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Generalizations



All Indians are bigots and hypocrites. Non-Vegetarians are evil and violent. All dark skinned people are poor. ABCD girls are arrogant. ABCDs hate the FOBs. All Biharis are gonads and corrupt. Sardars are morons, and they go nuts at 12:00.

All Muslims are fundamentalists. All Christians are out to convert the world. All Hindus are fanatics. All Muslims are fanatic. All Muslims are conspiring day-by-day everyday to destroy India. Religion is the only way to God.

Women can't keep secrets. Men are chauvinistic sexual pigs. Women are bad drivers. Women have a bad sense of direction.

All blacks are morons and dangerous. All whites are racist. All white women are sluts and immoral. All blondes are dumb.

I could go on and on and this list would be long enough to be made into an encyclopedia. Some of these might look like facts to you and some outrageous, it all depends on your beliefs and where you come from. Some people would debate that some of these are not just assumptions but facts and some would justify them by saying that generalizations make dealing with people easier. I don't think anybody has a monopoly over rationality or irrationality.

If we have to live our life just believing whatever we listen or read from traditional channels and don't have an open mind we might expect to screw up things very often than not. By the mere generalization of somebody's exterior self, we may be left with an incomplete summary of the subject. I believe that knowledge promotes understanding and that understanding is the basis of respect.

When people use these generalizations sooner or later they might start believing in them. You will notice that generalizations are easy to be made on a minority/perceived enemy/perceived to be inferior peoples than on a majority population. Also generalizations are most often about the bad things that you can say about people, they're almost never any good generalizations of any group. People want to be very rational when it comes to saying good things about a certain group but not when it comes to saying bad things.

I would like to quote from the diary of Anne Frank (She was a Jewish teenager in hiding with her family in Netherlands during the WWII, when the Nazis were capturing all the Jews and sending them to concentration camps in Germany. She along with her family was safe in an office building for about two years. They were later found by the Nazis and sent to the camps where she later died.) She wrote.

"What one Christian does is his own responsibility What one Jew does reflects on all Jews"

This can be easily applied to any minority/perceived enemy/perceived to be inferior peoples in any nation and will hold true. I would like to repeat something I wrote earlier here on Sulekha.

"The Index of measuring goodness seems to be different for minorities and majorities. The worst of a minority becomes the benchmark for that minority, but the worst of a majority becomes a meager aberration."

Like for example if an American meets an Indian who for some reason or the other has a bad odor around him. For the American it would be very easy to say, "these Indians stink". More than trying to debate the rationality of generalizations I want to address what is wrong in believing such generalizations. Now lets say I believe ''All women are inferior to men". Now what is wrong with such a belief? Some people might give me a lot of instances where women who have done such and such thing in such and such field, which are traditionally male dominated and hence my belief is not rational. But then again you have given me proof of only some women who are better then men or equal to men in certain aspects. So I can convert my belief to "most women are inferior to men" and that would satisfy your reasons. Then there will be many who would argue that such belief is irrational out of instincts. Why?

I think there is nothing wrong with this belief of mine, If I were stranded on an remote island cut off from the rest of the human society, anything I believe is of no consequence. But when you live in a society and you interact with others your beliefs affect the way you deal with people and how you treat them. That is why it would be wrong for me to believe that "most women are inferior to men".

I am a firm believer in Schrödinger's cat when it comes to generalizations, I believe the Cat is alive. How can I assume that the cat is dead unless I actually go and make an observation? Let me give some information for those who don't know about Schrödinger's (the guy who invented Schrödinger's Uncertainty Principle, which states that you cannot know the position and speed of an atomic particle at the same time) cat.

A cat is caged with a bottle of poison which can be broken by tripping a hammer. The cat is placed in an isolated closed room, which is locked. Now how long before the cat fiddles with the hammer, breaks the bottle, drinks the poison and dies. I cannot be 100% sure that the cat is dead unless I actually make an observation going into the room and seeing the cat dead. I could make assumptions that a cat gets hungry after certain amount of time and dies after another certain amount of time after drinking the poison. But I cannot be 100% sure unless I make an actual observation. Applying to the present context I cannot believe in a generalization unless I make an observation of each and every person of the group we are talking about. To make it simple I will just quote one of my favorite quotes of Buddha.

"Believe in only what happens to you".

For some strange reason we tend to believe easily in bad things that are said about people than their good. Even an unreliable source can make you believe in stuff you would not have believed in normal conditions. esp. if it is about people who you think are different form you or perceive as your enemies.

The problem with generalizations more than the irrationality of it is that if you just believe in them they take on a form of permanence that can lead to troubles. I believe that any idea/philosophy/policy when considered permanent will cause problems. Human society is not stagnant it evolves and changes and so should the ideas of human society. Or to say specifically all morality cannot be assumed to be permanent. I am convinced that morality cannot be permanent, it has to evolve with the times and people.

It is very much debatable today as it was thousands of years ago questions like, does Man have a moral sense? Is Man fundamentally good? etc. Throughout civilization's history many people have tried to find a moral sense in human beings or have tried to define morality for the people. They defined what they thought was suitable for that time and people, and these moralities were given the sanction and permanence by invoking the name of God.

I wonder if the philosophy of religion can survive time if it were not given the sanction of God. Though God's sanction of some morality is helpful, like for theft but defining morality and hence law purely on religious grounds is certainly not a good idea. Like for example people don't scoff about booth capturing or rigging in the elections because God has not said it is wrong. With the growing globalization, the increasing signs of a global village and the polarization of political boundaries for many, there is a need to define morality outside the realm of religion or for religious morality to evolve. There is a similar need for people to be open-minded and apply reason to life.












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