stickers

Coming up to my office this morning, I see a little patch of stickers - maybe five of them - stuck to the wall of the elevator.  Fruit stickers - the labels stuck onto apples to help the cashier.  Someone has used the time riding up to peel them off fruit and deposit them onto the elevator's paneling.

This, of course, is bad.

And other things are bad.  Police brutality, ISIS, dementia, greed.  But is there any useful or even meaningful commonality to these things?  Aren't they tied together merely by being susceptible to being labeled bad?

And if that is all, what good are labels like bad?

The answer is in the mediation of such words between our thinking and our thoughts.  The broad, vague categories like bad are part of the flex of our thinking life.  Like the categories left and right, or conjunctions such as and and or, they are as indispensable and provisional as our ability to hold things in our palms for a time.  Are those buildings on my right, and those trees on my left?  Certainly.  Is it useful to be able to think them so?  Yes.  What do those buildings or trees have in common?  Only that they are susceptible to being noted as to my right or left on account of my position.  Outside my thinking, there is nothing right or left about those buildings or trees.  Does that empty such categories of use?  No, they are necessary.  They are part of my ability to move myself through thoughts, and move thoughts around.

Broad categories are the hands and feet of thought. 

When someone tells you something is bad, or when you hear yourself think with some such broad category, the question is chiefly: what is being done with the thought?  It is the motion of the doing and not the flexibility of the tool that tells.