What are gray matters?

I don't know why, but the world is obsessed with classification. There is almost a perverse, anal need for people to keep things (and ideas) in neat compartments. Whether there is an evolutionary reason that helped the well organized caveman to become the sophisticated human that he (or she) is now, or whether it comes from the parental bombardment of "keep your room clean" "keep things in their place" one will never know. [And one may spend billions of dollars of reasearch budget in trying to put the cause sqaurely in the bucket of nature or nurture!]

Given the complexity of the world, compartmentalization is inevitable. I guess it does have its advantages. We owe our existense and our level of civilization to those millions of unsung heros who spent a lifetime separating harmful things from beneficiary things.

But a good thing can be taken too far. It is this broad, naive separation that allows our leaders to talk in terms of "good versus evil" "us versus them" "black versus white" "tall versus short"... Well I made up the last one, but really, when you dig a little deep there is hardly any difference between an average Joe from "us" and a similar average Salim from "them" that a quick, mild makeover can't fix.

Gray matters are those concepts, ideas, people on the boundary. When I say boundary, it seems like a line - and that is a victory of those classification people right there. It is usually not a line, but a huge region that accounts for majority sometimes. You see these matters in every scientific endeavors. In biology you have to draw arbitrary lines between species, genra that are far from obvious. Even the "clear" demarkation amongst living and non living is no so clear when you examin the viral world. In economics we have the celebrated classes that are supposedly in struggle with each other. In politics there is nothing but classification - demographics, caste, religion, parties... The media that reports on all these further "simplify" matters by drawing polarizing conclusions from a neutral data. They give the beautiful science of Statistics, which alone has the idea of the complxity and continuity of all distributions; a bad name. I have not seen a more ironical irony - and believe me I have seen many!

It would not matter too much if all this simply led to minor differences of opinions, some quirks of human thinking, and polarization of people who watched "Lost" vs people who sweared by "Nips and Tucks"... We will simply dismiss it as a collective intellectual zit on a humanity that is still yet to mateur. However, these compartmental thinking traits cause wars, hatreds, and miseries. And that is why the gray areas matter.