| It turns out that the world is complex. Really complex actually. In fact, it’s so complex that we are constantly looking for ways to simplify it. Not ways to dumb it down, mind you, but ways to place it in a context that makes it easier for us to comprehend.
The most popular of these is to categorize things. Post-secondary students, for example, constantly encounter categorization in the division of learning between faculties. A medical student, a law student and a geography student learn different things about different topics. Why? Because there’s just far too much information out there for your doctor to know the regional climate of Paraguay, or for your lawyer to be able to perform open-heart surgery.
Of course, categorization goes far beyond the classroom and extends itself to virtually every facet of our day-to-day lives. The work world is divided into accountants, managers, mailroom clerks and others. The grocery store has a dairy section, a deli and a freezer aisle. The list goes on.
Categories are invaluable in that they distil an exceptionally large amount of information into manageable volumes. Instead of people who go through life as a Jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none, we have specialists who can solve a lot of our everyday problems.
But categorization has its limitations.
Relying too much on categories as a tool for sorting through the muck can lead to over-simplification when it’s really not in our interests to do so. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the political debates of the day.
Traditionally, political camps have been divided into two categories: left and right. In its time, this system served us well, allowing truly complex positions to be summed up by slotting those espousing them into one wing or the other. But now the system is falling apart. "Left" has become synonymous with sissy, "Right" with scary. These categories are now too parochial to do us any good.
What if I’m pro-life, pro-Israel and pro-Kyoto? Or if I’m a gun-toting, SUV-driving middle management type who just happens to believe that we should devote more than 0.7 per cent of our gross domestic product to development aid? Maybe I’m any number of combinations of any number of different values on the multitude of issues that are important to people across the world.
The point is this: slotting people into categories based on one of two possible value sets destroys legitimate debate on issues that are integral to our way of life. Having only two sources to look to – left or right? – when discussing critical concerns leads to a host of expectations about beliefs on matters that are irrelevant to the question at hand.
As long as one can advance a compelling and coherent argument for the issue under discussion, who cares whether they fit the mould for all the other beliefs we expect them to possess? Instead, as has been argued elsewhere, it is time to call for a return to the politics of ideas. Values – not pre-defined value sets – should reign supreme.
Even as you read this, there are people bursting out of their moulds. Ranchers and conservationists, two groups that have traditionally enjoyed a rather frosty relationship, are teaming up to protect land from the effects of urban fringe development. Small-L liberals aim to rein in spending, and big-C Conservatives allocate money to social issues. The list goes on.
These events should not be anomalies, reported by the media as the "how about that?" event du jour. Instead, we should stop judging them based on what we are told to expect from that group and start judging them based on merit.
Yes, it is a difficult and cumbersome proposal. Yes, we love our categories, and we love how easy they make it to understand problems that would otherwise be far too complex to comprehend. But we don’t love misconceptions about our beliefs, we don’t love being told that because we think X we must embrace Y, and we certainly don’t love political discussions getting bogged down in name-calling and fear-mongering.
The time has come to re-evaluate the language we use around values. To move past the traditional left and right categories and to settle upon a lexicon that truly reflects the panoply of beliefs that people hold. More importantly, to do away with the assumptions that hinder real debate around real issues affecting our lives in real ways.
The time has come to be ambidextrous in our political discussions. |
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