Chuck Klosterman has an article over at the Esquire site that looks at stereotypes through the lens of a visit to Germany. What strikes me about the article, and this is in the first few paragraphs, is that the use of stereotypes is something many of us do without much thinking about it.
It's a form of sloppy thinking, but I also suspect that it's a way the brain deals with the complexity of the world. In order to make the overwhelming amounts of information more manageable, the brain creates categories that become stereotypes when they are culturally agreed upon.
Obviously, the worst stereotypes also involve prejudice, like racism -- which puts them into a whole other class. These stereotype are reductionist and based often in fear of the "other."
Part of Klosterman's point in looking at less harmful stereotypes is that no one really takes them seriously. They become a shorthand, and are often never really consciously examined. This too is reductionist and substitutes the shorthand for the reality, which is sloppy thinking but also creates a false sense of reality.
As a Buddhist, I do sitting meditation and mindfulness practice with the goal of seeing the world exactly as it is, without illusion. It's humbling to think of how often I fail and fall back to using stereotypes. I'm sure I do it frequently here in this blog.
It's certainly something to think about.
Here is the intro the Esquire article:
We all hate stereotypes. Stereotypes are killing us, and they are killing our children, and they are putting LSD into the water supply. Stereotypes are like rogue elephants with AIDS that have been set on fire by terrorists, except worse. We all hate stereotypes. Seriously. Dude, we fucking hate them.
Except that we don't. We adore stereotypes, and we desperately need them to fabricate who we are (or who we are not). People need to be able to say things like, "All stereotypes are based on ignorance," because expressing such a sentiment makes them enlightened, open-minded, and incredibly unpleasant. Meanwhile, their adversaries need the ability to say things such as, "Like it or not, all stereotypes are ultimately based in some sort of reality," because that kind of semilogic can justify their feelings about virtually anything. Nobody really cares what specific stereotype they happen to be debating; what matters more is how that label was spawned, because that defines its consequence. It raises a fundamental query about the nature of existence: Is our anecdotal understanding of the world founded on naivete, or is it built on dark, unpopular truths? That is the question. And here (I suspect) is the answer: neither. Stereotypes are not really based on fact, and they are not really based on fiction. They are based on arbitrary human qualities no one cares about at all. Whenever a given stereotype seems right (or wrong), it's inevitably a coincidence; the world is a prejudiced place, but it's prejudiced for the weirdest, least-meaningful reasons imaginable.
Read the rest.
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