Rational Bigotry?

the map and the territory

One of the puzzling things about certain political and cultural conflicts is how strongly people feel about them. I can understand why some people would prefer that homosexuals not be permitted to marry, find it harder to understand why they care so much about it. Similarly for same sex couples adopting. Similarly for polygamy. And similarly — I think the most interesting case — for attitudes towards transsexuals, individuals who have undergone a sex change operation. In each case, the question is why A cares so much about what B, or B and C, or even B, C, D, and E are doing.

I have a conjecture about part of the answer.

The world is a complicated place. One way in which we deal with that complication, in law and thought, is by representing a complicated reality with a much simpler model. There are lots of examples; here are two:

Some people are more mature than others, physically, emotionally, intellectually. For many purposes we lump all those differences, along with the continuous range of ages, into two categories: children and adults. Doing it that way makes it easier, in law and in conversation, to deal with issues where maturity matters. The cost, as with any simplification, is sometimes getting the wrong answer.

If we define gender by genitals, hermaphrodites are both male and female, eunuchs in some sense neither. If we define it by DNA, some apparent males are female, some females male. Some are neither XX nor XY, some both. Nonetheless, we continue to classify people, in the law and inside our heads, as either men or women. Most of the time the simplification fits the reality. Occasionally it doesn’t.

Someone who does not fit our categories is a problem not because he is doing anything to us but because his existence makes it harder for us to use our simplified models to make sense of the world. The problem only exists if we are aware of it; XXY genetics existed a century ago but nobody knew about them. Hermaphrodites existed and were known to exist but nobody you knew was a hermaphrodite or, if someone was, you didn’t know about it,¹ so there was no problem for your day to day attempt to use a simplified map to navigate social space.

One example of the breakdown of a simplified map is the breakdown of the concept of marriage. It used to be that people could usefully be classified as married or not married, which simplified a good deal of social calculation. As it became increasingly common for couples to openly live together without being married, the classification began to break down. That made it harder to figure out whether you had to invite A to dinner if you invited B, whether you were free to court C, how to briefly sum up your knowledge of the status of A and B when describing it to D.

The breakdown of the English class system may be another example, one I am familiar with mostly through literature.² The population could for most purposes be sorted into three classes: working, middle, and upper. Knowing what class someone was in did not precisely describe anything about him; a successful businessman might be richer than most of his class superiors, a poor clergyman was upper class. It approximately described many things about him: accent, income, profession, education. Knowing which class someone was in gave you at least a first guess at how you should interact with him, how he would expect you to. People who didn’t fit the pattern, such as the rich landowner who “made it in trade” or the American professor visiting at Cambridge who mowed the lawn of his rented house, are a problem. Cambridge professors, being upper class, don’t mow lawns.

That example is first hand, or almost; it happened to my father some seventy years ago, spending a year at Cambridge.

Transsexuals are a particularly striking example of the problem. If you knew him as a male and now know her as a female, there is a real problem fitting him/her into your mental picture of the world, a problem that shows up in my discomfort with using either gendered pronoun. I can see how other people might find similar difficulties in fitting into their heads polygamous families, same sex married couples, a chil with two mommies, and much else.

Other people have no obligation to make their lives fit my picture; maintaining my map of the world is my problem, not theirs, reality has no obligation to conform to it. But I think the discomfort which comes when reality changes in ways that make obsolete what used to be an adequate set of simplifications provide at least a partial explanation for the strength of the response.

I do not feel entitled to change people to fit my preferred picture but some people could and did. James Scott, in Seeing Like a State, describes ways in which states try to alter the territory to fit the map, to change people to make them easier to rule. It is easier to keep track of people, to know who has paid his taxes or been drafted, if they all use the same naming system, to tax their land if they all use the same system for land tenure and land measurement. If you are sending agents from the capital out to the provinces it helps if the language is the same in both, ideally the same across the whole country.

James Scott describes how, in these and other ways, the human territory was altered to fit the rulers’ map in the process of building the modern nation of France.

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1. Jewish religious law had rules for hermaphrodites so it is possible that in a Jewish community you would know.

2. Two of my favorite examples are “An Habitation Enforced” by Kipling and “The Verger” by Somerset Maugham.