In Shakespeare’s play, “As You Like It,” a player recites the seminal version of the contemporaneous, much-used phrase, “All the world’s a stage and all the men and women players.” In an early essay, “Labels” we briefly touched upon the common, erroneous predilection to identify and summarily assume knowledge of the persona of others by reductive association, based on their occupation or appearance. Such populist practice has, in addition to its consistency of error, many implications proximately causative of serious harm. It may, accordingly be useful to reprise the subject in a more consequential context.
The origin of many family names had their origin in the era of early subsistence societies and often identified one’s working role or craft. Thus, the origin of names like Carpenter, Sawyer, Wagoner, Cook, Taylor, Priest, Bookbinder, Turner, and the like. While in modern times, society does not attribute family names to craft or function, many do reductively conflate one’s function, and even physical appearance, with a perceived stereotypical personality.
In ancient Greek theatrical identification of the players’ respective roles in comedy or tragedy as, the righteous King or dark villain, and in the ancient Japanese Noh play, the player wore an identified mask in keeping with his theatrically themed role or the predestined fate. No member of the audience needed to exercise his imagination or insight to be cognizant of the classically known role, intended message, and specific part portrayed in such traditional narrative by such easily identifiable characters. This classical style of art, often called for such a fashioning of the protagonist’s mask so as to be stereotypically instructive of his flawed personality (ex., “hubris”) and/or his classically, inevitable fate at the hands of the justice-dealing Gods.
In modern life, many people seem inclined to make reductive, uninformed, and facile assumptions or judgments of other people, based on their taught, or self-perceived stereotypes. Thus “Lenny, the lawyer,” or “Calvin, the accountant,” might erroneously and reductively be identified by stereotype, and based on the observer’s held fiction, his traditional persona, such as the outspoken lawyer or the more reticent accountant.
Initially, and contextually, in the above illustrations, the phrase, “Lenny the lawyer,” and “Calvin, “the accountant” implies a tendency to unsophisticatedly comprehend and describe people in a functional pattern, as opposed to the more challenging and appropriate, acquisition of specific personal insight or understanding. In the early days, appellations such as “Cooper,” which merely designated his trade, as a maker of barrels, and no more; similarly, Sawyer, Taylor, Driver, Preacher, and Farmer.
Regarding the above designation “Lenny the lawyer,” any rational individual would perceive the description as indicating that Lenny is an individual who works as a lawyer, and no further. The reductionist might take the designation of “lawyer,” to reductively and confidently deduce the implicit presence of specific nuanced attributes, such as aggressiveness, wordiness, and even shrewdness. The name and designated profession of Calvin, as an accountant, says nothing about his persona; yet a reductionist may ignorantly choose to associate with him, assumed qualities of shyness and a neurotic striving for precision. The reductive “thinker,” is a major roadblock and impediment to empirical truth and accuracy; not to mention, fairness and reason.
It is inaccurate, dysfunctional, and often perilous to reductively ascribe perceived characteristics in the evaluation of other human beings by populist, facile, and often grossly inaccurate, reductive assumptions. The populist inclination to so err often appears to be demonstrated by those who are inadequately schooled, and those of insular persona, in their arduous quest for some measure of some understanding of their life’s environment.
Such reductive, rationally objectionable, and unjust inclination to render facile judgment and falsely confident evaluation of others, founded on arbitrary and distorted stereotypical reductionism, plays a perversely, prominent and tragic role in the injurious and metastasizing pathology of bias and irrationally based prejudice, relative to race, religion, sexual orientation, and ethnos.
-p.
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