Robinson’s declaration reminded me of this scene from the television show The Wire. For those of you who have not seen the show, the witness, Omar Little, is testifying to the fact that he saw the defendant, “muscle” for a local drug operation, shoot and kill an innocent person. The attorney—a man whom Robinson would describe as a criminal lawyer in both senses—represents this particular drug outfit in all of their legal matters.

Omar’s words “I got the shotgun, you got the briefcase” are another articulation of one of the themes in Lawyerland: the attempt to sort people into “good” and “evil” can be an exercise in reductionism. The belief in such dichotomies undermines society’s ability to analyze the social forces at work within it. Recognizing this, The Wire tries to challenge conventional categorizations of good and evil surrounding crime. Watching the show you will empathize with the drug-dealing murderer, hate the commissioner of the police department and feel an overwhelming ambivalence towards most of the main characters. Each hero is, at times, an antihero. Each character is good, evil, both and neither.

Though ostensibly an advertisement for my favorite TV show (Obama’s too!), this post actually means to extend outside of the world of TV drama. There are many areas in our personal and professional lives where we distill people/groups/concepts into circumscribed categories so that we can avoid having to deal with their complexity. What do we lose and/or gain in doing so? How do we stop?

-- TomaLivshiz - 08 Feb 2012

You drew an excellent and inspiring analogy to one of my favorite shows which forced me to think, and edit the questions you posed above. I don't know that distilling people/groups/concepts into circumscribed categories is necessarily a bad practice that we should try to stop, however we should pay attention to what we lose and gain by this practice. I feel like the reason we make these categorizations is animal nature. We are wired (pun intended) to rapidly classify unknown objects into known categories, in order to understand how to deal with them. For instance, we naturally need to figure out whether an approaching person is a friend or foe - a threat we need to protect against, or a companion we can allow into our territory.

I don't think we can or should try to change these initial categorizations of people/groups/concepts; but perhaps by paying attention to our individual patterns in how we categorize different people/groups/concepts we will gain insight into how and why we make our initial categorizations, whether they are accurate, and how helpful or detrimental they end up being to us. For instance one might realize they are too quick to categorize somebody who wears an “I voted for Bush” pin as evil, and thus miss out on communicating with and understanding somebody from a different political view and additionally miss the chance to figure out how to argue with and communicate with that person. Or on the other hand one might realize that by making such an instant categorization he/she is shields his/herself from having a pointless, blood-pressure raising interaction with a person of opposite views. Or another example of a beneficial instant categorization is Robinson's quick judgment of the Federal Prosecutor who asked him to stop being so vulgar, which allowed him to not waste time trying to explain his viewpoint to the man who probably wouldn't listen anyway.

The above reasoning is why I edited the questions at the end of your post. I agree we should try to look at what we lose from our quick categorizations, but I think it's also important to look at what we gain. In posing the question “How do we stop?”, I believe you already came to the conclusion that those categorizations are wrong. I think this is similar to what Professor Moglen said last week in class about it being easier to come to a conclusion before fully thinking about it (see Sandra Day O'Connor's Supreme Court decision), which is something that I do often and I am trying to correct. So before determining the practice of rapid categorization is wrong, maybe we should look at the empirical evidence of what happens to us before we make our categorizations and the empirical consequences of those categorizations (similar to Felix Cohen's suggestion of how we should treat judicial decisions) to determine whether it is something we want to stop in the first place. Thoughts?

-- SkylarPolansky - 08 Feb 2012