On Abstraction

The human ability to abstract is a two edged sword. It has been the source of major human accomplishments and major human deception and unnecessary misery.

What do the Mars Rover and the murderous U. S. soldiers in Hidatha have in common? They are both the results of the human ability to abstract. Somewhere in our evolutionary history we humans developed the ability to abstract from our observations. An abstraction may begin with generalizations about the common elements in the phenomena we observe, but in rather short order they take on a life of their own as an abstraction. Humans became so fascinated with their abstractions that we began drawing relationships among them, using these to build abstract structures, which they endowed with meaning superior to that found in our ordinary experiences. An example of this process is found in plane geometry. The Egyptians had learned to triangulate the Nile flood plain using knotted ropes so that after the annual flooring they could reallocate the land to the owners. Eventually the Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras derived the properties of the right triangle independent of any application. Pythagoras and his followers were so impressed with the symmetry and power of their geometry that they built a religion around it. Plato held that everything we witnessed was a pale reflection of its perfect form, called a universal. These universals were where reality resided.

I think one lesson to be learned from our power to abstract is that it is very productive when applied to the natural world, but problematic and even deadly when we apply it to human beings. When applied to human beings abstractions can easily result in bigotry, violence and mass slaughter. In bigotry we usually abstract one or a few characteristic of the members of a group and disregard all individuality within the group and any other group characteristics. Thus derogatory terms such as japs, gooks and now ragheads are used to describe opponents in combat.

The military is notorious for its efforts to “objectify”, that is making objects out of the enemy by abstracting some presumed characteristic and applying it to all members of the defined enemy class. This allows soldiers to be more efficient in killing enemy humans because they do not have to treat them as humans. Currently we are seeing the results of this form of abstraction play out in the “prosecutions” of the soldiers that slaughtered a family, including children, in Hidatha Iraq. Although many participated in this slaughter, only one has been convicted and he will serve several years in prison whereas if he had done this to an American family he would have been sentenced to die. Even in the administration of “justice” these Iraqis remain objectified.

Lt. Col. David Grossman has written a book titled On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. Grossman describes how the U. S. Army, in comparing the combat kill rate for American troops to the ammunition they fired in the Civil War and World Wars 1 and 2, determined that the kill rate was far below what they expected. Upon further investigation they found that the majority of troops in combat were avoiding killing the enemy soldiers by firing over their heads. These citizen soldiers could not bring themselves to kill another human being even when being fired upon. As a result the U. S. Army began a vigorous desensitization effort in training its soldiers. In my judgment, this may be a reason why the military is trying to place increasing amounts of technology between its soldiers and the enemy. When one fires a missile from a destroyer at sea one does not have to see the consequences in an Iraqi village over the horizon and hence one performs more reliably. The only casualty is our humanity, which happens to bind our species together, and hence is fundamental to civilized society. One additional question is, of course, what happens when these desensitized people return to civilian life?

One more example of abstraction gone grievously awry can be found in economics. The problem began with an abstraction we call money. Prior to money as a medium of exchange, economic transactions were basically barter. In my own lifetime my maternal grandmother would take the eggs and garden produce of their Iowa farm to town and trade them for salt and other necessities. When money was introduced as a medium of exchange, goods could be much more broadly distributed. All sorts of erstwhile local human products and services could find their monetary equivalencies and be interchangeably sold and purchased. However, money soon created a world of its own in which people began to make money off of money itself. Even Jesus saw there was something wrong with this (competing abstractions?) when he threw the money changers out of the temple. Thus began a world of business detached from human need. An enormous space was created for speculative deviousness, fraud and manipulation of a society’s economy. Of late, the inequalities and environmental disasters caused by money-based abstraction has led to an economic reaction called “true cost accounting” which aims at restoring the environmental and social damage caused by our money-based capitalism. It requires that all effects, e.g. pollution, social degradation, environmental destruction, waste etc. be built into the cost of products and services so that our economic activities do not lead to disastrous consequences for the human species.

Finally, there is that most dangerous threat to our species the abstraction called religion. As a recent article in the Providence Journal (April 28, 2008) asks, why in the repeated crises mankind is now experiencing, for example the current global food crisis, do we call in such experts as the economists, the agronomists and the political scientists to analyze the problem and offer possible solutions, but we never call in the demographers who analyze population explosions. Why indeed! Could it be the fear of backlash from the religions that promote higher birth rates? After all, the Vatican tried to kill the United Nations International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, Egypt in 1999.

We know as certainly as we know the contribution made by fossil fuels to climate change, indeed more so, that the human population explosion is the fundamental cause of the damage we are doing to our planet and to ourselves. Yet we have major religions such as Catholicism and Islam promoting maximum population growth. If, in ordinary life, we saw a person pouring gasoline on a house fire we would act immediately to stop the crime. In the case of a similar threat to our species we give tax breaks to the criminals.

One aspect of abstraction-based structures is that, because they can be independent of all constraint either of fact or reason, they are ideal hosts to the play of human emotions. This often gives those abstractions applied to humans their power to affect humans.

Given our mass societies and their complex interrelationships, social abstractions in the form of law are necessary. However that necessity may reflect the problems of massive groupings of human beings more than anything intrinsic to human nature. In brief the lesson to be learned here is that our ability to abstract has very powerful consequences and that we should examine any abstraction-based proposal or practice for all its consequences before allowing its implementation. However, to require this kind of precaution, in the face of massive religious, cultural and advertising hype focused only on the so-called benefits of their abstractions saturated with emotionalism, will take a much higher level of sophistication and self control than now exists in our society. This change can either be accomplished through education, hopefully undertaken by progressives, or the realities of environmental and social collapse will induce humanity to learn the hard way – if it survives the learning process.

Bob Newhard