Wise Words? Names and Labels

The human experience is unique because its different for each person. Everyone is born in a slightly different time and place and each of the many factors of our upbringing can have lasting and meaningful impact on our life. Despite this, there are a lot of commonalities to the human experience as whole. I'm fond of a lyric by Jack Johnson which sings that 

"humans are animals with just fancy shoes, ... [and] tools to build all the junk that we sell"

While I think there is some poetic truth for this, I personally love animal lives and cherish them just as much as human ones, the skeptic in me is quick to point out that thats not entirely true. Sure a lot of our tools and time since the industrial age began have been focused on competitive practices which reward the sale of intoxicating junk, but thats not the whole story. A lot of time has also been spent sharing and spreading ideas, and for me personally thats the best part of being human. And I think at the root of this ability to have an idea and think about it, is the ability to tell one thing from another and connect them. This is something which all humans do, and its important I think to look at how it works and why we need it because its very much a core building block of human knowledge, rivaled perhaps only by experience and trial and error. All of that later but for now, lets talk about the brain of a baby just learning to explore the world.

When we're very small, we're often very tactile and eagre to explore things with our senses in any way that we can. A quick google search led me to an article from the Harvard website which claims that 20 percent of kids try to (or succesfully) eat a nonfood object as a small child. I was certainly the one of those five, I ate sand at the beach as a baby for...

unknown reasons.

So, babies spend a lot of their time exploring as a normal part of their development in which they are gaining the ability to discern one object from another. For me, its possible I had just never seen anything like beach sand in my suburb of Cleveland and wanted to understand it inside and out. I needed to know what this thing was, because even my small and clearly untrustworthy mind could tell that it was different. According to this article from the Better Health Chanel, this exploration centric period in time is somewhat connected with children's speech transitioning from babbling to sounds which may even be beginning to take on the consistency of tone and context of words. Such period in time occurs around 6 to 9 months into a person's life.

(I was sort of non verbal as a kid and made up my whole language and I could never quite figure out if that made me kinda smart or really stupid)

I believe that its this process: discerning which objects in the world are different from one another and also forming continuously more concrete and deliberate ways of identifying them, which teaches us our fundamental human skill of connecting two ideas together. It's important to note that this is on some level the primary cognitive difference between humans and animals. Yes an animal can identify one thing as different from another and they have a basic enough understanding of causality, but they do not connect endless streams of ideas and thoughts together in order to understand their own life. I wish I could remember some of the animal lives of my soul, it would be interesting to experience just how beings who have a soul and think and feel and live but do not ponder or overthink live. Like many other things, cognition is both a great strength and a great weakness, and thats the duality I wanted to talk about.

When we can distinguish one thing from another thing, we could say it has a Name. A Name is something every proper noun has and its something which distinguishes something as a distinct entity. While these do not compose the whole of our language, they do occupy a lot of what we often actually talk about. The world around us is filled with specific names which command a lot of power: be they politicians corporations or simply famous people who many others listen to. 

Names are also identified in more academic circles as being Proper Nouns. These are words which are not valid in Scrabble because they pertain to one specific thing and are often assigned by one person and not however many people are responsible for each version of each dictionary (especially when that knowledge was mostly passed around in print). Simply put they're very volatile. Even though a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, someone who was assigned the name Rose at birth may one day decide their name is Rock or Rick or anything else. This is contrary to another way in which we distinguish one thing from others: labels.

Labels are very static. Some, such as "sinner" have been around longer than any singular human nation. You normally don't get to choose your labels. Either they're a result of something you did or they're something you were born as. You may be an American or an African or a Brit or any other number of things. Labels do not typically apply to one person, they typically apply to large groups. Ive used the examples of nations but even within nations they denote large groups such as religions, professions, and classes. It varies greatly how much control you have over which labels are assigned to you. Obviously no one chooses when they're born and the word sinner is usually lobbed for dispensing judgement, but we do have (some) choice over our profession. However, in most of these cases, the label is simply assigned to the group for the sake of their convenience. It is not something the group asks to be identified as, except in the case of nations and gender/sexual identity. And just as we as Americans fought a war for our independence from the old world of the British Empire, gender and sexually divergent people are fighting a war right now for our independence from hetero-normative standards of life.

Because I live in Ohio, I drive past a billboard on my way to Columbus which stupidly proclaims that "Marriage is a Between One Man and One Women." Clearly the conservative cuck who errected this dickless slander is very protective of the word marriage and does not want it to include people who are too different from them. This is because the fundamental function of labels is to separate a group from other groups, and so if someone is in your label they must be an "us" and not a "them." Unlike Names which are used to distinguish one thing from all other things, labels are used to describe one group of people and may not necessarily include or exclude people from other groups. A lot of groups allow a lot of other groups to exist within it, America for instance was founded on the basis of being inclusive to all religious and geographical backgrounds (in spite of what some people have labeled as "traditional american values"). However some groups are necessarily exclusionary of others, such as Catholics and/or Conservatives against non heteronormative people. Whats silly to me is that the fear of including a different kind of person in their in group is so strong that they believe its morally upstanding to ask that person to not exist at all.

But thats insane. The parts of us which seperate us from "normal", both our Labels and our Names, are not wrong for the most part (I suppose murderer and pedophile are also labels and those are bad things) and we should make an effort to be more inclusive. I'd like to think we could one day live in a world where we were truly able to live alongside another with their differences to us respected and appreciated. But for now, Ill simply drive past that billboard with my middle finger in the air one more time.

Be true to yourself,

Sammie