We are all part of a pyramid of reductionism. In our effort to understand we generalise about everything, the nitty gritty is too complicated and more to the point the more information we have the further away from our prejudiced views we become.
Our wholesale collective stereotyping of people, cultures, habits, failures and strengths would dissolve if we took the trouble to properly analyse the ingredients which describe a collective. "No two people are alike" we say and yet we describe whole nations
with an epithet that can be unpleasant and down right misleading. The French are this the Germans are that. African people are poles apart from the Chinese. South Americans are as chalk from cheese when compared to the people who call themselves North Americans.
And yet amongst all this collective labelling we miss the simple fact that a person, where ever they are born, no matter which culture they have, each one of them has the same or similar sets of basic needs. Food, shelter and security, love and affection,
respect and
attention as human beings. Each individual firing a gun at the enemy is a
husband a father a lover or a son, shorn of their uniform they are the same flesh and blood, yet we label whole nations with praise or ridicule depending
how the image of
that nation is fed to us by the media. Even historians write with bias
it's as if the singular, the person who makes up the calculus of the nation are all the same and yet we know that is not true. Even the
word characteristic is maligned since what we call
the 'character' of a person, which is in part formed by the way he or
she is informed when growing up in a country, this influence over the
citizen never the less has within the national influence a sub set of 'family' and a further subset of individual personality.
No nation can be described by its citizens, the rainbow is too varied, too rich and we should all take time to modify our phobia for labelling, as if the label was anything more than a recognition of our own ignorance.
No comments:
Post a Comment