I: ON CLASSIFYING PEOPLE

"We find ourselves, then, met with the same difference that eternally exists between the fool and the man of sense. The latter is constantly catching himself within an inch of being a fool; hence he makes an effort to escape from the imminent folly, and in that effort lies his intelligence. The fool, on the other hand, does not suspect himself; he thinks himself the most prudent of men, hence the enviable tranquility with which the fool settles down, installs himself in his own folly."

-Jose Ortega y Gasset

In order to decide how to behave toward other individuals we must somehow classify them. When we classify something we are saying that in some respect it is like some other things which are considered to be in the same "class" or category. Each individual human being may therefore be classified in many different ways, since there are many different ways in which people can resemble one another. Thus we can classify people as men or women, children or adults, dead or alive, tall or short, white or black, rich or poor, and so on.

The fact that any individual can be classified in more than one way can be driven home by a consideration of five men named Adams: 1) John Adams; 2) John Quincy Adams; 3) Charles Francis Adams; 4) Henry Adams; 5) Sherman Adams. Which one of these men does not "belong" with the other four? Looked at from one (very trivial) viewpoint, the answer might be John Quincy Adams, for he was the only one with a "q" in his name. But a different basis for classifying could be "family", and in this event Sherman would be the odd man out, since Henry was the son of Charles Francis, who was the son of John Quincy, who in turn was the son of John. If we were interested in politicians, however, Henry might have to be put in a separate category, for the other four Adams were all mainly known as politicians while Henry was more of an academic person. And if the location of the person's most noteworthy activities is made the basis of classification, Charles Francis would be in a class by himself, for he was U.S. ambassador to England during the Civil War while the other Adams are best known for what they did inside the U.S.

It is important that we classify people with considerable care, since behavior that is fully appropriate toward a person in one classification may be quite unacceptable toward someone who is in a different category. The husband whose behavior does not distinguish between people in the categories "my wife" and "not my wife" may soon find this out, and the military career of a major who treats a lieutenant colonel like a lieutenant does not seem likely to be a bright one. We are unlikely to classify people appropriately, however, if we fail to see that the individual is the fundamental unit of action and analysis, or if we lack an adequate degree of conceptual acuity.

Human beings exist and act only as individuals, but it is easy to forget this. We are inundated daily with plausible words which if taken literally proposition which is quite true, as far as it goes-"He is an Indian," She is stupid," etc.-and then leap from the true proposition to the untrue conclusion that this is the true proposition about the individual being classified, that it tells all that is worth knowing about that individual, that one knows how to treat him merely by knowing this single fact about him. This is a mistake in logic to which we are all prone but which is most visible in prejudiced people such as racial bigots. The very components of the word pre-judice (judge) refer to a process of jumping to a conclusion about another person on the basis of one or more irrelevant traits, of deciding how to treat that person before knowing anything significant about him, and we correctly think of the prejudiced person as at least a potential perpetrator of injustices.

Rather than basing our treatment on another individual on what he is in the above sense, we would do much better to base it on what he does (or can do): "He plays the violin very well; therefore we will have him play the solo part." Obviously, however, it makes no sense to treat somebody in a certain way if what he does is unrelated to our purposes: "He plays the violin very well; therefore we will hire him to fly our new jet airliner." But generally speaking a logical relationship between what the person does and the way we treat him means that it is at least possible that we are treating him justly.

Although treating another individual in accordance with what he does is an essential element in "rational" and "just" behavior, it is not necessarily the best of all possible approaches. It is clearly preferable to judgments based on arbitrarily-selected aspects of what the other person is. But in another sense what a person is can be seen as a still higher basis for deciding how to treat him than what he does. In this case, however, the reference is not to arbitrarily-selected aspects of what the other individual is but to the fact that he is a whole and unique individual, or perhaps that he is a member of the human race. The person oriented to what the other individual is in the narrow sense takes particular aspects of him out of context and risks loss of a sense of proportion; the person oriented to what the other individual is in the wider sense takes things in context. If "justice" requires treating another individual on the basis of his actions rather than of what he is, then basing our treatment of the other individual on what he is in the more comprehensive sense may be closely related to the concept of "love." This latter type of behavior can be perceived in the sister, for example, who visits her unattractive and thoroughly crooked brother in prison, not because of what he is (narrow sense: stupid, fat, dishonest) or of what he does (robs banks, drinks too much), but in spite of these things.

It does not follow, however, that it is always equally unreasonable to treat another individual on the basis of what he is in the narrow sense-it may be more or less unreasonable, or it may indeed be entirely reasonable under some circumstances and for some purposes. In the first place, it is entirely possible that in judging someone on the basis of what he is we are really referring to a characteristic which it is within his power to change. Thus we may decide that "He is a bad driver," but the same thing can be said just as well (if indeed not more accurately) in the form: "He drives badly." For many purposes, such a deciding whether to revoke his license or deciding whether to accept a ride with him, to say that a person is a bad driver is an entirely legitimate basis of classification, a statement about what the individual does posing as one about what he is. But many statements about what a person is cannot be converted into statements about what he does, and in such cases reference is usually being made to something the individual has little or no power to change. We can decide: "He is a Negro," but it makes no sense at all to convert this into the proposition: "He Negroes badly." If a statement about what the person is cannot be converted into one about what he does, this is a warning that we may well be employing an illegitimate basis of classification.

In the second place, the legitimacy of a particular classification cannot be determined once and for all because the classification may be perfectly appropriate for some purposes at the same time that it is highly inappropriate for other purposes. The classification "Negro" is certainly legitimate for scientific and statistical purposes, for example, and may be useful in identifying an arriving guest speaker you are supposed to meet at the airport. On the other hand, "Negro" is certainly not an appropriate classification for the purpose of deciding whether an individual should be allowed to vote or exercise other rights. The classification man/woman is legitimate only when it is related to the purposes of the decision in some reasonable manner and with very few exceptions (such as military conscription) is no longer regarded as a legitimate category for political purposes. Another classification, child/adult, is certainly a very fundamental one, and derives its legitimacy from the fact that what a child is affects very directly what he can do (a relationship which obviously also holds true for man/woman, but not for Negro/non-Negro), and some of the implications of this classification will be discussed in chapter IV.

The problems posed by racism in the modern world are so excruciating that it will be useful for us to give particular attention to this special case of classifying people. An analysis of racism is particularly illuminating for our present purposes because: 1) it emphasizes the importance of the distinction between what a person is and what he does: 2) it shows that not only do we classify other people, but we also may think of ourselves in terms of classifications; and 3) it provides a concrete example of a problem where a higher than normal degree of conceptual acuity reveals how easily an illegitimate category can sneak back into our thinking through the back door.

The most crucial racial problem in the present United States is not the way individuals classify and treat other individuals, but rather it is the way individuals classify and go about thinking about themselves. This is not to minimize the problem of actual discrimination, but it is to say that the problem of self-esteem is both more fundamental and more difficult to deal with.

"Race" as a concept has two components. It has an objective component, that is, what color a person's skin is. And it has a subjective component, that is, the "meaning" that ones own or another person's race has to a particular individual, how he feels and thinks about it. When Americans speak of race as a "problem," we nearly always refer to our attitudes toward other individuals; while this aspect of "subjective" race is important, it is less so than our attitudes toward ourselves. There are really three kinds of people: 1) there are people who are a certain color and ashamed of it; 2) there are people who are a certain color and proud of it; 3) there are people who are a certain color and do not give a damn about it, who do not think that this is a matter of cosmic significance. If we assume there are two "races" in the U.S., black and white, then there are six categories of people (actually or potentially) interacting:

Of course with these six different categories of people interacting, endless possibilities for misunderstanding and conflict exist. If we consider only simple two person interactions, there are twenty one different possibilities here (W-l/B-1, W-l/B-2, W-l/W-2, B-2/B-2, etc.), but if we allow for misperceptions of the category the other person is in, or that the perceiving person himself is in, etc., and for interactions involving three or more persons, the number of possibilities becomes astronomical.

It is not possible to say that it is better to be one color than another; good and bad relate to how we act, what we do, whereas our actions have nothing to do with what color we are. Nobody can do anything about the color he is. On the other hand it is possible to evaluate the relative merits of the three types of people. It is clear that the third type of person, the one who does not believe his color is a matter of any significance, is the best kind to be, since the other two positions are logically untenable. It is also clear that the second kind of person, who is proud of his particular color, is the next best kind to be, but this is for a different reason. It is just as illogical to be proud of being a color that you have no control over as it is to be ashamed of being a color you have no control over. But it is humanly much more tolerable to be proud.

If there are three types of people as evaluated here, then progress in racial matters becomes a concept of some complexity and subtlety. Obviously, movement of any individual towards the third position must be regarded as progress, as movement in the right direction. But such a movement need not be linear; there is the additional possibility of a "dialectical" movement, a movement in zigzags (or to borrow from Marxist terminology, from thesis to antithesis to synthesis). This dialectical alternative complicates matters in discussions of just what constitutes movement in the right direction, especially for white people, and failure to take it into account can produce great misunderstandings between well-meaning black people and well-meaning white people.

It may be that many black people have a slight advantage in thinking about this problem, because movement from being a type one person (ashamed) to being a type two person (proud) is progress both of the linear and of the dialectical sort. To be proud of one's color is both a better way to feel than to be ashamed and also in a sense its antithesis. There is therefore no ambiguity, no question about which direction progress lies in.

For many white people, on the other hand, the point of departure is not from being the first (ashamed) type of person but from being the second (proud) type of person. For these people, linear progress would involve moving directly to the third, or don't give a damn, position, but dialectical progress would require an intermediate movement from the second to the first (ashamed) position, Although it is a step backward to be ashamed, it may be a step backward that can lead to two steps forward (the "dialectical foxtrot"). Ambivalence and fundamental difficulties are thus more likely to be found among well-meaning white people than among well-meaning black people. But the racial problem is so bound up with people's emotions that there is plenty of confusion among people of both colors.

Nowhere is this confusion more visible than in the debate over integration in the United States; the confusion has been such that many well-meaning people have come to advocate policies based on racist premises, that is, that a person's race is a legitimate basis on which to decide how to treat him. At the core of the confusion are the concepts of segregation and integration. The problem is that each of these words is currently being used in two distinctly different ways, referring respectively to a state of affairs and to the way people act:

There are thus, as indicated by the use of index numbers in the chart, four separate concepts associated with these two words. Of course there is nothing unusual and nothing "wrong" with this situation; words are often used to express several different meanings, depending on context. But in an area as emotionally charged as race there is something dangerous here; there is the danger that people will fail to distinguish between the two different meanings of each of these words and will therefore not act properly because (though they mean well) they do not think properly.

For example, it is widely (and undoubtedly correctly) thought that segregation is bad, but which "segregation" is it that is bad? Clearly if "segregation₁" and "segregation₂" do not mean the same thing, to say that one is bad does not allow us to conclude that the other is too; it may be, but that is a separate question and depends upon exactly what is meant by each of the two forms of the word.

Segregation (referring to a state of affairs) clearly is what is often called "de facto¹ segregation." (The widespread use of this special expression, which must be presumed not to be redundant, indicates that the present analysis is not a case of hair-splitting.) This kind of segregation can be determined statistically. If, for example, 15% of the college age population of the U.S. is black (the figure is purely hypothetical), and a particular college has only 1% black students, then it is segregated₁, it is "de facto segregated."

Segregation (referring to a way of acting) is what is often called "racially discriminatory behavior." In racial discrimination particular people, in deciding how to act towards other particular people, base their decision entirely or at least partly on race. For example, if a college's director of admissions receives two applications from students whose other qualities that the school is interested in are the same, but one is black and one is white, and he decides to admit the white one but not to admit the black one, this would be racially discriminatory behavior, it would be a case of segregation₂.

It is only segregation₂ (discrimination in actions) that is bad. Segregation₁ is a statistical concept, not an ethical one. A lack of "racial balance" in any particular area is significant only if race is important, which must be denied. An obsession with segregation₁ results either from inadequate conceptual acuity and consequent confusion of it with segregation₂, which is bad, or from a misinterpretation of the fact that segregation₁ ("de facto") is sometimes at least partly a consequence of segregation₂ (discrimination in actions). It is easy to conclude that segregation is bad because it causes segregation₁, but this is clearly incorrect; segregation₂ is bad because it involves treating particular individuals unjustly, in a manner which has no logical connection with anything they have done or are. Furthermore, existence of the conditions known as segregation₁ does not necessarily allow us to infer that segregation₂ is going on; for example, the college with only 1% black students may be so expensive that most black people, whose average incomes are lower than those of white people, cannot afford to go there, and there are many other possible reasons why such a low number of black people enroll.

A similar analysis can be made of the two different meanings of "integration." Integration₁ (referring to a state of affairs) is simply the opposite of segregation₁. If 11% of a relevant base population is black, and 11% of some particular institution or group within the larger population is also black, then in the particular institution we have integration₁. Since segregation₁ is neither good nor bad, its opposite is also neither good nor bad. Presence of integration₁, or "racial balance," is morally significant only if race is important, which again must be denied.

Integration₂ (referring to a way of acting), however, is not the opposite of segregation₂. Segregation₂ is treating a person on the basis of his race for the purpose of keeping him separate from people of another race; integration₂ is treating a person on the basis of his race for the purpose of putting him into the presence of people of another race. The purpose is different, but the treatment or form of acting is the same in integration₂ as it is in segregation₂: both involve deciding how to treat a particular individual on the basis of his race. Thus it does not at all follow that because segregation₂ is bad, integration₂ is good; indeed, on the contrary, since integration₂ shares with segregation₂ precisely the characteristics that make the latter bad, integration₂ must also be regarded as bad.

The opposite of segregation₂ is not integration in either of its senses, but rather desegregation, defined in terms of its ordinary usage as ignoring a person's race in making decisions about how to treat him. It is thus completely possible to be in favor of desegregation and simultaneously opposed to or indifferent toward integration; not only is such a position a logically tenable one, but it also would appear to be the only position which is compatible with the analysis of classifying people presented in this chapter.

We have been examining one type of individual behavior, the act of classifying other individuals and fitting them into particular categories. This analysis is intended to pave the way for the discussion of certain fundamental concepts which will take place in chapter II, but it is also meant to be more than merely preliminary. It is significant that although the behavior under scrutiny is that of an individual, it has been necessary to refer simultaneously to other individuals; the discussion has not been about individuals in isolation, but about individuals in contact with other individuals, which is to say in society. And of course "society" is not employed here in the narrow, capitalized sense which refers to the "tiny group which claims for itself alone the name of society, which calls itself ‘Society'; people who live by inviting or not inviting one another." Society here refers to the totality of the relationships between all of the individuals now living on this planet. You will notice that it is necessary to define "society" for purposes of this discussion because there are conflicting ways the term can be used, and that the definition is in terms of individuals. It is not necessary to define "individual" because the reality to which the term refers is a part of our direct personal experience-observation and introspection-and to attempt to define it in terms of "society" would only set us to going in circles anyway. Thus, as noted earlier, it is very difficult to avoid concluding that the individual must be regarded as the prime object to be studied in political science and that focusing attention on the individual, far from diverting attention away from the proper objects of social analysis, is a most suitable way to build a firm foundation for the later edifice of higher abstractions concerning "society", "state", "government", "justice," etc. As Salvador de Madariaga has said:[1]

Human beings are the only real and tangible entities, the only creatures which really do exist and in whom all spirits and tendencies are manifested. Individual man is the home of liberty, of authority, of anarchy, of dictatorship, of order, or equilibrium, of the health of the State; and as for the nation, where does it exist if not in the hearts of its citizens, i.e. separately and completely felt in the heart of every one of the flesh-and-blood citizens who compose it?

Certainly abstractions referring to more than one individual are useful for thinking and communicating, but they may also be dangerous and misleading. When a newscaster says "The United States today told Russia that...", this is a useful form of verbal shorthand, but if the image his statement suggests to the listener is a cartoon symbol of Uncle Sam speaking to a Russian bear with the hammer and sickle engraved conveniently on its stomach, a terrible distortion of what actually happened will have been received. Statements in such an abbreviated form appear frequently enough for us to take some pains not to receive them too thoughtlessly. One thinks of the issue of Time which not too long ago informed its readers that "East Germany is furious at the Rumanians... Rumania is equally furious at the East Germans... Hungary is chagrined at the East Germans and the Poles.-Czechoslovakia is alarmed...."[2]. One does well to remember the concrete individuals and their particular actions which lie behind abstractions such as "Hungary" and "Czechoslovakia." One does even better to begin with an attempt to understand individuals before trying to think about the more complicated matters which are usually thought to be central to the concerns of the political scientist.

One of the most significant characteristics of the individual is that he lives among other individuals; there are therefore relationships which occur among individuals. As long as it is remembered that these relationships are not individuals, they can usefully be said to "exist" in a certain sense. Perhaps the best way to think about "relationships" is to remember that they do not exist in their own right, but are "relationships-between-individuals." It is on individuals-in-relationship that political science-social ethics focuses, not on some individual in isolation (which is impossible), and not on "groups" (which can have no existence independent of the people who make them up). Thus as we prepare to turn our attention to a simple system of classifying relationships-between-individuals it is appropriate to conclude the present chapter by quoting from a little study by Heinz Eulau. "Political scientists," he says, "must ask two types of questions: first, how and why do individuals behave the way they do in politics; and second, how and why do political systems function the way they do? The two questions are, of course, interdependent, and it may be that we really ask only one question: what are the consequences of the behavior of individuals for the behavior of political systems?"[3]

[1] Salvador de Madariaga, Anarchy or Hierachy (New York, 1937), pp. 77-78.

[2] Time, February 17, 1967, p. 34.

[3] Heinz Eulau, Recent Developments in the Behavioral Study of Politics (Palo Alto, 1961), p. 36.