Generalisation - its weakness and its uses
There has been a lot of talk recently about the ignorant, redneck American tearing around deserts in armoured vehicles, armed to the teeth, executing the policies of a stupid little man that lives in a big white house, surrounded by crooked cronies who have a tendency of having a vocabulary limited to the word “yes”.
This is a fiction that has been useful to many, but counter-productive to me. I find fiction more than helpful when trying to understand phenomena. I refuse to accept fiction when the thing I am trying to understand is turned into fiction. One must never confuse the mechanism for understanding for the thing to be understood.
The problem with argument and description is that so often we must rely on that most fragile basis – generalisation, a useful fiction. We need scope and context. These sometimes become obscured when we turn to the particular. To generalise is to simplify, to seek the universal in an instance. It is crucial for communication. It is crucial for brevity. Remember the rule of 7: A person can hardly ever remember more than 7 “bits” of information, whether they be numbers or clauses in a sentence or points in an essay.
Generalisation is the heart of strategy. When we want the sweep of mass movement, when an ambitious end requires ambition in means.
It is a crude instrument when used tactically, for small skirmishes that require precision and accountable credibility.
This is the reason generalisation works so well in the novel and so appallingly in journalism. In the former, if carefully and masterfully handled, it can bring us tiny steps closer to the truth. In the later it can be a gross simplification that leaves a point of view open to easy attack, no matter how valid the point, or obscure the concreteness, the veracity of the event and the representation of the event.
In criticism against America and its foreign policy, generalisation has been a cheap and effective weapon for those impotent in the face of a world power that can generalise on such a massive scale (generalisation gaining strength through propagation and repetition) to justify such terrible efficacy in its particulars. We’re using enemy tactics against the enemy, but we also cry foul when the enemy uses those same tactics.
It would be impossible for me to defend a stance that excludes generalisation; so instead, I will give instances where fictitious generalisations (even though all are the containment of a generalisation in a characterised particular) have actually helped me in understanding the American spirit and character.
Pyle in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American: The America that defers moral responsibility in the interest of what is deemed to be a moral outcome. People see America as being terribly naïve in its approach to foreign countries, their turmoil and the American tendency to “help” in a way that seems to be morally and ethically indefensible but is fuelled by an idealism that seeks betterment and progress for all.
Tom Ripely in Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripely: The America that is cultured and knowledgeable but has no moral compass whatsoever. It acts in the name of expediency and self-interest. It can also posses a cordial face while acting in such a manner. It is highly mobile across the international arena, being multi-lingual and highly adaptive. Do not slight it because the ramifications can be awful and mortal.
Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn: America the innocent, looking on aghast at itself while it subjugates populations and puts them in the service of the greater American economic and political good. Uneducated and unlettered, not a profound being, but good and kind, adventurous for all the right reasons, this America finds delight in a world that is foreign and new to it.
Raoul Duke in Hunter S Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: The America that is confounded by its own circumstances and desires. It recognises a great, rich vein of traditional American genius and also recognises that it possesses all the ingredients necessary to be truly great and beneficent, but it acknowledges that many of the traits that make America so successful are highly perverse and criminal, indeed, that it is this perversity and criminality that makes it great.
This list is by no means exhaustive. There are many archetypes that are specifically American and are useful when trying to understand America and all its multifariousness. These are the ones that are most prominent in my recollection because I enjoyed the writing.