Putting Labels on Issues: Binary and Unproductive
Overheard a conversation at the next table in a pleasant cafe in town. Person A (let’s call her Jill) was getting a new laptop. She seemed quite engrossed in the quest, and was browsing various online discussions as well as shopping sites. She said to her friend, let’s call him Paul, that some computer makers are moving their production out of China. Paul sighed, and said annoyingly, “That’s just racism.”
Jill looked surprised. “How?” she asked.
“They are doing this for racist reasons,” Paul explained. “If the Chinese were white, none of this would be happening.”
“Hm,” Jill muttered. She seemed unconvinced.
Neither was I.
I don’t pretend to know why computer makers want to spread their manufacturing to other countries. I have no insider knowledge. Perhaps Paul does. But I can think of a host of reasons why they might do so. Risk-spreading for one. Eggs in one basket and all that. And then there are geo-political reasons possibly. I’d imagine if the subject country were Russia, computer makers would be doing the same as well. And Russians are white, are they not?
“But if racism is the reason,” Jill looked up from her search, “why have they been making most of their computers and other things in China for all this time? Surely China didn’t just become non-white overnight.”
It’s too easy to just slap a label, in this case racism, onto a complex issue and pretend to have arrived at some insight. Life is a tad more complicated than straight-forward binary sound bites would suggest. Reducing everything to one cause is easy. It is also lazy. It is also invariably wrong. But we like doing that. Put a label on something, and voila ends our mental exercise. We can move on to watching TikTok feeds.
In the end, though, the over-simplification of labeling things, of reducing complex matters to just one variable, is not only foolish, it also has (perhaps) unintended consequences. I would think that a lot of our current problems arose from just that. Racism, indeed, is directly a result of people reducing everything to race, or skin colour, or country of origin. In fact, all sorts of biases and prejudices stem from this kind of moronic simplicity.
It just ain’t that simple.
I saw a newsfeed the other day, and it had a picture of a big heap of plastic things which have been piled high to promote some sort of end of plastic day. Yeah, there’s a lot of plastic in our world. Maybe too much. But can we honestly do without it? Indeed, in the picture a lady was adding some plastic jugs onto the heap, while using her mobile to take photos of the moment. And she was wearing Crocs. Plastics anyone?
Don’t get me wrong. I think there’s a lot of racism in the world. I think there’s too much plastic. I think climate change is real. I think people drive too much. I think the gap between the rich and poor is immense and deplorable. I think war is sick. Be that as it may, I also don’t think the solution is to simply attribute our problems to one thing and act as though that thing’s elimination is the answer. Complex problems require complex solutions.
Society takes pride in how much more educated people are than before. Yet I wonder if all this education has helped us think more deeply, contemplate more clearly, and act in more enlightened ways. Or has the current job-centred form of education merely makes us more like automatons, focusing only on the simple-mindedness of a task. And let AI do the actual learning instead.
The world is more gray than black and white. Maybe even fifty shades of it. Let’s not jump into judgement too quickly. We are blessed with intellect. We should use it.
