[BRIEF NOTE] On Essentializing Categories

[rfmcdonald]

After I read Hitler's Second Book last year, I was most struck by Hitler's unimaginative projection of categories of race and nationality backwards into the distant past and forward into a hazily-outlined future. A Czech was always a Czech, a German was always a German, and never was there any slippage between the two categories. Never mind that eastern Germany was originally populated by Slavs who doubtless left a notable imprint on the early 20th century populations of these regions, or that the very name "Hitler" might well have derived from the Czech "Heidler." Ignore the facts that, had things happened differently in central Europe, instead of one Czech nation there might have been separate Bohemian and Moravian nations or that the German nation-state was a late construct aided as much by the Prussian kingdom's unlikely survival of Napoleon as by long-term trends towards national consolidation in Europe. There was only the boring and ahistorical certainty that the boundaries separating groups at present were as impermeable as ever.

It strikes me that this fallacy is committed in the present day by badly-informed people of good will. Ideal definitions rarely manifested in reality are projected onto suspect groups, unhindered by any process comparable to research or any objects comparable to data. French Muslims are all misogynistic Islamists; Americans are all celebrity-obsessed militarists; English Canadians are boring prudes. Reality's so much more diverse, and infinitely more interesting, than that mistaken homogeneity.