significant that I would have otherwise answered. A few moments later, I mentioned that I write occasionally, and he said “oh, so you’re a content writer?”. I said, “How do you write something that isn’t content?” He had what seemed to me like an overdeveloped impulse to categorize…it was almost as though he felt that categorization is the task of any responsible person trying to make sense of things. I don’t question the sincerity of these intentions. I only question the efficacy of this as a means of making sense of the world. It was clear to me that despite the fact that this individual was very honestly and sincerely motivated by a simple desire to understand and relate to me, the process by which he was trying to do so actually prevented him from understanding much at all. And yet, this process is very very common. Uncertainty and complexity don’t feel comfortable for most people.
