The Category Is Pose Quotes

A category of government activity which, today, not only requires the closest scrutiny, but which also poses a grave danger to our continued freedom, is the activity NOT within the proper sphere of government. No one has the authority to grant such powers, as welfare programs, schemes for re-distributing the wealth, and activities which coerce people into acting in accordance with a prescribed code of social planning. There is one simple test. Do I as an individual have a right to use force upon my neighbor to accomplish this goal? If I do have such a right, then I may delegate that power to my government to exercise on my behalf. If I do not have that right as an individual, then I cannot delegate it to government, and I cannot ask my government to perform the act for me…In reply to the argument that a little bit of socialism is good so long as it doesn't go too far, it is tempting to say that, in like fashion, just a little bit of theft or a little bit of cancer is all right, too! History proves that the growth of the welfare state is difficult to check before it comes to its full flower of dictatorship. But let us hope that this time around, the trend can be reversed. If not then we will see the inevitability of complete socialism, probably within our lifetime.

In investigating the lumpings that have shaped societies past and present, we should, I believe, be charitable toward those who merely inherited the classifications that were dominant in their own times. But we should be less patient with those, like Calhoun and Sanger, who pressed to enforce their preferred categories, to encode them in law and make them permanent. Such people are immensely dangerous, and for the health of our public world we need to become alert to the compelling power of lumping: having seen the ways lumping helps us manage information overload and create group solidarity, we should become aware of the temptations it poses to us—to all of us.

Zero-tolerance discipline policies, specifically the controversial category of willful defiance, have become a routine way by which to punish and marginalize Black girls in learning spaces when they directly confront adults or indirectly complicate the teacher’s ability to manage the classroom—not necessarily actions that pose a threat to the physical safety of anyone on campus.

My fear is that much of the antiracist literature is an iteration of the same process of maintaining and reaffirming whiteness. Little in the mainstream antiracist narrative focuses on challenging the idea of “white people” itself. Rather, it takes the category as an unassailable truth, with the emphasis placed instead on making white people nicer, through a combination of begging, demanding, cajoling, and imploring. “Whiteness” was a concept popularized by convincing one group of people it would make their lives better, and demonstrating it through the brutal dehumanization of another group. Now all “whites,” even those with little power in any other quarter of their lives, had the power of life and death over these “others.” This is a “truth” that’s had close to five hundred years to really embed itself. The question I pose is this: Does telling “white” people that racial equality means that their lives have to literally get worse (“but thems the breaks”) really seem up to the challenge of uprooting this centuries-old pernicious promise?

I have finished Russell's Nightmares and must confess that they did not come up to expectation. No doubt it was my fault for expecting too much, knowing how unsatisfactory I find his philosophical views; but I had hoped that, at least, when he was not writing normal philosophy, he would be entertaining. Alas! I found his wit insipid, and his serious passages almost intolerable—there was something of the embarrassment of meeting a Great Man for the first time, and finding him even more preoccupied with trivialities than oneself. In his Introduction, Russell says 'Every isolated passion is, in isolation, insane; sanity may be defined as a synthesis of insanities', and then he proceeds to give us examples of isolated insanities—the Queen of Sheba as Female Vanity, Bowdler as Prudery, the Psycho-Analyst as Social Conformity, and so on. Amongst these, as you noted, is the Existentialist as Ontological Scepticism. Here, Russell's satire is directed partly against what Sartre has called 'a literature of extreme situations'; and this, for an Englishman, is no doubt a legitimate target, since the English do not admit that there are such things—though, of course, this makes the English a target for the satire of the rest of Europe, particularly the French. But what Russell is not entitled to do is to group the insanity of doubting one's existence along with the other insanities, and this for the simple reason that it precedes them. One may be vain or modest; one may be prudish or broadminded; one may be a social conformist or an eccentric; but in order to be any of these things, one must at least be. The question of one's existence must be settled first—one cannot be insanely vain if one doubts whether one exists at all and, precisely, Russell's existentialist does not even succeed in suffering—except when his philosophy is impugned (but this merely indicates that he has failed to apply his philosophy to itself, and not, as Russell would have us believe, because he has failed to regard his philosophy in the light of his other insanities). The trouble really is, that Russell does not, or rather will not, admit that existence poses a problem at all; and, since he omits this category from all his thinking nothing he says concerns anybody in particular.

A few years ago, a couple of young men from my church came to our home for dinner. During the course of the dinner, the conversation turned from religion to various world mythologies and we began to play the game of ‘Name That Character.” To play this game, you pick a category such as famous actors, superheroes or historical characters. In turn, each person describes events in a famous character’s life while everyone else tries to guess who the character is. Strategically you try to describe the deeds of a character in such a way that it might fit any number of characters in that category. After three guesses, if no one knows who your character is, then you win. Choosing the category of Bible Characters, we played a couple of fairly easy rounds with the typical figures, then it was my turn. Now, knowing these well meaning young men had very little religious experience or understanding outside of their own religion, I posed a trick question. I said, “Now my character may seem obvious, but please wait until the end of my description to answer.” I took a long breath for dramatic effect, and began, “My character was the son of the King of Heaven and a mortal woman.” Immediately both young men smiled knowingly, but I raised a finger asking them to wait to give their responses. I continued, “While he was just a baby, a jealous rival attempted to kill him and he was forced into hiding for several years. As he grew older, he developed amazing powers. Among these were the ability to turn water into wine and to control the mental health of other people. He became a great leader and inspired an entire religious movement. Eventually he ascended into heaven and sat with his father as a ruler in heaven.” Certain they knew who I was describing, my two guests were eager to give the winning answer. However, I held them off and continued, “Now I know adding these last parts will seem like overkill, but I simply cannot describe this character without mentioning them. This person’s birthday is celebrated on December 25th and he is worshipped in a spring festival. He defied death, journeyed to the underworld to raise his loved ones from the dead and was resurrected. He was granted immortality by his Father, the king of the gods, and was worshipped as a savior god by entire cultures.” The two young men were practically climbing out of their seats, their faces beaming with the kind of smile only supreme confidence can produce. Deciding to end the charade I said, “I think we all know the answer, but to make it fair, on the count of three just yell out the answer. One. Two. Three.” “Jesus Christ” they both exclaimed in unison – was that your answer as well? Both young men sat back completely satisfied with their answer, confident it was the right one…, but I remained silent. Five seconds ticked away without a response, then ten. The confidence of my two young friends clearly began to drain away. It was about this time that my wife began to shake her head and smile to herself. Finally, one of them asked, “It is Jesus Christ, right? It has to be!” Shaking my head, I said, “Actually, I was describing the Greek god Dionysus.

Two kinds of development help explain how a readiness built up to kill all Jews, including women and children. One is a series of “dress rehearsals” that served to lower inhibitions and provided trained personnel hardened for anything. First came the euthanasia of incurably ill and insane Germans, begun on the day when World War II began. Nazi eugenics theory had long provided a racial justification for getting rid of “inferior” persons. War provided a broader justification for reducing the drain of “useless mouths” on scarce resources. The “T-4” program killed more than seventy thousand people between September 1939 and 1941, when, in response to protests from the victims’ families and Catholic clergy, the matter was left to local authorities. Some of the experts trained in this program were subsequently transferred to the occupied east, where they applied their mass killing techniques to Jews. This time, there was less opposition. The second “dress rehearsal” was the work of the Einsatzgruppen, the intervention squads specially charged with executing the political and cultural elite of invaded countries. In the Polish campaign of September 1939 they helped wipe out the Polish intelligentsia and high civil service, evoking some opposition within the military command. In the Soviet campaign the Einsatzgruppen received the notorious “Commissar Order” to kill all Communist Party cadres as well as the Jewish leadership (seen as identical in Nazi eyes), along with Gypsies. This time the army raised no objections. The Einsatzgruppen subsequently played a major role, though they were far from alone, in the mass killings of Jewish women and children that began in some occupied areas in fall 1941. A third “dress rehearsal” was the intentional death of millions of Soviet prisoners of war. It was on six hundred of them that the Nazi occupation authorities first tested the mass killing potential of the commercial insecticide Zyklon-B at Auschwitz on September 3, 1941. Most Soviet prisoners of war, however, were simply worked or starved to death. The second category of developments that helped prepare a “willingness to murder” consisted of blockages, emergencies, and crises that made the Jews become a seemingly unbearable burden to the administrators of conquered territories. A major blockage was the failure to capture Moscow that choked off the anticipated expulsion of all the Jews of conquered eastern Europe far into the Soviet interior. A major emergency was shortages of food supplies for the German invasion force. German military planners had chosen to feed the invasion force with the resources of the invaded areas, in full knowledge that this meant starvation for local populations. When local supplies fell below expectations, the search for “useless mouths” began. In the twisted mentality of the Nazi administrators, Jews and Gypsies also posed a security threat to German forces. Another emergency was created by the arrival of trainloads of ethnic Germans awaiting resettlement, for whom space had to be made available. Faced with these accumulating problems, Nazi administrators developed a series of “intermediary solutions.” One was ghettos, but these proved to be incubators for disease (an obsession with the cleanly Nazis), and a drain on the budget. The attempt to make the ghettos work for German war production yielded little except another category of useless mouths: those incapable of work. Another “intermediary solution” was the stillborn plan, already mentioned, to settle European Jews en masse in some remote area such as Madagascar, East Africa, or the Russian hinterland. The failure of all the “intermediary solutions” helped open the way for a “final solution”: extermination.

i used to classify my books in two categories: architecture books and other books. then i realized that my first category mostly dealt with architecture as an aestheticized formalism, whereas the second category posed cities, buildings and settings as integrated with life and human character. During the past thirty years, i have come to view all books as architecture books, because all human situations, histories, fictions, actions and thoughts are framed by human constructions and artifacts; our spatial, material and mental constructions provide essential horizons of understanding. i read poems, listen to music, look at paintings, and watch films as potential architectural propositions.18

The earliest medieval logical curriculum, studied from the time of Alcuin’s On Dialectic (late 780s?) until the late tenth century, was based mainly on the accounts of logic in the encyclopedias of Cassiodorus, Isidore of Seville and Martianus Capella, together with Apuleius’s Periermenias (an account of basic Aristotelian syllogistic) and the Ten Categories, a paraphrase-commentary of Aristotle’s Categories. The last of these was written in the circle of Themistius, but attributed in the Middle Ages to Augustine. This misattribution points to one of the reasons why logic had such a large place in early medieval education: it was seen as indispensable in theological discussion, both because it provided a way of posing fundamental questions about God and his relation to his creation, and because it furnished a formidable argumentative weapon in controversy.

Those who make up Spitzer’s category of “social junk” rarely unite to orchestrate a potent resistance to the social forces that maintain them in states of vulnerability. They rarely pose an organizing threat against the system that keeps them in a state of what Giorgio Agamben would call “bare life,” that is, included among the living in sovereign systems but only as the always excludable, even killable. They remain vulnerable to being sacrificed for securing the efficient “quality of life” of those in realms dependent upon corporate power and their proximity to the white overclass.

The Uttarakhand BJP president declared similarly that pregnant women could avoid caesarean deliveries if they drank water from a river in the state.94 Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself claimed that India invented reproductive genetics and plastic surgery. In October 2014, he told a gathering of doctors and other professionals at a hospital in Mumbai: “We all read about Karna in the Mahabharata. If we think a little more, we realize that the Mahabharata says Karna was not born from his mother’s womb. This means that genetic science was present at that time. That is why Karna could be born outside his mother’s womb. . . . We worship Lord Ganesha. There must have been some plastic surgeon at that time who got an elephant’s head on the body of a human being and began the practice of plastic surgery.”95 Remarks such as these were met each time with protestation from “rationalists,” a category of intellectuals often affiliated with the communist Left. Three of them, known for their criticism of Hindu nationalist sectarianism and obscurantism, were murdered between 2013 and 2015: Narendra Dabholkar, the founder of the Maharashtra Blind Faith Eradication Committee; Govind Pansare, a long-standing member of the Indian Communist Party; and M. M. Kalburgi, former vice-chancellor of Kannada University in Hampi96 (see chapter 7). For obscurantists (whether they belong to a religious sect or an ethnonationalist movement), rationalists are key targets because they are viewed as blasphemers and pose a threat to their belief system by exposing the myths in which they believe.

In the last thirty years, I’ve read, heard, and seen the world’s most creative, gruesome, distasteful, and well-performed threats. I’ve learned that it’s important to react calmly, because when in alarm we stop evaluating information mindfully and start doing it physically. For example, a death threat communicated in a letter or phone call cannot possibly pose any immediate hazard, but the recipient might nonetheless start getting physically ready for danger, with increased blood flow to the arms and legs (for fighting or running), release of the chemical cortisol (which helps blood coagulate more quickly in case of injury), lactic acid heating up in the muscles (to prepare them for effort), focused vision, and increased breathing and heartbeat to support all these systems. These responses are valuable when facing present danger (such as when Kelly stood up and walked out of her apartment), but for evaluating future hazard, staying calm produces better results. A way to do this is to consciously ask and answer the question “Am I in immediate danger?” Your body wants you to get this question out of the way, and once you do, you’ll be free to keep perceiving what’s going on. The great enemy of perception, and thus of accurate predictions, is judgment. People often learn just enough about something to judge it as belonging in this or that category. They observe bizarre conduct and say, “This guy is just crazy.” Judgments are the automatic pigeon-holing of a person or situation simply because some characteristic is familiar to the observer (so whatever that characteristic meant before it must mean again now). Familiarity is comfortable, but such judgments drop the curtain, effectively preventing the observer from seeing the rest of the play. Another time people stop perceiving new information is when they prematurely judge someone as guilty or not guilty.

Is there something uniquely dangerous about beans? I posed this question to plant scientist Ann Filmer, recently retired from the University of California, Davis. In her reply, she included a link for a website she had put together on poisonous garden plants. I was taken aback to note that nine of the 112 plants in Category 1 (Major Toxicity: “may cause serious illness or death”) were currently, or had recently been, growing in our yard: oleander, lantana, night-blooming jasmine, lobelia, rhododendron, azalea, toyon, pittosporum, and hellebore. Another, the houseplant croton, was growing in an orange ceramic pot in my office. In other words, it’s not beans. It’s plants, period. If you can’t flee or maul or fire a gun, evolution may help you out with other, quieter ways to avoid being eaten. Over the millennia, natural selection favors eaters who turn up their proboscis at you, and eventually they all steer clear.

Convenience sampling—testing the waters with friends and family—often leads to false positive results because loved ones tend to adore your idea no matter what. Crowdfunding campaigns—like the one Jibo ran on Indiegogo—pose a similar hazard. Individuals who back such campaigns are often product category enthusiasts looking for bright, shiny new things and are eager to be first to sample them. Crowdfunding campaigns can demonstrate a product’s appeal to such zealots, but they don’t provide data on mass-market demand.

The binary of illness/wellness is always porous, whether or not we notice. In Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag wrote, “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.” I used to believe Sontag uncritically. Now I know that the two kingdoms don’t exist; it’s one kingdom, in a quantum state. We are all constantly both sick and well, sick/well, sick and well both, our body and immune system in conversation with a world rich in microbes, viruses, and bacteria, almost all of them either benign or beneficial, countless microbes in me here as I write and in you there as you read. The quantum state of sick/well. Let me take cancer, that disease so long synonymous with death. Cancer is not a binary. We’re willing to acknowledge this, but only when one has already crossed over into the sick category. Cancer has stages. Stage 1 cancer is still small, mostly easily treatable; stage 4 cancer is aggressive, malignant, deadly. Many prostate cancers require no intervention at all. They are subclinical. We live with them until something else kills us. Cancer is not black and white but gray, and further, there is no white to begin with. There is no absence of cancer as long as we have a body. We make cancerous cells every day our cells divide, which is to say every day. In order to keep living, and keep making—for example—new skin to push the outside world out, our cells have to divide. With each cell division, a cell will make mutations. Mutations are the raw material of cancer. Carcinogens and sunlight cause cancer because they cause mutations and damage to our DNA. But without cell division, no life. To risk cancer, to make it day by day, is to live. The absence of cancer is death. So cancerous cells are a normal part of life. In the popular imagination, we see the immune system as mainly protecting us from infectious disease, from bacteria and viruses. But just as importantly, our immune system protects us against cancer, the cells in our own body that mutate to become other, to pose a threat. At almost 40, I’ve certainly had cancerous cells in me, cells that mutate so they can divide and divide and divide. It’s my immune system that finds those cells and kills them so that I, a whole organism, can survive. But because I don’t have cancer doesn’t mean I haven’t had a cancer cell in me. I have, and survived it, so far.