Tuesday 2 May 2023
Read the label
But he gradually perceived that the words she used had no meaning for her save, as it were, a symbolic one: they were like the mysterious price-marks with which dealers label their treasures.
Edith Wharton - The House of Mirth (1905)
Many people will have noticed a common orthodox reaction to ideas which are contrary to mainstream mantras. When conventional folk encounter unorthodox ideas, their reaction can be an almost visible search for familiar labels such as far-right, racist or outdated - symbols of their unwillingness to engage further.
There are many social and political labels available to the orthodox as any sceptic knows well. In general they seem to be associated with what is sometimes called confirmation bias, although that too can be used as a label. Used in this way, labels can be paths of least resistance, avoiding the effort of coping with anomalies, or indeed sceptics.
Regular commenter Sam Vega recently recommended a book by Martin Amis titled Koba the Dread. I haven’t read it yet, but I have a sample downloaded onto my Kindle. The book is about Stalin and the indulgence of communism by Western intellectuals, "Koba" being Stalin's nickname. Here is a negative comment on the book copied from the Amazon website.
The book is just anticommunist propaganda, written by a pillar of the bourgeois establishment, Stalin crushed those who opposed socialism and turned a backward country into a nuclear superpower that stood against American capitalist imperialist aggression, revolutions are not a tea party, make no mistake the enemies of socialism must and will be crushed.
This comment is little more than a series of labels and to my mind, so exaggerated that it is likely to be a parody of communist rhetoric. Labels are essential to totalitarian politics, but in this case, padding the labels out would have made the comment slightly more authentic. Could still be authentic though.
We all have to make use of labels of course and there is no rule to distinguish the useful from the evasive. There are clues such as a refusal to engage with reliable facts, uncertainties or inconsistencies, but even these tools cannot deter the labellers. Oops I’ve labelled the labellers.
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5 comments:
Labels are a useful shorthand among those of a similar persuasion ("Woke people are like that"..."Typical green nonsense"...etc) but the problems come when they are used to try to persuade. Nobody wants to have a simplistic label applied to them; we all think we are somehow subtle and evade summing up. And so their only use is to insult. And that's best done via more creative means.
“ Used in this way, labels can be paths of least resistance, avoiding the effort of coping with anomalies, or indeed sceptics.”
In one, AKH.
B*****r the labelling, what about all the stuff I have to send back because they're the wrong size or colour!
I spend a small fortune on clothes from firms like this, and invariably, they get it wrong!
Er, this is the Amazon complaints department isn't it...
I try hard, and often fail, not to label people, even those I don't like or agree with. But the point you make is quite right. The subject of 'racism' I find onerous. No one has ever called me a 'racist' (within my hearing), but it's a label to hurl at people, without a proper definition of what a 'racist', upon careful consideration, actually is. It's just a catch all term of abuse devoid of empirical meaning. I often muse that in many respects I'm a 'racist' from a philosophical point of view - aren't my weird cousins in Stamford Hill dressed in long black clothes and hairy hats practicing 'racism'? I would say they are, like all ethnic minorities do to a certain extent. They have great big labels attached to them, I guess.
Sam - yes, nobody wants to have a simplistic label applied to them and I sometimes wonder if being called 'woke' annoys people. Yet as I recall, the term was originally adopted by people who wished to be seen as woke. Maybe they still do.
James - it's hard being sceptic though.
Scrobs - apparently many people buy two sizes and send back the one which doesn't fit. Seems like hard work to me, but it is done.
Tammly - I'm sure we have to some extent lost the ability to use prejudice in a relaxed and socially constructive manner. We can be prejudiced as a way to keep hold of what is familiar to us, while accepting that other prejudices may be used similarly. Now we seem to have stirred up very unhelpful battles between different prejudices and the value of relaxed prejudice is lost.
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