'Why do we always have to name things, classify them, put them in boxes?' Photo: Linnaeus’s System of Botany, plate one, 1777
‘Learning happens when we wander across borders, refusing to be contained within them.’
Thought for the week: Catherine Henderson is out of order
Yesterday a tiny bird was perched on our television aerial, singing incredibly sweetly. But instead of just letting me listen, my busy mind came butting in, wanting to know its name.
Why do we always have to name things, classify them, put them in boxes? Is this a natural impulse?
I think it is more a cultural thing, embedded in the way we have learned to see the world. It is a necessary part of science and medicine. It helps us understand, discover and invent. But it also allows us to create divisions: to separate ourselves one from another and from the natural world. For example, the Enlightenment gave us the false system of racial categorisation, now understood to have no scientific basis. What we are left with is racism.
Our dual perception of ‘us’ and ‘nature’ is not innate either: people in other parts of the world have an understanding of being a part of nature that we in the West have largely lost. But we are beginning to feel our way back towards this now: as the Youth for Climate movement has pointed out, we have to see ourselves as part of the whole, separate neither from each other nor from nature.
But while we reach forward to try to grasp this truth, our ways of doing things lag behind. In the UK our education system is still largely based on a nineteenth-century model, which neatly divides study into separate subjects. In primary education we too-often ignore the way that younger children naturally learn: by making connections and exploring tangential paths and obsessions. Learning happens when we wander across borders, refusing to be contained within them.
We think we have to do things a certain way, but that may be because we are reluctant to let go and explore other ways. Do we do this too in our Quaker work? Is it necessary to divide it into discrete areas – peace, social justice, climate, migration? Or does this get in the way of our seeing how everything overlaps, how there are no lines of division between any of these?
Right now it feels like we are in a time of melting down and reforming. We need new models, newer ways of being and doing, in order to imagine our way forward.
Comments
Perhaps because my parents moved many times in my early years ( I went to 8 primary schools on both sides of the Atlantic) I’ve very much always seen connections rather than keeping things distinct - and consequently felt that my thinking was not typical. As part of my role as Ecumenical and Interfaith coordinator for Central England Quakers I have joined the Birmingham management committee of City of Sanctuary because refugees and asylum seekers are of all faiths and denominations. I’m involved in our climate emergency action because this is a matter of concern to us all and we are working with other churches and faiths and with those of no faith towards a low carbon future. My passion though is for biodiversity because of the interrelatedness of all life and I’m turning my allotment to becoming a forest garden with exciting results. My neighbour on the plot complained the other day that there were too many insects, which she doesn’t like. I very much agree with Catherine when she speaks about our trained tendency in western society to classify things and put them in boxes. We urgently need to step outside the box more and stop ‘othering‘ what is currently beyond our understanding.
By Yarntwiner on 30th July 2020 - 9:18
Good article and good comments. Ou children are put into National Curriculum boxes far too young. Food for thought
By nyinmodelek@btinternet.com on 2nd August 2020 - 7:56
“Names Don’t Constitute Knowledge” - is a quote from probably the second greatest twentieth century physicist, Richard Feynman - Einstein gave us relativity, Feynman gave us Quantum Mechanics. Watch this short clip from a documentary by Yorkshire Television: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFIYKmos3-s
There is knowledge about things, where we observe the world; there is knowledge of things, where we participate in the world; and there is knowledge with things, when we relate to the world. We are not thinkers observing the world, but actors relating to the world. Simply “an understanding of being a part of nature” is still not enough - we have to actively relate to the world, to let go of our precious ego and join in, risking suffering and loss, if we are to truly know ‘that of God’.
By GordonF on 4th August 2020 - 7:37
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