Political labels pose the danger of dehumanizing those you happen to disagree with
One commonly writes about something because one is interested in it, and one commonly reads about something for the same reason. But the two lines of interest do not necessarily coincide: What I find interesting to write about you may not find interesting to read about. Write a weekly column and you’ll see what I mean.
Judging by the comments, the column I wrote last week garnered more interest than I expected it would. When I wrote it, I was laid up with maybe the worst cold I had ever had — either that, or I hadn’t had a cold in so long that I had forgotten how unpleasant they can be. At any rate, all I wanted to do was finish writing it and send it off to my long-suffering editor. The column was about labels and I would have labeled the column “adequate.”
Having since discovered that the subject at least, if not my writing about it, is of some interest, and having had time to think further about it while in a far better frame of mind and body, I have decided to expatiate further upon the topic from a somewhat different angle.
My Jesuit mentor, Edward Gannon, S.J., gave a lecture once on the difference between essentialism and existentialism. That lecture was one of the most important events in my life. To this day it influences the way I think and feel and act. The point of it was that essentialism has to do with categorizing, distinguishing one thing from another, which is both necessary and useful, but no way to live.
One illustration that Father Gannon used grabbed me then and has stayed with me since: You get on a bus. You hand the driver your fare, he hands you a transfer, you find a seat and sit down. No words have been exchanged. This is a perfect example of essentialist behavior: The whole transaction has been reduced to a mechanical function. So have you and the bus driver.
The simple insertion of the words “please” and “thank you,” along with actually looking at the driver, would have transformed it into a human encounter, something existential and not merely categorical. My column last week had mostly to do with an essay by Albert Jay Nock in which Nock suggested that political labels tended to be misleading and were best dispensed with. But now that I have had time to think about it, I wonder if the problem is not more serious.
I was talking politics the other day with someone who prefaced his remarks by saying, “The problem with Republicans is …” I have other friends who would preface their remarks by saying, “The problem with liberals is …”
Well, the problem with all of this is that those terms apply to millions of individuals. It is really those individuals you are talking about when you use those terms. Unfortunately, when you use them in the manner cited it is precisely those individuals’ individuality that you are factoring out. In other words, while labels can certainly be useful, they do pose the danger of dehumanizing those you happen to disagree with.
I remember a conversation I had a few years ago with a friend of ours — a genuinely caring person — who had spent some time living in rural Kentucky. She went on at some length about how religiously narrow-minded the people in that neck of the woods were. I asked her if she had ever talked to any of them. She thought for a moment, and then admitted that, no, she and her husband had kept to themselves and their academic friends and colleagues. Her view of the natives, it turned out, was based mostly on bumper stickers noticed in parking lots.
I worked for nearly 30 years at a newspaper where most of my colleagues had a faith in the state as a force for good that I could never share. We got along fine. They are good people. And our aims were not all that different: We agreed that steps should be taken to alleviate poverty and disease and injustice. What we differed on was the means that should be employed to deal with these things. We could air our differences in a good-humored way because we knew each other as persons.
So the next time you find yourself inclined to dismiss a large swathe of left- or right-wingers, remind yourself that those are persons you are talking about, persons you should maybe take some time to talk to and get to know.
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I commend you on another fine article, Frank. Let me build upon Father Gannon’s metaphor and your rural Kentucky anecdote. A frustration comes into play when I board the bus, say something that is pleasant and courteous, but then I too often encounter stone-faced silence or an isolated scowl; this mostly happens when someone imagines me to be unworthy of courtesy and consideration because of the bumper-sticker stereotypical group to which I apparently belong. As a libertarian-conservative working in a fiercely liberal-progressive environment (i.e., a university campus), I board the bus each day with a smile and a kind word, but I do get weary of the scowls and silences. It is a tough bus ride, my friend. It is tough.
The solution is very simple, and has been outlined many times by such enlightened individuals as the Dalai Lama, the Buddha, the Christ, Rumi, and Lao Tze, among numerous others:
Don’t confuse the person with what they say.
Don’t assume that the rhetoric means that the speaker lacks a soul.
Remember that we are all human, and therefore all in this together. And no one here gets out alive. In a hundred years, will any of this matter? Probably not.
Frank, good post, and points well-made. I have found that applying absolutes when applying political labels can be especially misleading, in part, because the politics themselves are hardly absolute.
Case in point: the part of West Texas where I live and work, which still contains a large number of “yellow dog Democrats” … Democrat by name and registration, but staunchly conservative in most matters.
It demands careful consideration and analysis when preparing a story for the paper, and refraining from labels … but THAT is certainly NOT a bad thing.