Gradation

An unusual blend of rock and pop, with a dash of techno... that’s what was running through my mind as Chris Cornell crooned (yet again providing testimony to the marvel that is technology), right into my ear phones.
That got me wondering, what is it with us and classification? We seem to have this inherent, uncontrollable, subconscious urge to want to categorize.
People, food, music, art, emotions... we spare nothing. Heck, we even have categories for the things that don’t fit in any categories! And do we have a lot of terms for them: miscellaneous, fusion, medley, potpourri...

So why are we afflicted with this strong basal instinct to bucket things? Is it just an inherent compulsiveness to group and tie up loose ends or simply a self preservation tactic against the daily deluge of information our senses are assaulted with?
If you think about it, you realize you never really think about it. It’s second nature, like a reflexive response, entirely involuntary. Almost as if the giant mass of gooey stuff between the ears that continues to astound us, were programmed to run the Divide and Conquer approach on everything it encountered, as a defence mechanism.

But categorizing isn’t the issue, no, it’s what keeps us sane. The problem starts when it comes to a particular set of classes, one we know by many names but the most familiar and the one they all come back to: Right vs. Wrong.
Its many derivatives would include the pairs of good-bad, acceptable-inappropriate, correct-incorrect, moral-immoral, and any other synonyms you might find for the same. The names change but the essence is the same: judging on the basis of values, bringing into the process of classification, the dangerous element of human subjectivity. I don’t mean to say that the other classes are perfect, objective or even exhaustive, far from it. They spill into one another all of the time, but here the lines are far more blurred. But more importantly the impact of the classification is of a different kind, it’s no longer only just a tool to help us make order out of chaos, but one that leads us to forming opinions, making choices about people, events or situations.
And that is exactly why I believe we must try to fully respect the fact that the definition of this pair (and the offshoots it brings along) is never going to be the same for two individuals, it would at best, overlap.
The shades of grey have to creep in, black and white just doesn’t quite cut it for this classification. In fact the black and white are intangible, unattainable, un-realizable, hypothetical even and like every other absolute, they’re merely a standard of measurement we use for the rest. The shades, the grey, you see them in not just the way we define the category, but also in how it is interpreted by individuals.

I think that is the key to tolerance, being able to understand and appreciate that everyone is entitled to their own set of values.
Each one is unique, and hence no one is unique. To be less cryptic, we’re all different in the standards we maintain, but the same in doing so.