Imagine a snowflake. Zoom in so you can see it closely. A snowflake is a sharp, rigid crystalline structure. True, right? That’s what a snowflake is, a sharp, rigid crystalline structure.
But is that the whole story?
Look again. A snowflake is other things too. A snowflake is incredibly small, round, flat, cold, and symmetrical. Being any one of those things does not make it any less the other things. The nature of a snowflake is not summed up by a single characteristic.
That’s not a very difficult concept to understand, yet it becomes incredibly easy to loose sight of once the snowflake becomes abstract.
Take, for instance, the abstract idea of gender. When you grow up in a particular culture, there are things that you just take for granted. Boy means blue and trucks and aggression and emotional repression. Girl means pink and dolls and submissiveness and emotional instability.
Some people like to say that gender is a social construct. Which is true. There is absolutely nothing about blue or pink that has anything to do with biological sex, yet in our culture, those two colors have represented the sexes since the 1800s. And the truth of social construct theory is a valuable structure for better understanding the nature of gender.
It is valuable to realize that boys can hate blue and love dolls and be in touch with their emotions and still be boys, while girls can hate dolls and be aggressive CEOs and still be girls.
But the social constructedness of gender is not the only significant characteristic of gender. There is also a biological factor. Primatologists have discovered that, even among chimpanzees, most boys would choose to play with a truck over a doll and most girls would choose to play with a doll over a truck. As it turns out, even though the social construct might further encourage boys to play with trucks and girls to play with dolls, those preferences are founded in biology, not culture.
This also applies to the complex phenomenon of human interaction. Our culture is going through a phase of analyzing every human interaction based on the skin color of those involved. And it’s true that most people notice skin color differences and they, therefore, play a role, sometimes large, sometimes small, in most—if not all—human interactions. This analysis does further our understanding of human interactions. But skin color is certainly not the only factor that impacts them.
When a dark-skinned person loses a job, it is not more likely to have to do with skin color than job performance or economic issues. And, today, any dark skinned person who loses a job because of their skin color and not because of job performance or economic issues would be capable of overcoming that injustice, even though they absolutely should not have to, after a manageable amount of time and effort.
And finally, this applies to the abstract socioeconomic system. Marx based his critique of political economy on the exploitation of the laborers by the business owners. And it’s true that business owners exploit laborers. But it’s not the only true thing about the socioeconomic system. It’s also true that the laborers saw no better options.
Farmers and artisans flocked to factories of their own free will because life as a factory laborer was, in many ways, safer and more secure than life as a farmer or artisan.
It’s also true that factories generated more, higher quality products for a lower cost than artisans possibly could. This allowed more of those very exploited laborers to own shoes that they did not have to make themselves.
When brilliant people start looking at something from a new or uncommon perspective, they often find truth there. And there is a tendency to believe, once you’ve uncovered a new truth, that now you have THE TRUTH. But truth is not a missing piece in a puzzle. Truth is the whole puzzle. And every piece found before your great discovery is as critical to it as the piece you found. And just because you’ve found a missing piece doesn’t mean that the puzzle is complete. Truth is a puzzle that can never be completed.
So let’s keep learning about snowflakes. Let’s keep searching for puzzle pieces. But never forget that, no matter how much we know, there is always going to be more that we don’t know.
