Generalisations

 Well, I spoke about this with my therapist (I have no idea how we got onto this subject, tbh, but we did... and it might be pretty foundational to my psyche), so I might as well write a thing about it here. First, I'm writing this without apology, without censoring myself... So, it's going to get nerdy, okay?

I hate generalisations, and loathe them with a passion. I appreciate that that's a generalisation in itself, but bear with me, please. I understand why generalisations and their close cousins, stereotypes, arise. I get why we revert to them (basically our brains really aren't as good as we think they are and its easier to have a story about what a group of people are like than to not have one because scaling is difficult - humans generally know 50 to 200 people, the average size of our troops as troop primates is around 150 individuals, about the size of a Medieval village, and we're often confused by fictional characters - your troop may include characters off the telly, for example. So, yeah, our brains can be pretty shit). I'm aware there are instances where generalisations can be useful. You don't need to test every pack of wolves you come across to know that they're potentially dangerous - but like the part of the brain which warns us about danger becoming overly vigilant if we have an anxiety disorder, it seems to me that in our current society generalisations are becoming an impediment rather than a help.

Back to generalisations. They drive me crazy because they essentially strip away facts, strip away individuality, and strip away nuance. They're perfect for our current age because Twitter doesn't let you get into the meat of anything anyway and the social media age isn't one for deep thought, in my experience.

My feeling is that a generalisation takes away all but one identifier, over invests in that one thing and then, to cap it, basically allows the person making the generalisation to paint whatever they like over the top. For ease of communication, let's call this a "blob". So, every time we use a generalisation, or stereotype, we're defaulting to one of these blobs, painting our own perception over it - usually to the detriment of the people we're talking about (because in my experience, there are no positive stereotypes at all. Not even "Scandinavians are tall" is a positive stereotype). This isn't to say that the perception is wrong, only that when it's delivered this way it's presenting a subjective and incomplete picture, which may be devoid of factual truth. After all "immigrants coming over here taking our jobs" is a generalisation, and not a pleasant one. So is "all Roman Catholic priests are nonces", for that matter...

Let's take an example: "Women want to have a children". On one level, that's a pretty innocent statement... except that not all women want to have children. What we've done there is take a statement and exiled someone who doesn't want children from the blob. We've essentially said, she isn't a woman because she doesn't want to have kids, transforming her with six words into a eunuch. That's alienating and creates a situation where she's not only been exiled but she's potentially been devalued in the eyes of society which is working to a story where women want to have kids. We might ask what's wrong with her because of this... The fact that she may have PCOS or Turner's Syndrome, or have been abused as a child and be frightened that she might repeat that abuse herself (and has the self awareness to step away from that poisoned story) doesn't occur to us.

Of course, to take a slight tangent, the issue of children and being able to bear them now has another dimension - in that it's used as a reason to discriminate against transwomen by saying they can't be real women because they can't give birth to children... which is an argument that politicises being a woman just as much as the idea that "boys don't cry" does for XYs.

The other thing is that, this stereotype of women all wanting to breed, adds in other complications. Women not getting jobs because of a fear that they'll become pregnant and disappear to be mother, for example. Women who want to have abortions are still painted as being unwomanly by certain sections of society (usually by certain members of the Tory party, and specific churches on the more evangelical wing of Christianity).

And yet, many of us would say that "Women want to have children" is an innocent statement, conveying nothing more than a truth.

To use another example "Cats are creatures of the Devil" as a story resulted in the burning alive of many thousands of cats for no other reason than they followed their natures, and made the Black Death worse during the 17th Century. Our culture still retains part of this, albeit in a less violent form. Black cats are less likely to be adopted from rehoming centres because the idea... the generalisation... that they are somehow evil still persists.

Let's grab a third just because we can. "Europeans were involved in the slave trade".... what all of them? What about the people of Dubrovnik, who abolished slavery in 1455? What about the people of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Poland? As far as I know most of Eastern Europe didn't have colonies overseas, and weren't involved in the triangle trade (and indeed the people of the Balkans were more likely to become slaves under the Ottoman Empire).

The other thing, and I may be overthinking here, is that no word or idea stands alone, but connects to other ideas and words via symbolism or even good old word association. Everything we can think of connects to something else. The sun isn't just a burning ball of gas hot enough to light and nurture life several billion miles away, it's a symbol of hope, a scarab pushing a big ball of fiery shit across the sky, a chariot driven by Apollo, and so on. This could be seen as an interplay between the stories we consider to be "reality" and the actual physical universe that we take for granted and often ignore. In order to give something value, it has to be immersed in our stories.

Likewise "Men" isn't just a word, but a series of meanings - many of them negative, unfortunately (though I appreciate that may be subjective... for me, it's largely negative). You can spin this out to almost anything. There's nothing in existence that doesn't have a symbolic value, or a connection to other things and this spans from the idea that colours have significance or meaning, all the way to the high weirdness of much of the symbolic meanings of animals within discrete systems like Medieval Heraldry.

The blobs, therefore, connect to other ideas, to other pictures, without considering specifics or individual stories. They are as much part of our socialisation/brain washing as the stories we're told about the world growing up - and they persist even once we start to question those stories, assuming we ever do. They are a lazy, sloppy even, way to make an argument (and I am aware of the irony as I use them myself here). Unfortunately, they're also necessary because our brains aren't that great - and we live in societies that are too complex for us to be specific (if we just went back to being hunter gatherers it would solve the problem, but at that point we'd run into a logistics problem because there's too many humans to do that).

It's difficult though. On the one hand, if we use the word "some" then most of the people who guilty of a type of behaviour that we disapprove of will weasel their way out of it (and yes, that probably is a generalisation because English is stupid), while if no qualifier is used, then like the women who don't want children, we've been excluded from the group and quite possibly devalued (at least in somebody's eyes). It seems to me that English lacks the sort of grammar and language that would be useful in these situations, in the same way that Ancient Greek has many words for love that all have subtly different meanings, and we're stuck with one. I feel we could use more words for love, and more for fun and for saying sorry as well. It's maddening that we don't have a word that means "I'm sorry to hear that" without sounding as if you're accepting responsibility for whatever's gone wrong. Though, that said, do we want to give the PM (Boris Johnson at time of writing, for any futurenauts reading this in the year 2600) more ways to offer non-apologies?

And of course, there's the argument that in asking people to moderate their language, we're asking them to self censor, which they shouldn't have to do... but at the same time if your statement is the equivalent of kicking a football through a window... then shouldn't you stop and think about phrasing a little more, unless you're actually looking to stir things up and create a commotion (and to be clear, I don't think that there's anything wrong with that.... sometimes it’s needed after all).

What I ask is that people think before they type, ask if what they're using this stereotype for is helpful, or if the sentiment can be expressed in another way. I also ask that we start evolving a way in English to sidestep the issues we're seeing here to make language more suitable for the issues it clearly faces. (While we're at it, can we develop words for different kinds of fun and love, please?)

Oh and when I win the lottery, I'll adopt all the black cats... even yours if you don't want them. (Because cats are the best animals ever).