NOTE: This article was published in the July 2012 edition of The Independent Platte (a now-defunct newspaper in Platte County, Missouri).
Labels can be useful. They can also be destructively limiting.
I have always refused to define myself in terms of a political party, for example. It seemed to be at once a superfluous and self-confining act. And while my urge to reject a political label was something about which I felt pretty strongly as a young person, it was firmly cemented as part of my personal makeup when, over the years, I watched the annual kabuki theater that is the State of the Union Address. Seeing our legislative “representatives” behave in such a stylized fashion – members of the President’s party erupt in standing ovations with predictable frequency, at every utterance of some platitude, while members of the opposing party sit in stony silence, signaling the gravity of their disapproval – left me wondering why such a farce could ever be taken seriously by anyone other than those who earn a living as part of it.
I think it is safe to say that every one of us engages in some labeling, though, of self and other. Labels are, after all, handy intellectual shortcuts. Labels are convenient, and probably sometimes necessary.
Failure to label (and communicate) oneself as “diabetic”, for example, might have deadly consequences. Safety dictates that some labels may be necessary. Then there are those role-related labels which present part of our identity – gender, profession, and philosophical labels we use to identify ourselves and others.
It is equally obvious, though, that labels can be self-limiting, preventing us from achieving things we might otherwise accomplish. Labels allow us to denigrate others with a simple categorization, a condemnation by language. It brings to mind the old George Carlin routine: “Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and any one going faster than you is a maniac?” We assume our own assessment of the situation is right, and that of anyone who disagrees with us is wrong. When we’re feeling particularly generous, we’ll admit to the possibility that a few of our conclusions might be open to a little modification, but the important ones – the ones dealing with basic right and wrong – those are set.
Nineteenth century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote “when you label me, you negate me”. In writing that, I think he meant that, by slapping a label on someone, we can handily confine the characteristics of that other person in relation to our own prejudices. The grown-up thing to do would be to consider that another person’s viewpoint might have some validity. Instead, we distort the motivations of the “other” in order to satisfy our own simplified worldview. Ultimately, reliance on overly-simple thinking seals us into reactionary behavior, lacking the necessary nuance for optimal navigation of life circumstances.
The recent death of Rodney King prompted me to consider his rise to fame. Commentators reported his most well-known quote: “Can we all just get along?” as something of a laughing matter. Perhaps it was a testimony of Mr. King’s naiveté. But, in making that remark when he did, following the riots which were in part prompted by the acquittal of police officers on trial for charges related to Mr. King’s videotaped beating, he was demonstrating the kind of emotional maturity which allows one to overcome the ego-based behaviors which often get us into situations we might otherwise prefer to avoid. The honest answer to his question is “probably not”, but, really, there is no harm – and potentially great benefit – in trying. And in demonstrating such emotional maturity, Mr. King (at least for me) swapped one label – petty criminal – for another – role model.
Evaluating what we encounter in the world is not an elementary exercise in looking at a black-and-white image. It is tempting to view it as so, but it often leads us down a dead-end road when we succumb to looking for simple answers. Simple thinkers are very effective at tactical strategies, but they do so from a place of distorted world view, and, consequently, they believe in and push as priorities things that embody the dictum that there is, in fact, one right way to behave, and to live, in each circumstance. From another perspective, though, those things are meaningless.
Scientists sometimes us mathematical models to predict how changing input variables – especially time – will impact areas they are evaluating. This is a fairly common practice in weather prediction, climate study, and hydrogeology, for example. But a community is not monolithic, and its members are not so easily defined as to be utterly rational and predictable. Those communities, and their members, are not mathematically definable, like the variables in a scientific model. When we try to force values based on our own prejudices onto those model input variables, we end up with models which reflect those prejudices right back at us. The same goes when we label others based on our prejudices.
I can say with dead certainty that, even having evaluated the negative outcomes associated with the practice of labeling, I’ll continue to do it at times. There aren’t many among us who could resist doing so. And, as noted, there are circumstances when doing so is really the rational and appropriate thing to do. But it is those other circumstances – the ones in which the temptation is there to label the other an “idiot” or “maniac” – those are the ones I’m going to try to work on for myself. Because, really, when we label others, we’re labeling ourselves. And if we allow others to define us on the basis of a label (and hence a cliché), we effectively negate ourselves.
World Strata 