Just read an interesting letter from TICS by Paul Bloom and Susan Gelman: Psychological essentialism in selecting the 14th Dalai Lama. In it, they discuss the fact that humans tend to act as though physical objects can acquire some kind of nonphysical essence. For example, John F Kennedy’s golf clubs sold at auction for $772,500. That’s pretty silly.
It’s especially silly when you consider that there is no physical characteristic of the golf clubs that link them to JFK. They are just golf clubs! They are worth that much not because they are made of gold, or because the objects are specially different from any others. They are worth that much because of their history. Yet, nothing about their current state contains any real information about that history (or maybe they have JFK’s DNA on them?).You could swap in some other golf clubs from the same manufacturer and nobody would know! So what’s so special about them?
On the one hand, I find this intuition very compelling–that there is something essentially different about those golf clubs as compared to any others. Their history is different. They’ve been through different things. But on the other hand, I don’t believe that they are interestingly different as physical objects from other golf clubs. You could never tell by looking at them who’s owned them! What’s a hardcore materialist to do?
I wonder about psychological essentialism poking its head into other social and political domains. Americans seem to care less about the number of Iraqi deaths than American deaths. We also care less about the rights of immigrants, and noncitizens. How much of our national and social in-group mentality is driven by this idea that somehow this group of people is different from this other group of people? That somehow differences of origin or culture are somehow relevant to what rights a group should have?
Said another way, how could a country seriously believe that its citizens were so essentially different from any other group, that rights should only be guaranteed to citizens? How can anyone seriously believe that those golf clubs are so essentially different as to be worth three quarters of a million dollars? Is thinking that American citizens deserve things other groups don’t any different from thinking JFK’s clubs have intrinsic value?