Month: February 2019

It’s easy to see the survival advantage. It is important to distinguish the appetitive from the aversive. One berry is sweet and energizing; the other kills you. But the conceptual tools that attend human language turn categorical discernment into compulsion. Nouns require criteria of inclusion and exclusion, and in those many places where Nature fails to offer clear boundaries, we quickly add our own. The world is an exceedingly complex web of dynamically interacting and ever-changing multidimensionality, yet we prefer easy dichotomies. Even the idea of human (and species, more generally) is a tool of simplification, a mere linguistic designation that has no solid referent in the natural world.

Yesterday I took an online personality test based on the enneagram model, a typology consisting of nine personality types. I took the test because it wasn’t immediately clear from the type descriptions which of two adjacent types I fit into, “the investigator” or “the individualist.” According to my test results, I am more “investigator” than “individualist,” but not much more. My results came with a list of Barnum statements telling me things about myself that I already know, things that apply in larger or smaller portions to everyone else, regardless of personality type, things like “Although you enjoy the company of others, you also need alone time.”  

Nature, of course, doesn’t recognize types. Nature is a-categorical. Nature acts with unbridled intimacy. Nature deals only with individuals. But this is a terrifying prospect. It is terrifying for the civilized to imagine a world of individuals, uncountable billions of individuals (uncountable trillions if we include the microscopic): each one irreducibly unique, each one impossible to dismiss as irrelevant. In a world of individuals, there can be no actionable classification, no categorical imperatives, no hierarchies of worth to serve as a guide.

My computer welcomes me when I turn it on in the morning. The ATM machine thanks me for withdrawing money from my own bank account. The screen on the pay-pad at the supermarket thanks me for my patience. The sign at the top of the stairway asks me to please watch my step. Doors of public businesses explicitly welcome me as I enter and thank me as I exit. Other doors thank me for shutting them behind me.

The absurdity of this slides right past us. That a mechanical device could be welcoming or feel thankful for anything is ridiculous on its face. That a wall or door or posted sign could act as some kind of conduit for the expression of polite sentiments is ludicrous. The disembodied words “welcome” and “please” and “thank you” appearing on an electronic screen are utterly empty of content. The warning, “Watch your step” is meaningful—and, in some cases, meaningful to the point of being life-saving—but the addition of “please” is beyond superfluous, and entirely gratuitous.

Is all of this simply more evidence of the technological outsourcing of our humanity? Perhaps. But if so, it is the outsourcing of a humanity that was long ago stripped bare of its human authenticity. The very idea of politeness, as reflecting a separate category of action, is evidence of the degradation of human authenticity. Authentic humans engaged in authentically human interactions have no need for please and thank you. To say please and to beg—to plead—come to the same thing. In traditional human society, where all have access and the capacity to give freely is unrestricted, there is little or no need to ask. In such society, “thank you” is a brutal insult: to thank someone is to say that their kindness was unexpected.