Liberal and Illiberal Labeling

Philip Damon taught writing and literature at the University of Hawaii for 34 years, and his fiction, non-fiction and social commentaries have been published widely. Among the mystic and holistic traditions, he has followed many practices. His “Sacred Democracy” columns appear monthly in http://readthedirt.org.

During this year of “Just Thinking” columns, I’ve alluded to the evils latent in labeling, primarily as factors in “polarization,” “cynicism,” and other conditions that threaten the democratic spirit. In many ways, labels are easily spotted for the injustices they enable; in many others they feel like the most natural tags for us to apply. Maybe it depends on if we’re doing the labeling or the ones being labeled. Or, maybe it depends on whether the label reflects “just thinking” or is intentionally misleading.

In our personal lives, it’s critical to monitor our vocabulary of labels and assess their fairness and grasp on reality. Our social and political cultures feed us most of our labels—some by design, some by custom. Labels can be for sorting and organizing, for selling, liking or hating. In the political culture, both libs and cons (sorry) stoop to iffy labeling, yet in outrageous calumny there’s really no contest between the two. Nothing is liberal about pejorative labeling, nor is anything truly conservative about it either. At their best, conservative and liberal are the yin and the yang of any just process of social self-governance, so neither mindset can claim a moral purpose in despising the other.

Perhaps there is truth to the notion that “illiberal” labeling (lacking a phrase more apt for labeling such an unfair practice), whether by lib or by con, is the shadow impulse of either ideology. Isn’t it clear yet that neither can function rationally without the other?

Um, nope. Conservative and Liberal are ideological twins joined at the hip from birth, yet cursed to be at one another’s throats until they’ve swallowed the irony of their interdependence. Any injury to one’s “other” is injurious to oneself as well. Separately, neither can survive. For everything there’s a season, and each season is a label of its own.

Wisdom traditions acknowledge “the thousand opposites” to be labels themselves, with each set containing a complexity of endless ironies. Thus we compare them ever so judiciously to other pairs, resisting temptations to oversimplify.

As a mental process, labeling is akin to empirical induction in logic, by which we, as observers, deem patterns in phenomena sufficiently consistent to infer generalizations. These certainties we induce thus provide premises on which to base deductions in the future (not only Sherlock Holmes deduced). Happily, our deductive judgments can be easily tested—by double-checking our reasoning in reverse, backward from specific to general to specific. Hasty generalizations, however, often lead to faulty premises, based on which future deductions, logically “valid” as they may be, will nonetheless be untrue. Labeling and inductive reasoning are often distant cousins.

It can also be a matter of semantics: there are labels and there are labels. We value them as names, for their convenience, wit, even their truth. Yet they can be “illiberally” weaponized by oversimplifications, to project someone or something as an enemy or a threat to one’s safety. The target for such labels is the point of view of citizen-consumers impressionable enough to buy into the mindset of a simplistic label, selected as a visceral opposite of certain pre-conditioned cultural values. At this point, the polarization process is close to complete. Pretty degrading, huh? Interesting, that word “illiberal.” Look it up.

Those who stand to gain from such polarizations no longer have to work as hard to convince their popular base —perhaps a well-armed base—that portions of the greater population are their detested enemy. It may take a bit of reminding now and then, via the media they own, which calls to our attention a further hypothesis: Does such labeling, as a tool of deception on a systematic basis, border on a pathological quality of mind?

Well, yes, but as we “grok” this, must we think generalizations are evil per se? Labels may just be logos on jars, but generalizations are truths, or ought to be. As mental beings we need them but with a depth sorely lacking in the cultural vernacular of the new millennium. Is there a language anymore for addressing our labels justly and wisely?

Various kinds of narrative approaches have been tried to heal communities of the most virulent forms of our worldwide epidemic of polar labeling. Rwanda and South Africa have had mixed results on the national scale. An experiment was conducted with several dozen Israeli and Palestinian teenagers, assembled on neutral ground for several weeks of summer camp. Despite early friction and occasional confrontations, the groups approached actual friendship in that short a time. Cliché or no, proximity forced them to know one another and to perceive the enemy in their human complexity, while the labels they carried fell gradually away. Yet when questioned years after their affable goodbyes, both sides spoke derisively of the others and their hated country. Isn’t that how wars get supported, though? Countries need a ready enmity to be the reactive citizen-mindset.

But our own country too? Aren’t we the stuff of a living democracy? Shouldn’t that stuff motivate us to look behind all labels, even if it means getting to know “others,” or reading novels by and about individuals from groups that we’ve so far had only labels to know them by (separate as those labels have made us feel from “them”)? They may be “immigrants,” “criminals,” or “environmentalists” to us, especially as we conflate these labels with others applied pejoratively to whomever we’re confronting, in person, on TV. Yet if our culture became suddenly sympathetic to them, we’d adopt pleasanter labels.

In 1906, Upton Sinclair published his classic muckraking novel, The Jungle, and soon millions of people felt compassionately for the sufferings of immigrant workers in Chicago’s slaughterhouses. “Foreign labor” (drawn by label-laden promises of greener pastures in European tabloids) became personalized into parents and children, heroically enduring horrific conditions—wreaked on them by overseers of the meat-packing outfits that controlled them. The bosses considered them to be less than human. Yet readers had been opened in the heart, as were those Israeli and Palestinian adolescents, for a while.

Just thinking….