I don't believe in addressing persons objectively. I don't believe it is truly possible, and even if it were, I think it demeaning. Perhaps this is why I am so opposed to things like No Child Left Behind, where each student - and by extension each teacher and each school - is evaluated by some supposedly independent and thus "objective" standard of measurement. Ask me about my students, all 130+ at the end of the year, and I should be able to tell you about each individually, strengths and weaknesses, how each has improved and grown, and - yes - how in many cases I have not been able to help. I do not want to limit my dealings with each student by how s/he performs on a single measure, no matter how perceptive the instrument used may be.
Perhaps that is why I prefer to at least try to address each person I encounter subjectively, not objectively. And it is that I will attempt to explore in this mental meandering.
Perhaps to some degree I am influenced by having read the statement of Stalin that "The death of one person is a tragedy, but the death of millions is just a statistic." When I encountered that as a teenager, my reaction surprised the teacher who exposed me to the words. I believed that the within that statistics were myriads of tragedies, because each person, no matter how insignificant s/he might seem to the powerful like the Soviet dictator, had someone who might mourn them, miss them.
And perhaps it was because of my Jewish heritage, with extended family who were eradicated in the liquidation of the Jewish community in Bialystok. I realized that in the destruction of entire families was also the loss of memory, of those who would normally mourn and remember on one's behalf: no sons to say Kaddish for the parents, for example. Still, the killing of 6 million does not reduce them to a collective statistic, or at least, it should not. We can and should strive to think of 6 million individuals - parents, children, grandparents, aunts, cousins, uncles, neighbors, and even strangers to one another who in the moment of death became related.
If we insist that a prisoner be addressed by his inmate number we are depersonalizing him. The number replaces name and identity. It does not matter if that number be tattooed on a forearm as in the camps run by the Nazis, printed on the back of one's prison garb as is sometimes the case in American penitentiaries, or is the sole identification of records - of academic progress, of pension benefits - in any case it represents a loss of personhood, a reduction or elimination of seeing the person fully as a human being.
We are in theory a democratic society. We have documents and court decisions that are supposed to protect INDIVIDUAL rights. Yes, I know at times those documents speak of the rights of the PEOPLE, for example in the 4th Amendment. But people in that sense is a collective of persons, because elsewhere, for example in the 5th Amendment, the documents are explicit - that no PERSON can be denied life, liberty or property without due process of law.
The rejection of a person on the basis of an external fixed characteristic like race or gender, or even one we may think is of choice such as religion or political orientation, is to ignore the uniqueness of that person. It is to treat them as a member of a class we have chosen to denigrate, to see as lesser than ourselves and how we self-classify. Yes, at times to make up for past discrimination done on the basis of such group distinctions we will find it necessary to consider the group classification. Ideally, as King noted, it should not be the color of our skin but the content of our character that determines how others will judge us. And that content is ultimately something for which we each, over time, assume increasing personal responsibility. It is how we define ourselves as persons.
I am a Convinced Friend. That is, not having by birth been a Quaker, I joined the Society of Friends because I found it an appropriate way to come together with others who approach things we consider important in somewhat of a common fashion (although my own Monthly Meeting still contains a wide variety of views on almost any topic one might consider). While I am uncertain in how I think about God as an external deity, I have chosen to operate on the principle derived from George Fox, that we walk gladly across the earth answering that of God in each person we encounter. Fox did not say "in all the people" but rather addressed the question of individuals. And it is not to address, but rather to answer. That is, each human already has 'that of God" and it is our responsibility to respond to that, to "answer" that. Considering it as divine is also to consider it as a unique manifestation, one worthy of the utmost respect.
We are impatient. We want to "do" so much. We believe in "efficiency." In my previous occupation, before becoming a teacher, I worked with computers, sometimes writing the programs that made them work, other times designing the systems which others programmed. The idea was to accomplish more through the power and speed of computers than could be done by human labor. I was good at it, perhaps too good. And it bothered me, because I could see how the technology was not always used to liberate and empower individuals, but instead sometimes drove behavior to be more standardized so that it could be computerized. As one of Jewish background I was well aware that IBM sold information technology to Hitler's Germany that was used to make the camps more efficient.
But it does not have to be so extreme. And I am not a Luddite: after all, I write this on a MacBook Pro, a machine so much more powerful than anything within the reach of those alive during World War II.
Dehumanization begins with small steps. It begins when I refuse to listen to an idea because it is offered by a Republican candidate for office. If I operate on the basis that no good can come from a Republican candidate, I no longer perceive that candidate as a human being as entitled to respect as I may demand for myself, but have reduced him to an object, a political adversary who must be overcome. And for all my passion as a political active Democrat, I do not want to reduce myself to that: in treating him as less than fully human I myself am acting as less than the complete human being I should be.
I want to be seen as subject in myself, not as someone who can be categorized, even as I know we must use categories and labels to help us understand. After all, I have already done so several times in this mental meandering - I am of Eastern European Jewish background (and hence also white) and I have indicated my commitment to the Democratic party as I understand it. I am male, over 60, relatively well educated. I could also classify myself as shy, extravert, upper middle class by background and income . . . But none of these fully explains who I am or how I perceive myself. None individually, and not even all I could list taken together accurately describe who or what I am.
As poorly as I may at times express myself, I want others to listen when I speak and write in an attempt to reach out. It is frustrating if the response is "you are only saying that because you are a(n)" and then fill in the label. The label may be accurate, but is it not possible that even as my statement coincides with how you would expect one to whom that label would apply might speak, there might be other reasons? Is not that reaction at that moment dismissive of my uniqueness, and hence my very humanity?
Our humanity and the various classifications into which we can be placed gives us some commonality, some basis of coming to together, of beginning the process of mutual understanding. But think how often when we act on the assumption of what the classification means to us we turn out to be mistaken in our expectations of what the response of the other will be. Might it not be because we have objectified the other, we have considered that person according to some external, supposedly inpendent and hence "objective" measurement or classification, rather than taken the time to try to perceive the whole person?
You should not be an object to me. You do not exist for the purpose of receiving my words or actions. The world may not revolve around you, but it also does not revolve around me.
This is a political website. Its stated purpose is to elect Democrats. But think how often we argue over what it means to be a Democrat. As articulate and intelligent as the active membership of this site is, we often disagree intensely on what is appropriate or acceptable for a Democrat. Certainly I have participated in such discussions, for example, when I criticized the Clinton campaign for trying to discourage out of state college students from participating in the Iowa caucuses: I said it was inappropriate for a Democratic to ever seek to prevent people from voting. And while many here would agree with that assessment, does that entitle us to label someone whose understanding of the common label of Democrat differently as a hypocrite, or someone to be 'read out" of our understanding of who is a Democrat?
The Society of Friends used to 'read out" of Meeting those whose behavior was considered unacceptable. That happened to the woman who saved the Stuart portrait of George Washington when the British burned our Capital city, Dolley Madison. And I do understand that there are limits beyond which we are not prepared to go in accepting others into a common classification.
So perhaps this reflection may seem of little value to others. Perhaps it is no more than my own thinking aloud, or writing to clarify my own thinking. Still, even as I argue that we are each unique and entitled to be recognized and treated as such, absent some level of commonality we would have no basis for community of any kind, and I am certainly no fan of the Hobbesian vision of the war of every man against every man where he noted "and the life of man? Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Part of our common humanity is that usually we seek to find points of commonality, of overlap, with others, so that we do not feel so alone or isolated. Sometimes we submerge aspects of our uniqueness in order to remain in the common fold. And that is appropriate, because we do not exist in isolation from others, and we need to be able to come together for common purposes lest our uniqueness leave so isolated as to be unable to survive.
Still, I would argue that our balance of how we react towards others is too much of the direction of what I consider a false objectivity. It may not be completely possible, but I aspire to treat each person I encounter as subject in herself, because I want to receive a similar respect of person towards me.
It is far less "efficient" to deal with others as subject in themselves. Perhaps that should lead us to question whether we give too much deference to efficiency at the expense of humanity. As a teacher, to read each essay offered by a student is far less efficient for me as a means of gaining an understanding of what the student can demonstrate as learning accomplished than is running a batch of cards through a scantron machine that indicates whether or not that student has bubbled in the answer I have deemed to be correct. Although I may complete the task of assessment more quickly, it does not necessarily mean that my understanding is as complete. Sometimes taking more time and exploring the thinking of the student is a more efficient way for both of us to help that student correct and improve his understanding of and ability to deal with the material. And whether or not is more efficient, it is certainly more human to be able to dialog about one's own thinking processes than it is to be measure by which out of four or five choices you have bubbled in during an exercise that seems to require convergent thinking, removing your particular even if peculiar perceptions. An "objective" multiple choice test is to some degree dehumanizing precisely because of the requirement for convergent thinking.
To be sure, there are some areas of learning on which it is necessary to have common understanding. And even in a diverse liberal democracy such as we hope for our nation, we must have some degree of common understanding, lest we disintegrate into either anarchy or tyranny imposed by those with the greatest access to means of force.
It is my contention that we are out of balance - we are too much, in too many ways, oriented towards the so-called objective approach, at the real loss of individuality and hence of humanity. Even well meaning liberal politicians may be prone to this: arguing for education on the grounds of economic competitiveness versus people in other countries immediately comes to mind, not merely because the international comparisons driving the fear inherent in such statements may be erroneous, but also because it diminishes education to its economic benefit, and at least to me education should be so much more than MERELY the economic benefit it may offer.
My concerns may seem silly. They matter to me, and I think they may matter to others, which is why I voice them here. There is little I can offer in how we can address such concerns beyond the power each of us has to try to make difference in our own words and actions. We often hear the expression to think globally but act locally. I cannot directly influence the "big picture." But it is certainly within my power to seek to live up to my own highest aspirations, to "answer that of God" in each PERSON, to refuse wherever possible to reduce my consideration of others as part of a collective known as "people" or any other group category, but to strive to see that person as unique in herself and to try to act and speak accordingly.
That requires patience, first and foremost with myself, with my own lack of understanding and my persistent failure to act and speak in the manner to which I aspire. It also requires me to be more open to different forms of expression from others, even when those might make me quite uncomfortable. Yet unless I am willing to leave my zone of comfort, of familiarity, I cannot grow, nor can I expect to find and experience the common humanity I share with others who upon first encounter may seem or speak or act in ways that I find very alien.
This mental meandering comes to no conclusions. It cannot, because my own thinking is still under development. Nor do I claim all knowledge and complete perception. I accept that my own expressions on this, as on other matters, may contain internal contradiction. And because this is a general communication, not written to one specific person, it will inevitably produce reactions as different as the persons who choose to engage with my words.
That is as it should be. When we first speak or write, we assume something about the audience to which are words are directed. We then need to observe and listen to the reactions, expressed in words, in actions, in body language, in facial expressions. Only then are we continuing down the path of seeing each member of the audience as a person, subject in herself.
That is what is on my mind this morning. What is on yours?
Peace