The world our ancestors encountered was dazzlingly complex. Bordering on chaos, how did primitive man navigate this world of unforseen dangers and mind-boggling complexity? I'd venture to guess it arose through our ability to recognize patterns.
We are programmed to see patterns, as evidenced by the faces we see in appliances and animal shapes in clouds. We are constantly on the lookout for cause-and-effect relationships. Where no clear cause is demonstrated for a witnessed effect, we typically associate the cause with the spiritual realm, and have done so since were children. The wall creaks as the temperature changes and the materials that compose it shrink or swell. Being children we dont know what the wall is made of, much less the effect that temperature and humidity have on wood, metal screws and bricks. So we blame the noise on a "monster" of some sort, or ghosts or gods.
Even as adults we try to boil complexity down to understandable phenomena, as demonstrated by the numbers of people who faithfully follow their daily horiscope; life is so complex and chaotic, yet it is governed by the simple movements of stars and planets. Astrologic signs are based on astronomic constellations, yet another example of seeing order in randomness. At the root of finding order in the mess is our system of labeling things.
Labeling things allows us to better understand their relationships with other things, and tease more sense out of complexity. After labeling enough things distinct categories of traits begin to appear, and clusters of order seem to emerge out of chaos. Such labeling became a standardized practice under the recent use of science and the scientific method to better know the world around us.
Labels and categories are fine, however few are prepared when they find exceptions to their label. The more our reach expands beyond our immediate surroundings, the harder labeling becomes. Assigning names to the bodies visible in the sky is easy. Lumping them into categories based on shared traits is simple. There is a curtain of sparkling lights that do not move in relation to one another, we call these stars. There are five other objects in the night sky that do things on their own, moving relative to the stars and each other. These are planets. The sun and moon are easy as well, since they are clearly two very different things. Our order makes sense.
Fast forward to the present, with our ability to experience further than our naked eyes allow. Empowered by telescopes, we know there are four more planets in addition to the five we can see that orbit our sun. Some of these planets have moons of their own. The sun is a star, very unexciting as stars go, just like the billions visible to us in the sky. These stars are parts of a galaxy, and way off in the distance are more galaxies with more stars, and likely, more planets in them. At the outer edges of our solar system lie small frozen worlds similar to our latest planet, Pluto. But whats this? Among these balls of ice are bodies quite a bit larger than planet Pluto that also orbit the sun--have we more planets than we thought?
You all know how that turned out, Pluto became relegated to a new class of objects that had distinct traits in common with one another, and were not considered planets. Similarly, we have detected the presence of planets around other stars, however these planets are much larger than anything we previously knew of. We could only detect their presence because they were so large and close to their parent star that they made the star wobble; we detected the wobble and inferred the invisible object's size. Some are so large that they stretch the definition of both star and planet, and this raises a question similar to what we encountered with Pluto--what traits must be present to clearly define an object as one thing and not another? This is crucial, since the universe probably consists of a spectrum of size objects from molecules at the small end, to moons and planets in the middle, to stars and galaxies and finally galaxy clusters at the unimaginably large end. Where on the spectrum of names and traits does one thing stop and another start? Any line we draw to distinguish one thing from another will be blurred and arbitrary.
Steven Jay Gould wrote "What is a Species?" in the December 1992 issue of Discover magazine about our need to categorize things, and pointed out how aribtrary our systems could be:
I had visited every state but Idaho. A few months ago, I finally got my opportunity to complete the roster of 50 by driving east from Spokane, Washington, into western Idaho. As I crossed the state line, I made the same feeble attempt at humor that so many of us try in similar situations: Gee, it doesn’t look a bit different from easternmost Washington.
We make such comments because we feel the discomfort of discord between our mental needs and the world’s reality. Much of nature (including terrestrial real estate) is continuous, but both our mental and political structures require divisions and categories. We need to break large and continuous items into manageable units.
Such categories and labels work on small scales and narrow experiences. As we increase our knowledge we must embrace complexity and understand that the best use for labels is as temporary communication of a standardized idea that may or may not be accurate when we acquire more information. Such new understanding is not limited to science, but must extend to all aspects of our experience, from politics to the arts, and beyond.
Remember, things are always far more complex than they seem.
What problems do we encounter when we use labels to break continuous things down into smaller units in fields such as politics?
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