Points and Patterns

I’ve been thinking recently about the human tendency to try to put things in context, to search for patterns across different situations and conversations. It’s something I do a lot, and that my friends and the communities I’m a part of do constantly as well.  Here are some examples from just the last week or so:

• When a friend of mine critiqued the “March for Science” as contributing to the ongoing problem of the politicization of science.

• When an acquaintance commented about not understanding why the whiteness and maleness of free software is a problem, and I thought to myself, “Oh, not this conversation again.”

• When, in discussing the most recent BBC Sherlock series, a friend expressed frustration both that the show was not explicitly queer but also that none of the 200+ mainstream Sherlock Holmes adaptations have been explicitly queer.

In each of these examples, a single instance of a phenomenon - a march, a conversation, a TV show - is placed in a broader cultural context.  For lack of better terms, I’ll call these points and patterns.  Of course, no two people’s cultural contexts are precisely the same, and so one often has to do a lot of explaining about the pattern one’s trying to place a point within.  Part of my exhausted “Oh, not this conversation again” was worrying over just how much about feminism and anti-racism I’d have to explain before the other person could understand where I was coming from, let alone agree with me.

But convincing people that a pattern exists is only part of the battle.  Because once you’ve successfully convinced everyone, well, what_then_?  You’ve still got this point to deal with, this concrete thing sitting in front of you or happening to you and you need to figure out how to respond.  How does it relate to the pattern?  What does the pattern tell you to do about the point?

Let’s get concrete again.  We’ll use the data point of the existence of the March for Science.  My friend tried to place this point in context, drawing a pattern of politicized science including the smearing of climate change researchers, the anti-vaccination movement on the left, and more.  This pattern is a bad pattern, she argued, and therefore we should not support the March for Science.

This is the default point-pattern relationship.  “The point is part of the pattern, the pattern is bad, therefore we should not support the point.”  Or, conversely, “The point is part of the pattern, the pattern is good, therefore we should support the point.”  You can see this take shape with my other two examples.  “Shauna’s had to have this debate hundreds of times, it’s unpleasant to have to have the same argument over and over, therefore she shouldn’t have to have this debate yet again this particular time.”  “This is yet another non-queer Sherlock Holmes adaptation, the fact that 200+ adaptations of Sherlock Holmes have all been heteronormative is unfair to queer people, therefore we should not support this show.”

To be clear, the above reasoning is not terrible.  But it’s limited.  Because every data point can and does exist as part of multiple patterns, and what happens when those patterns give us conflicting advice?  For instance:

• The March on Science is taking place within the pattern of an unprecedented assault on science by the most powerful political institution on earth.

• The conversation about diversity in open source is part of a pattern where people who haven’t thought much about diversity before feel afraid to ask questions for fear of seeming ignorant.

• The Sherlock Holmes adaptation Elementary, while contributing to the problematic pattern of non-queer Holmeses, does break tradition by casting a woman of color as Watson and a trans woman as Mrs. Hudson.

One can believe in the existence and importance of every one of these patterns – and, in fact, I do – but not be sure what action to take on any given point.  Because we’ve not thought rigorously about the relationship of points to patterns, we don’t know how to compare them.  Most of these conversations seem to devolve into an argument about which pattern is more important, which in my experience just leads round and round in circles.

I have_no_ useful advice about how to compare point-pattern relationships.  It’s a very hard problem.  But it’s one I think we’re going to need to address if we’re going to make headway on some of these complex societal problems.