Recent conversations with a friend provoke me to follow-up on my recent article discussing the media.
This friend is smart, but not very interested in politics, and what information he gets I suspect comes almost entirely from mainstream sources. What struck me in our recent conversations was how much understanding of some issues was based around labelling.
What do I mean by this? Take this (hilarious) example from the BBC.
The new prime minister of Italy is ‘far-right’ (this is in the title and is literally the first set of words in the main body), but also “vows to govern for all”! What meaning is attached to ‘far-right’ here? The only specific reference to policy is this short quote from a rally:
"Yes to the natural family, no to the LGBT lobby, yes to sexual identity, no to gender ideology... no to Islamist violence, yes to secure borders, no to mass migration... no to big international finance... no to the bureaucrats of Brussels!"
Is this ‘far-right’? Really it isn’t relevant because of course the point of the language is mark Meloni and her party as ‘bad-guys’ by placing a label on them.
Back to the conversations with my friend. Examples of labelling included that J. K. Rowing is a ‘transphobe’ that a celebrity who had protested against US involvement in Ukraine was ‘pro-Russia’ and allusions to ‘Trump-supporters’ being bad people. My friend was also very eager to avoid himself be labelled as a ‘conspiracy-theorist’ when discussing Russian motives for invading Ukraine. In all cases, a whole range of facts, arguments and underlying philosophical differences had been reduced to a set of labels, that once pinned on an individual or group marked them out as the bad guys, and no more thought on the issue is required.
This reinforces my belief (that others share, see the previous article) that most media discussion makes our thinking actively worse, and that whilst this rarely matters in any substantive way it can spill over in to real life, and the evidence of our own experiences is normally a much more reliable guide.
However, it also leads to me reflect on two things. Firstly am I any better? Secondly can the heuristic of relying on a label ever be useful?
On the first question I know that if I reflect on my own thinking I may often dismiss people based on labels: ‘woke’, ‘left-wing’, ‘socialist’ in a way that masks a lot of nuance. In fact I have done it right here by dismissing ‘mainstream journalism’ when there is certainly good mainstream journalism out there if I looked and judged it on a case-by-case basis. Intellectual hygiene requires us to be careful in our thought processes and I need to be careful as much as anyone else.
This leads to the next question, why use these labels in the first place? Labelling acts as a heuristic because understanding everything about an issue is complicated and we may feel compelled to form an opinion. I know almost nothing about Italian politics, but I know some Italian people, it is a country I have visited, I am an academic who is expected to know about political and economic issues, so attaching labels to the political parties and weaving a simple narrative about the rise of the ‘far-right’ and what this means for the wider European political and economic environment makes things easy. The alternative is to have no opinion at all until all the facts are in, which you likely will never do, and whilst this is sometimes a perfectly reasonable option, it isn’t always.
How then to use this Heuristic responsibly? I don’t think it is possible to avoid altogether, but what is needed is the awareness that you have in fact used the heuristic, and that this is a short-cut. Do not mistake your opinion on this matter for something deeply-held and well-evidenced and therefore hold it lightly. Be willing to change your mind more readily than for things you have carefully thought about and assessed the evidence for. Most importantly for me, do not let this spill into the real-world, treat people kindly, listen to what they have to say and judge for yourself why they think what they do, don’t let your labelling define your relations to actual people.
I don't have a problem with labels as long as they are accurate. Some of the accuracy is dependant on the definition others will affix to a label you have given. This can make the whole thing rather subjective and you can't fix stupid but we are a species that relies heavily on categorization in our thought process so there is really no getting away from it. We can try to fix it by being as specific as possible with our labels, be willing to change a label we have given in error, and insist on clear definitions in our discourse. It is not an accident that the left is constantly trying to change the definition of things.
We have to be willing to challenge false labels by demanding specifics from our opponents and pointing out clear contradictions in their labeling process. The more we can do this the more the uninformed and misinformed middle can see through the haze created by those who misuse labels.
I found myself looking through a book of Taoist fables that relate to your point. None of the ones I found are precisely on point, but they do illuminate that labeling things amounts to constraining the bounds of discussion.
But, in any case, labeling really is a kind of gaslighting, no? It's a way of strategically framing discussion.