“A label can be a physical object that, when applied to another object, conveys important information about it. What it’s made of, how to use it, how long it may be kept, and the best means of storage before use or consumption. Things like that. These sorts of labels abound in today’s world and are vital to navigating the perils and pitfalls of acquiring and using the commodities we take for granted to feed ourselves and our families, clean our homes, ourselves, and possessions, and maintain our surroundings. To wipe our bums and blow our noses. Cure a headache.
“And then there’s the other kind of label. This kind also abounds in today’s world, but less as a means of conveying important information than as a short cut around understanding. Understanding requires a desire for knowledge, and a willingness to be observant. To think and draw conclusions. Unlike labels of any description, these attributes are not common in the world. If this type of label is applied to a controversial thing – a firearm for example – or worse yet, a person, the label alone comes to replace the true substance of that to which it’s applied. That’s how we get terms like ‘gun violence’ for example, flying in the face of the fact that violence doesn’t come in flavours, and notwithstanding the implement that is used to bring it about, there is only violence, and it springs exclusively from the mind of its perpetrator
“Similarly, there is no ‘gay love’ or ‘straight love’, there is only love. There is no ‘gay marriage’ or ‘mixed marriage’, there is only marriage. There are no ‘women’s rights’ or ‘gay rights’, there are only rights. In not one of these examples is there justification for tagging violence, love, marriage, or rights with a qualifying label branding it as something different from every other expression of it. The term ‘racial hatred’ doesn’t define a special brand of hatred … only the excuse for its existence – a label. The same goes for ‘religious intolerance’.” ~ Wordly Wisdom Wednesday – Beware of Labels
I would like to direct your attention, Goode Reader, to the passage that appears in bold in the second paragraph excerpted above. Understanding, as it’s widely practiced in the 21st century, is about finding out as quickly as possible how you are supposed to feel about someone or something. Finding the feelings will tell you how you should act, notwithstanding the actions or intent of the person or thing labelled. Actual substance becomes regarded as irrelevant because judgement has been pre-passed, instantly accessible on a template.
Contrary to attempts to brand as a recent phenomenon what the Esteemed Professor Jordan Peterson calls “low resolution thinking“, I would suggest a study of the ascent to power of Adolf Hitler on the crest of a tsunami of public adulation, both domestic and foreign. Closer to home in time, the creation of the “sound bite” and its evolution into the definitive expression of any possible greater context, leading to Teachers being admonished to teach works of literature absent any requirement for students to actually read the work in its entirety. After all, to do so might expose the raw bundle of quivering nerve endings once referred to as a”mind” to uncomfortable — even traumatic — feelings. Best to provide Twitter style snippets of painless interpretations of both the greatest and basest expressions of Human endeavour, and if that can’t be done, ban the work wholesale from the curriculum.
And thus, in the cuddly and soothing embrace of those empowered and entrusted to know better, the cultivation of sound minds is supplanted by the “safe space”. In a world treasuring forgetfulness over remembrance, only subjective feelings of slights and “micro-aggressions” hold meaning in their meaninglessness. When contrary opinions are equated with physical pain and any hint of exposure to the unfiltered chronicles of the sins of our collective past justify a PTSD diagnosis, the ability to cope with real pain and hardship is diminished into insignificance.
When simply to acknowledge the existence of evil, let alone the legitimacy of divergent interests between individuals and peoples, must be summarily rejected as anything that can be permitted to be even talked about, is to self-bestow lack of personal responsibility for the consequences. In such a barren wasteland stand the dried husks of those heretofore perennial weeds — Compassion and Hope.
“From the foldings of its robe, it brought two children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment.
“‘Oh, Man! look here. Look, look, down here!’ exclaimed the Ghost.
“They were a boy and girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.
“Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.
“‘Spirit! are they yours?’ Scrooge could say no more.
“‘They are Man’s,’ said the Spirit, looking down upon them. ‘And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!’ cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. ‘Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And bide the end!'” ~ Stave Three, A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens
