Evils Done in the Name of Categories

In the wake of the mass shooting in Orlando, Florida, and after the initial shock and horror and heartsickness, I’m going to expand a bit on my last post, Hating Categories. Initially, I wanted to leave the last post as my only comment here. I still feel such horror and grief and anger that I don’t want to respond to it as a thinker.  But those emotions also carry me into seeing the suffering that people cause through their categorizations. So I’m adding some quick perceptions about the negative side of categories.
 
Since I write about genres, I write about categories. In some ways I’m a defender of genres and other categories. Yes, they normalize behavior, but that’s good as well as bad. Yes, they constrain writers and readers, but without such constraint there can be no creativity. All topics I’ve written about in scholarly works quite a bit.
 
But the categories work against us, too. In the mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, on June 12, 2016, that terrorist act targeted a category of human beings. Categories have very real consequences in our very real worlds.

 Photo scene of Orlando nightclub shooting: Credit Phelan M. Ebenhack/Associated Press 

So, without over-intellectualizing and distancing from the emotional pain of that horrible event, I want to return to the conclusions from psychological research that I posted about earlier. Based on the New York Times article by Tom Vanderbilt, I summarized points on The Psychology of Genre, repeated below. My additions below each point in that bulleted list today: What can be the painful results of categorizing?

• We love to categorize: “The human brain is a pattern-matching machine. Categories help us manage the torrent of information we receive and sort the world into easier-to-read patterns.”

Sorting the world into patterns that are easier to read allows us to ignore the information that doesn’t suit us, or the information that contradicts those categories. “Ah, some people are gay” (probably even ignoring the more complex category of LGBTQ). A category that sorts individual human beings becomes “those people.”

• When we perceive the world in categories, it affects how we see the world. “when we put things into a category, research has found, they actually become more alike in our minds.” Or, as genre research has repeatedly demonstrated in one of the most profound statements: We shape genres, and genres shape us.

Once we have sorted people into categories, those people “become more alike in our minds.” Forget all the variations that are humans, “those people are all alike.”

• But that shaping is social, too, not just cognitive. We perceive differences that our social groups also perceive. Consider two finely distinguished categories of music: “If you didn’t know the categories, you might have trouble telling them apart — but meet the two groups of fans and the difference would be pretty apparent.” “People label music, music labels people.”

We don’t know enough yet about the shooter in Orlando or his groups, but if it turns out, as initially reported, that he at least identified with ISIL, then he would be a part of a social group that perceives and condones violence against the categories of Americans he perceived, regardless of the reality of who might have been in that club.

• Categories affect how we feel about the things we categorize, positively. “When we like something, we seem to want to break it down into further categories, away from the so-called basic level.” With all my birder friends, I especially like Vanderbilt’s example of birders not just seeing “birds,” but subcategories of birds. And people who see more types of birds like birds more (although it seems to me that birders create more types because they like birds so much, not necessarily the other way around)
• Categories affect how we feel about the things we categorize, negatively. “When we struggle to categorize something, we like it less.” We might dislike something more, whether it’s new music, a new style of beer, or an unconventional face (or gender identity? I add), because it causes “cognitive disfluency.”
• But we can react more positively by creating new subcategories: “Even if we seem to like easy categorization, we’re not rigid about the categories themselves.” “When existing categories do not suffice, we simply invent new ones.” Good news: We can change.

 
Obviously, haters and terrorists don’t perceive their targeted groups positively, so any distinctions within the category they hate are lost. Their categories become large and all-consuming, deliberately masking subcategories and differences within. They maintain the hate by maintaining the rigidity of categories. They don’t change.

• And Vanderbilt’s final big warning, one echoed by those fearing the underside of genres: “The great peril of this reliance on categorizing is that we could miss something that lies outside our perception.”

 
So much lies outside the perception of those who hate and those who hate by categories. The category allows them to keep from perceiving what they don’t want to perceive, to keep from generating “cognitive disfluency” that might make them question their perceptions.
 
To move beyond adding anger and violence to the world requires moving beyond rigid categories and limited perceptions.
 
For hate not to win, we must remember.

abc7.com