Spankers and Shackers

The basis of nations, races, social classes, religions, and all other ``human kinds'' is the obvious truth that personal traits cluster. Knowing one fact about a person tells you that other statements are likely to be true about them. The thing you know, or think you know, can be skin color, a symbol worn on a lapel, an accent, a rhythm coming out of headphones. It can be any perceivable bit of information. People can and have made everything into signals of identity.

As the philosopher Ian Hacking pointed out some years ago, modern life has added a technical source for such signals. In addition to the stuff we notice automatically (because of the way our minds work), we moderns also use identity signals that have been noticed for us. These are traits, or connections between traits, that have been found, vetted and digested by specialists -- researchers in bureaucracies and academia. They're just as exciting to the mind as the stuff we notice about appearances, language and other human-kind perceptions we get ``for free.''

Case in point today: Perhaps in some future election we'll cast aside red-state and blue-state here in the U.S., in favor of this distinction between spankers and shackers.