Categorising (or 'Us and Them')

Skimming through this blog, I noticed that almost exactly two years ago I wrote a post entitled 'Normality and Judgement'. It was about the way we tend to make generalisations and assumptions, and how important it is to be open to different cultural and generational traditions and habits, without compromising our faith and what we understand to be ethically important.

I'm currently reading an excellent book: 'Disunity in Christ' by Christina Cleveland. She's an American academic who writes in a very readable and accessible way, and I'm finding much to ponder. An early chapter discusses the way that we categorise things and people around us, and ways sociologists and psychologists describe this.

Categorisation is extremely useful in many situations: we need to know that something is (for instance) edible or not edible. A baby doesn't know this distinction and will often put non-edible items in his mouth to explore. Likewise a young toddler, seeing a four-legged object, doesn't necessarily know whether it's a chair for sitting on, or a table which should not be sat upon. Our grandson, at eighteen months, used a step-stool as a table. When one of the adults with him showed him that it could be sat on, he tried to climb on the coffee table to sit on that.

When we categorise other people, however, we can run into danger. That's not to say that it's always a bad idea: we are aware, for instance, that an elderly person might move slowly and could be somewhat hard of hearing and we make allowances for that. When we hear a certain accent, we have a good idea of where someone might come from. We assume that taxi drivers are competent in their vehicles and probably good at knowing the neighbourhood. When we want building work done on the house, and cannot (or don't want to) do it ourselves, we call a builder.

However we also make generalisations based on stereotypes and hearsay. The Japanese (we assume) eat sushi. The British (we are told) drink tea. People of one religion (it's believed) are peace-loving, people of another religion violent. Graffiti (we imagine) is probably the result of a young and disillusioned person getting hold of a can of spray paint.  And so on. In some cases there is more than a grain of truth in our assumptions.

But not always.

We are Brits who do not drink tea. Any religion is likely to attract a few violent types and some non-confrontational pacifist types, and large numbers of people who are somewhere in between. I'm sure there are some Japanese folk who loathe sushi. And I see no reason why an elderly lady in a wheelchair shouldn't be a secret graffiti artist...

Does that last sentence cause you to shake your head a little, thinking I've gone too far? And yet, why not? Why should it be assumed that young people are likely to deface their environment and old people (who were young themselves once) wouldn't do such a thing?

According to the book I'm reading, there's a tendency to align ourselves with people who are like us in some respects, while avoiding, as far as possible, those who are different. Inevitably we belong to or develop interest-related groups: that's not a bad thing in itself. An orchestra consists of people who are musical and like playing together; a gathering of philatelists isn't going to be enhanced by people who have no interest in stamps.

The problem occurs when we assume only positive things about 'us' and our 'in group', and negative things about everyone else. And we do it, the author tells us, to help us feel more comfortable about ourselves.

As I was reading about this, I felt a tension in my neck, a tightness in my chest. Surely this doesn't apply to everyone? I thought. Yes, I can see that there's a great deal of aggression around the world and negative assumptions about 'others' can certainly contribute to it. But we're not all like that. Some of us are quite able to accept anyone and everyone.

Then something was mentioned that was specifically relevant to the USA, and my shoulders relaxed as I remembered the author's nationality. Ah, I thought, she's writing about Americans here. Americans see things in extremes, in black and white, whereas we Brits...

I caught myself mid-thought. There I was, categorising 'Americans' as 'them'. Which is quite unfair as I know it's a stereotype: some of my closest friends hail from the United States and are not judgemental at all.  But still, the generalisation is in my psyche; and yes, for a moment I took comfort in being in group that didn't categorise negatively.

The good thing, apparently, is that all we need to do to overcome this tendency is to be aware of it. It may take time and effort, but so long as we stay open-minded, and realise that generalisations and categorisations are at best limited and at worst untrue, then we're moving in a less judgemental direction.

As an INFJ 'Idealist', one of my important values is knowing that everyone is a unique and valuable individual, and I don't believe it's right or helpful to judge or negatively categorise anyone at all, even those I find most difficult to relate to, or whom I understand the least...

... in other words, 'we' are those who accept everyone, and 'they' are the ones who categorise and judge....

Hmmm.

The problem with the 'knowledge of good and evil'.

Sometimes, reading a book that may - or may not - be generally quite interesting, a sentence or paragraph will leap out at me. A lightbulb clicks on in my mind; I have an 'aha!' moment. Another little piece in the vast jigsaw of life slots into place. Or, at least, a possible place.

One such moment occurred this week, while continuing to read 'The Adventure of Living'.  Here's what I read:

This is in fact the meaning of the account of the Fall (Genesis 3): The fatal error of men is this very aspiration to be like God, "knowing good and evil," wanting to have a moral code, so as to be able to act on their own, without any further need of God to enlighten them step by step. This autonomy was the very thing which God refused to give to man, despite all the spiritual insight with which he endowed him. Autonomy is his undoing. When he claims to know of his own accord what is good and what is evil, he deludes himself and goes after success instead of seeking God. 

(The Adventure of Living, page 151, Highland paperback edition) 

You might ask what is so profound about that insight.  Of course the Fall was about mankind wanting to be like God. 

Years - probably decades - ago, someone asked me, with genuine confusion, how Adam and Eve could have known that it was wrong to disobey God, if at the point before they ate the fruit they had no knowledge of good and evil. Wouldn't that mean, I was asked, that they actually didn't know that it would be wrong to disobey God? 

I had no answer to this paradox.

Over the years, I've seen the story more as a metaphor than literal. Even if Adam and Eve were the actual two first humans, created as described in Genesis, the stories were passed down over many generations before they were actually put in writing. Some details may have gone astray, I thought, or perhaps there was something that hadn't translated quite right into modern English. 

I don't have a problem with difficult questions or paradoxes, although I no longer enjoy debating them quite like I did in my teens. God is God, and details of Adam and Eve's mindset before biting the fruit are long gone in the mists of time. Even if I could resolve this question, I didn't think it would make any difference to me, or to anyone else.

But here's a throwaway paragraph in a book putting it in a new light. It wasn't that Adam and Eve were entirely innocent, with no idea about good and evil. Those concepts are planted in the human mind from birth; while some conventions are of course cultural, we are all created in God's image. We know intuitively that some actions or thoughts are wrong. A child of about a year old knows perfectly well what he's doing when his mother says, 'No, don't touch' and he reaches out a hand, slowly, while looking to see if she's watching. He doesn't know why it's wrong, to be sure; but he's well aware that he ought to do what his mother says. In the same way, Adam and Eve  - who walked in the garden with God, and knew him intimately - were well aware that if he said 'Don't touch', then it was very important to do what he said. They didn't even have the excuse of being immature babies. 

So - according to Tournier - what the tree of the knowledge of good and evil represented was not just a general understanding of right and wrong, but a detailed knowledge that spelled out every single possible instance of right and wrong living, which would enable people to live without God. 

And then, despite knowing this story, that's exactly what the Hebrew Pharisees built up over the years.

God gave his people plenty of laws, some about relating to other people, some about hygiene (very useful in the days before germ theory) and some which, I have to admit, seem quite arbitrary, even bizarre. Maybe some of those are mis-translated - I don't know. But the Ten Commandments, perhaps the best known, make a whole lot of sense. Jesus summed them up: Love God, and love other people. 

But that wasn't good enough for the Old Testament pedants, who wanted not just general principles but exact details of what they meant. So God told them to keep the Sabbath holy, to make it a day of rest. A great principle - but people wanted to know what was meant by 'rest', and how they could avoid 'work', and what exactly was meant by 'work' in any case. Instead of seeing the Sabbath as a gift to be enjoyed, to take time with the family, to enjoy God's creation, to worship in a relaxed way.. they wanted to know what they could get away with. So more and more details were written down, with restrictions and limitations that God never intended when he said, 'Take a break once a week'.  

Around two thousand years ago, Jesus was walking on earth, helping people get things back in perspective. He demonstrated in what he said and what he did that God's law is a law of love, not of pernickety detail. It's right to do good on the Sabbath, irrelevant of whether the good deed might be defined in some rule-book as 'work'. It's right to love our neighbour, whoever he might be, and to help people in need, even if they are 'unclean' in some way. 

So, we have the benefit of hindsight in the Genesis story, and in the Gospel accounts. Surely we should get it by now...

But, in the paragraph preceding the one I quoted above, Tournier says:

The Biblical revelation gives us no guiding principle for our conduct beyond a few very simple laws such as that of honesty or love.

He is making the point that, even in the 20th century when he was writing, Christians wanted to turn the Bible into a rule-book. 

I think some people still do. I once heard someone say that in every situation or problem he has encountered, there are clear and specific guidelines in the Bible about what to do. I didn't even try to argue. I could have asked what the Bible says about a corrupt hard drive, for instance, or even about children fighting in the back seat of the car. He would probably have thought that I was belittling the Bible, or being sarcastic, although I was genuinely curious about what he might have said. 

But actually, I think I have a higher view of Scripture in believing that it gives us general principles, and the encouragement to seek the Holy Spirit to give us guidance in our specific circumstances. 

That's not to say that I'm a relativist. I do think there are some actions which are always morally wrong (such as violence or stealing), and some which are always bad for us health-wise (such as smoking). But in the vast majority of the decisions we have to make, day by day, we're not actually choosing between clear right or wrong actions. We have brains and hearts and experience to guide us, and we also have the Holy Spirit. The Bible is undoubtedly important as the revelation of God's love, but it is not - and should not be treated as - the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. 

Sue F