Most of existence bugs me at one time or another, but this is something that really bugs me: how the existence of the individual is systematically ignored when discussing the group.
In nearly all our attempts to define who we are as humans, we choose to look at what’s general, not at what’s specific to the individual. That is, the assumptions we make – in research, in politics, in social action, in most fiction writing, in what we look for when we wake in the morning – are based on searching for the median or average that will help tell us what is “true.”
This comes from a species-wide acceptance that there is always a ’normal” an “accepted,” a “widely-agreed-upon.” Most of the time, by doing this, we lose track of the fact that each of us is a unique being with a unique construction.
A few examples:
#1: Both Biden and Trump were over the last year set upon for being “too old” to be president. If you look at them as individuals, at any age, it’s perfectly reasonable to ask, “Are you fit to be president?” But to start off, before any data have been collected, with the assumption that anyone over 75 is a doddering loon is not just obnoxious but ridiculous.
[OK, the particular loon writing this is 85; I’ve mixed up people’s names all my life, as has just about anyone I know. It has to do with brain storage mechanisms more than age.]
As it turns out, there is serious doubt about either Biden or Trump’s fitness to run a country. In Biden’s case, it looks like his response to aging has left him struggling. As for Trump, at no age would I have trusted him to take random samples of possum saliva. The man’s a cretin with the cognitive acumen of a crankshaft.
#2: At the other end of the age spectrum, the socio-political crap-collectors are now lumping all younger folks in the country into random “generations,” arbitrarily bounded by dates that make little or no sense, then assuming that these non-groups all think and behave like bonded clones. Worse, these “generations” are slapped with randomly-assigned letters like Z and X or derogatory labels like “millennial” [which can makes them seem like adherents of the 1000-Year Reich].
I have far greater trust in the country’s young [especially the women] than in my own cohort of codgers, but even in this case, for me to label them a solid forefront of hope would do them immense injustice. Every individual of every generation is a unique entity with a specific genetic heritage, personal background and conglomeration of experiences. They are not massed emblems.
#3: My own childhood. [Yeah, I know you don’t want to hear any more about that, but you’re going to. There’s a point to it in this case.]
When I spend time [with regret] reading about childhood experiences, related by adults relying on their memory, teachers relying on their charges’ behavior, or experts relying on their narrowness of outlook, I’ve have not yet, ever read or heard a description that matches my experience of childhood.
That doesn’t make my wee years in any way extraordinary or whoop-de-doo horrific, it just makes them mine in a wholly individual sense. Despite a range of experiences that I surely shared with any young human, my childhood did not match the general indicators for “being a child.”
Maybe it’s because of this later-in-life realization that I now consciously try to emphasize the individual ahead of the group in almost any situation – not because I like the individual more, but that I find thit a more spot-on entry to understanding the whyness of the universe. [“Thit” is not a typo, it’s my newly minted pronoun singular intended to conflate “he/him,” “she/her,” “it” and “they/them”; I could have chosen “shit,” so as to include the “s” from “she,” but that would suffer from conflict with established connotations.]
My choice of focus also comes from having always felt myself to be totally an individual – not a in a good or bad sense, but in the sense of feeling related to almost nothing. I don’t reject others, but that I am not of them.
So, yes – connections exist, groups exist, trends exist, and there’s good reason to keep them in mind and to study their construction. But we also need to remember that every social “unit” is a conglomerate of individuals in constant change, even when the group appears settled.
All is temporary, whether using a short time scale or a long.
Of course, in attempting to establish the underlying laws of the physical sciences, we definitely need to concentrate on the general. If the law of gravitation only worked on alternate Saturdays when he sun was shining from the northwest, it wouldn’t be useful in definition or prediction. The scientist wants to know how the mechanisms of the physical world can be described in every instance – or as close to that as possible, as determined through experiment.
As for the social sciences, they aren’t really science; in fact, I wish the term “social science” didn’t exist. It’s a congeries of rambling approximations and pretty-good guesses about how to quantify a collection of individual responses.
But since social scientists like to think they’re doing real science, they compile simple-minded questionnaires that try to focus on general trends, then pretend there’s a universal lurking behind the answers.
What happens with these questionnaires is that the questions actually do elicit individual responses, but not often ones available to the subject, who instead has to choose, from the three possibilities offered, the one they feel comes closest to their actual response [the available choices are often “yes,” “no” or “not certain”].
* * *
Now, thank your lucky your stars: Nothing that follows relates to anything above.
* * *
A lawn is no damned good to anybody. You mow it and the result lies as a big green flop, doing nothing. No flowers, no differentiation, as you assiduously lop off every last tassel that might look interesting.
Some people just love to cut grass. When astride a riding mower, they may even claim it as a form of meditation. So, for awhile I wondered if I was missing something; maybe mowing really is a relaxing form of Zen.
But then the truth struck me: I had the whole thing backwards: In practice, Zen is probably as big a pain in the ass as mowing.
* * *
Headline: “Babe Ruth’s ‘called shot’ jersey from 1932 World Series sells for record $24.1m”
Not only proof of the stupidity of the rich who buy useless shit by the walletload, but consider how many housing units that 24 mil could have provided. Instead, it provided absolutely nothing of real value.
* * *
Should the plural be “jack in the pulpits” or “jacks in the pulpit”? And why is there no jack off the pulpit?
* * *
Now and then I want to pound my head into the wall, hoping that both my head and the wall will disintegrate.
* * *
My father could wiggle his ears. No idea how he developed that kind of muscular control.
Today is the first time I’ve thought of that in decades, though it certainly should have popped up in my mind over all those years. After all, it says something delightful about my father. Yet there are other things I do remember that say nothing about him, one way or the other.
Memory is as fickle as a fly’s flight.
lickhaven 