How do All the Labels Help?
Back From a Break
I have been neglecting this newsletter. I apologize for not wishing everyone Happy Holidays, but otherwise this has been a break necessitated by the course of my life (mostly a busy course for the good) and the energy drain of current events.
I will return to the third installment of my “public hearings” series soon, and then go forward. This is just a short message to let everyone know I have decided to remain in the game. But also to say this:
I seriously considered not returning. My Substack feed is full of good information and interesting opinions, and I believe in what I have to say here. But I am weary of public discourse that is so bound up in and guided by how we label each other. What if we agreed on a moratorium on “left” and “right” and all their derivations? Also on Marxism, capitalism, and the other isms? Would there be anything left to say?
I have no interest in denying the diverse ways of being in the world, and I understand the purpose of taxonomy in trying to learn about that world. But the ecological reality is that we are all in this together, no matter how hard some pretend otherwise. I fear that most whose work I read are not starting from that common place.
So, let me re-prhase Richard Rorty as a starting place for thinking about that:
The democratic community is a community in which nobody imagines that you have something more to rely on than the tolerance and decency of your fellow human beings. It is a community in which everybody thinks that it is human solidarity, rather than the knowledge of something not merely human, that really matters. The actually existing approximations to such a fully democratic, fully secular community now seem to me the greatest achievements of our species.
I am reminded of John Rawls's philosophy that an ethical and legal code should involve imagining that we have no control over the circumstances we might be born into (as we don't) in a word we create.
The labels don't help. But asking people to first recognize how much they're driven by their own identity, and then to reconsider that attachment, is an almost impossible task. Or in other words, for me, it's often a matter of "pick your battles."
Well stated. Personally, I try hard to avoid labeling myself, so the Golden Rule would suggest that I shouldn't label others either. The extreme but false dichotomy of Left vs Right (amplified and trumpeted by various self-serving "influencers," although that's yet another label) has, in my opinion, done extreme damage to the United States. A moratorium on those divisive terms, as you suggest, sounds like an excellent idea to me.