Making People Objects

The issue is not about "people objects", but about how we make people into objects. The point is, people are not objects - we are not concretely representable things, with distinct borders or boundaries, who can be reduced to a certain set of essences. Instead, we are relational beings, or even 'becomings'. And yet, at a most fundamental level, we reduce one another into objects for the sake of convenience: not only our 'enemies', whom we more understandably reduce to a set of negative characteristics, but we even do this to an extent with regards to people we respect - they become a set of characteristics we respect, even if one of those characteristics is "having depth"! My point isn't that we should rediscover some proper sense of woolliness in our appreciation of each other, for there certainly are things to be said about one another; but the point is that there is always more to be said. Relational be(com)ings are not complete. Ok, perhaps the same is true about objects - in a sense - because nothing is perfectly constant in an ever changing world. But this truth is more pronounced with regards to human beings. We should not, therefore, reduce people to "the thief who did a particular bad thing", as though divorced from all the unknowns which constitute the person concerned. I might suggest, as a Christian, that Jesus' injunction not to judge others is the epitome of this observation ... and yet there is a sense that Jesus himself does objectify people at times (for he is not an idealised object himself, but a person on a journey, constituted by relationships with other messy people). For instance, is it an objectification to speak of "the poor" and "the rich", as though they are disembodied groups neatly sitting in opposition? Of course, there are clear examples of each, but we must also open ourselves to the complexity of the inter-relatedness, without belittling the purpose of the apocalyptic dichotomy: there remains a use for "them" vs. "us", to highlight the inequalities, the ways in which "they" (or is it "we"?) oppress and belittle "us (or "them"?) We will always do some objectifying, even necessarily, but the point is to recognise and edit it.