labels | With Compliments

Two major sources of bad thinking and communal strife are our tendency to resort to labels and the herd instinct. I set below what I wrote about these vices in a book written with Chris Wallace-Crabbe (What’s Wrong?) The extracts are long, but the issue is serious. This was the most important part of the book.

The vice of labelling

Some years ago, a woman at Oxford, en route from the reading room to the dining room for breakfast, was heard to say: ‘I have just been described as a typical Guardian reader, and I’m trying to work out whether I should feel insulted.’ A discussion about the meaning of the word ‘presumptuous’ then followed.

There is no law or custom that says we should apply a label to people – or put them in boxes, or in a file, or give them a codename. There is also no law that we should not. But most of us can’t help ourselves. So what?

Well, most of us don’t like being put into boxes. That is how we tend to see governments or Telstra or a big bank behaving toward us. Nor do most of us want to be typed. When someone says that an opinion or act of yours is ‘typical’ of you or your like, they are very rarely trying to be pleasant.

Most of us just want to be what we are. You don’t have to have a university degree specialising in the philosophy of Kant to believe that each of us has his or her own dignity, merely because we are human. We are not in the same league as camels or gnats. If I am singled out as a Muslim, a Jew or an Aboriginal, what does that label add to or take away from my humanity? What good can come from subtracting from my humanity by labelling me in that way?

So, the first problem with labelling is that it is likely to be demeaning to the target, and presumptuous on the part of the labeller. In labelling, we are detracting from a person’s dignity. We put registration numbers on dog collars, and we brand cattle, but we should afford humans the courtesy – no, the dignity – of their own humanity.

The second problem with labelling is that it is both loose and lazy. If you say of someone that they are a typical Conservative or Tory, that immediately raises two questions. What do the labels ‘Conservative’ and ‘Tory’ mean? What are the characteristics of the target that might warrant the application of the label?

In this country, at the moment, the terms ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ hardly mean anything at all – except as terms of abuse – which is how ‘Tory’ and ‘Whig’ started in England. These terms are now generally only applied by one side to the other. Not many people are happy to apply either of those labels to themselves. The categories are just too plastic and fluid.

Similarly, in Australia the labels ‘Liberal’ and ‘Labor’ hardly stand for any difference in principle any more. At the time of writing, on any of the major issues in Australian politics, what were the differences in the policies of those parties that derived from their platform? The old forms of name calling between Liberal and Labor mean nothing to our children – absolutely nothing. These old ways are as outmoded as name calling between Catholics and Protestants. And there is some common ground in the two shifts: very many people have lost faith in both religion and politics. The old tensions or rivalries just seem no longer to matter.

Unfortunately, and notwithstanding the obvious problems we have just referred to, labelling is not just common, but mandatory in far too much political discussion in the press, and certainly for shock jocks or those who make a career out of working TV chat shows. While some people naturally thrive on conflict – Napoleon and Hitler were two bad cases – some journalists in the press engage in conflict for a living. These people rarely have a financial motive to respond reasonably, much less to resolve the conflict. To the contrary, they have a direct financial interest in keeping the conflict as explosive as possible. It is notorious that controversy feeds ratings and that bad news sells newspapers.

If you put up an argument to one of these people who live off the earnings of conflict, the response will very commonly involve two limbs – a personal attack on you (the Latin tag for which is ad hominem), followed by some labels, which are never meant as compliments. For example, if someone dared to query the rigour of the government’s policies toward refugees, a predictable response would be ‘What else would you expect from someone who subscribes to the ABC? How would you like these people to move in next door?’ There is no argument – just vulgar abuse. The disintegration of thought is palpable, but a lot of people are making a handy living out of it – and not in ways that do the rest of us any good.

There is commonly a third problem with labelling: it generally tells you a lot more about the labeller – some would say the sniper – than the target, and the answer is rarely pretty. And if you pile cliché upon label, and venom upon petulance, the result is as sad as it is predictable. You disappear up your own bum.

Let us take one label that became prominent in 2016 right across the Western world. There has been a lot of chatter, or white noise, about ‘populists’. Who are they?

One of the problems with this word is that people who use it rarely say what they mean by it. If you search the internet, you will find references to ordinary or regular or common people against political insiders or a wealthy elite. These vague terms don’t help – to the contrary. What do they mean? Is dividing people into classes a good idea in Australia now – or anywhere, at any time? If it is simply a matter of the common people wresting control from a wealthy elite, who could decently object? Is this not just democracy triumphing over oligarchy?

Populus is the Latin word for ‘people’, with pretty much the same connotations as that word in English. Do populists, therefore, appeal to the people for their vote? Well, anyone standing for office in a democracy does just that. The most famous political speech in history concludes with the words ‘of the people, for the people, by the people’.

But ‘populist’ is not used to describe everyone standing for office. It is used to refer to only some of those, and the difference seems to be in the kinds of people who are appealed to and the way in which that appeal is made.

So, what kind of public do populists appeal to? Those who use this word say that the people appealed to are anything but the ‘elite’ – those who have got on well in life because of their background or education, or both. In both the United Kingdom and the United States this feeling about the elite – which might look like simple envy to some – is linked to a suspicion of or contempt for ‘experts’. People do, however, tend to get choosy about which experts they reject. (This rejection does not extend to experts who may save their life in the surgery, or at 30,000 feet, or their liberty; but it may explain the curious intellectual lesion that many people of a reactionary turn of mind have about science and the environment.)

Another attribute of the public appealed to by populists is that they have often missed out on the increase in wealth brought about by free trade around the world and by advances in technology. These movements obviously have cost people jobs and are thought by some experts to be likely to cost another 40 per cent over the next ten years.

A third attribute of those appealed to by populists is said to be that, in their reduced condition, they value their citizenship above all else, and they are not willing to share it. They are therefore against taking refugees or people whose faith or colour threatens the idea of their national identity.

Now, if folk who use the word populist are describing politicians who appeal to people with those attributes, they may want to be careful about where they say so. The picture that emerges is one of a backward, angry and mean chauvinist failure. That picture is seriously derogatory. If that is what people mean when they refer to populists, then it is just a loose label that unfairly smears a large part of the population. The term does then itself suffer from the vice of labelling that we have identified.

So, we would leave labels with George Bush Senior, who said that labels are what you put on soup cans.

Tribalism

We started this chapter on the subject of prejudice as the main corrupter of thought, and near the end of it we come to a common source of prejudice. You might call it tribalism or clannishness, or just the herd instinct. It is a human tendency to surrender judgment, and therefore dignity, to the crowd, or the mob. In its most terrifying form, the mob is the lynch mob, to which the French were subjected on a national scale during the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution, a period of state-sanctioned violence and mass executions. The surrender was more complete, and the consequences were more financially severe, during the 1929 stock market crash, but we see it all round us every day, and as often as not we don’t notice when we have switched into the mode of group control.

A harmless form is the one‑eyed Collingwood supporter. Indeed, one reason why people enjoy that part of the entertainment industry called sport is that this is just the area, either in the stands or on the terraces or around the office coffee machine, where independent judgment can be suspended and blind prejudice masquerading as loyalty can be safely put on show. (You might, from time to time, graciously applaud someone from the other side, but you may want to watch who you do that in front of.) You can even blow the ref a raspberry without going to the slammer.

One worrying form of clannishness is the tendency of some groups to form their own language and retreat behind it when they come under attack, when they feel insecure or when they just feel like being pompous. Doctors and lawyers used to be notorious for this, but both have improved. It is no longer smart or clever to be obscure; the contrary is the case.

A clannish corruption of thought is dangerous because it obscures meaning – it makes the author harder to pin down – and it masks a crude self‑interest in protecting the relevant group as the proper or even the sole repository of truth. This is very worrying when the author is unable to spell out a verifiable meaning for the benefit of the uninitiated. Secular thinkers for many centuries have accused priests of doing just this – of denying ordinary people access to the truth – or, if you prefer, the light – by refusing to give them the keys to the codes. You might recall that, before the Reformation, you could be burnt at the stake in England if you dared to translate the Bible into the native language of the believers. That must be the ultimate example of people being asked to take articles of faith on trust.

We see examples of this form of clannish or tribal protectionism, and the consequent mutilation of logic and language, in the newer social sciences (which some think is a phrase that contradicts itself), in marketing, among ideologues (especially think tanks and their acolytes, political advisers) and also in some parts of academia.

We tend to see the problem at its worst with the political ideologues – the advisers tend to be hard‑headed people who hardly believe anything, whereas the ideologues bring commitment and passion, and so are likely to invoke that most dangerous ingredient in rational discussion: sincerity.

The problem now is that you are dealing with people with a position and with a patch to defend (people Helen Garner referred to as those ‘who have an agenda’). You are dealing with someone who subscribes to articles of faith, and they may not realise or accept that articles of faith lie outside the borders of rational debate. You might therefore be talking to a zealot. Zealots are people whose zeal has infected their judgment. They become like one‑eyed Collingwood supporters – but much, much worse, because they believe that the stakes are so big. In the language of the stock market, they have their own skin in the game. Unable to see the world from the other person’s point of view, they are very likely to think they have uncovered the logical answer – that is, the answer, and there can only be one of those. They become progressively less able to see that reasonable people might differ on almost any question relating to human behaviour or belief. That is to say, they get less and less tolerant, and intolerance is the cancer of sensible discussion.

Agenda bearers tend to look on disputes not as debates about ideas, but as conflicts between the kinds of people who hold various ideas. They become emotionally attached to their own side and emotionally opposed to the others. We saw that the writer in The Australian who is obsessed with ‘political correctness’ said it was unfair that ‘we’ did not have the same remedies as her adversaries.With agenda bearers, judgment goes clean out the window. They are ready to argue about things they know little or nothing about, and that must end up in bullshit. They then get ready to attack almost anything said by the other side, and to defend almost anything that has come out of their side. They become driven by, and to, conflict. They therefore pick fights that they do not have to pick, and so they ignore the first rule of advocacy: If you have a good point, make it, and don’t bugger it up with a dud; if you don’t have a good point, shut up.

Agenda bearers are heavily into mockery, and into nodding and winking among themselves. They are not beyond leering or even jeering, and they may have an obsession about sneering: one of those cases where they project their own feelings and reactions onto their opponents. They often accuse others of being dogmatic or feeling morally or intellectually superior because they have right on their side.

They disdain experts, but they are long on conspiracies, especially when it comes to the newspapers or television consulted by the other side. Indeed, they stereotype people by reference to their chosen media – readers of Fairfax or viewers of the ABC must be like readers of The New York Times or The Guardian and must oppose the Murdoch press or Fox News. (Would you be insulted if described as a typical Age reader or an adherent to Fox News? Or would you just think that the author of the remark was both thick and presumptuous?)

If you are not into these nuances, a word that people known as culture warriors may be fond of, you are not part of the game. Indeed, there are times when they seem unable to choose their cheerleader – the Famous Five or Kim, Enid Blyton or Rudyard Kipling.

Ideologues are defensive about their own culture or faith – words broad enough to mean or contain just what they want them to mean or contain – and very suspicious of those who want to share the good life or who threaten to change its underlying fabric. For this purpose, they may allow a shock jock or some other gutter rat to put up kites for them, but the sensible ones always preserve deniability and a distance from the overtly vulgar.

Their arguments are mainly aimed at the man, in part because of the innate or acquired hostility of those advancing the arguments, in part because they tend not to play by the rules, and in part again because they have lost control of their moral or intellectual compass. They always accuse the other side of hypocrisy, of which they are World’s Best Practice exponents, and of utter indifference to the consequences of their ideology – which they are past noticing in themselves. Even when they set out their own contradictions in black and white, they cannot see them for what they are. They are not just biased or unbalanced; they are wilfully beyond persuasion. In ordinary terms, they are crippled by the chips on their shoulders.

You will recognise here many of the attributes of a bush lawyer and of far too many of our politicians. It will only get worse – as people subscribe to internet sites for the true believers, commune in language‑killing terms on what are preposterously described as social media settings, and banish the anxiety that comes with uncertainty by cocooning themselves in their own echo chambers.

***

I have set out those observations at that length because they bear on so much of what passes nowadays for political discussion – especially as it is applied to people grouped together under a label – such as Catholics, gypsies, Collingwood supporters, boat people, the Irish, academics, or just plain old fashioned bludgers. And by segmenting the people around us, we are of necessity speaking of minorities.

The cancer comes in two phases. First, something in the history of those in a group leads to people being referred to, or identified as, members of that group. Secondly, it is thought appropriate to attribute to every member of that group some attribute or characteristic.

That is a form of branding, and it detracts from the worth or dignity of every human being to whom it is applied. I do not subscribe to any doctrine of Original Sin, but if I did, this would be my prime candidate. And it may start when people are content or proud to place themselves in a box and claim to share one common attribute as a result.

What do I care about my skin colour, faith, or ancestry? What difference does any of them make? In the name of Heaven, in the bad old days we believed – we were taught – that Catholics were somehow different to Protestants.

In my view, Sir Henry Maine was spot on when he said in Ancient Law that the whole course of legal history saw the movement from status to contract. What matters in life is not what I do with what I landed here with from my ancestors, but what I do with other people while I am here. The contrary view dooms us to lie low under the weight of the past.

Let me just look again at two labels. ‘Elite.’ According to my Compact OED, this is ‘a group of people regarded as the best in a particular society or organisation.’ Is there a problem? Do we repudiate our best people? Can you think of anyone going to a medical clinic or law firm saying – ‘Don’t give me your best – just the mediocre’? Or saying to our Test selectors – ‘Don’t send the best to England – just the run of the mill journeymen’?

‘Populists’. There is an obvious difficulty in applying this term to those seeking office in a democracy, when that is achieved by appealing to people to support you. (Shakespeare wrote a play about it – Coriolanus.)

Three examples are Trump, Farage, and Hanson. Each has indeed one thing in common for me. None would be welcome in my home. The vices and charms of the first two are well known.

The Australian presents as a scheming, heartless and venomous bigot who is unfit to hold any form of public office in Australia. She has none of the élan of Trump or Farage, or those vicious mountebanks who broke Europe and the world in the last century. If that statement sounds large, what do you think might be the response of our Muslim brothers and sisters? Or have they not been here long enough to touch our conscience?

The Royal Commission into the Bondi massacre will have to navigate waters like these, and I don’t envy them. There are obvious difficulties in conducting any form of forensic process to what the Letters Patent refer to as ‘religious and ideologically motivated extremism and radicalisation’.

The Commission will hear of the most dreadful behavior to members of our Jewish community. There is one thing they will not hear of. That is of a sitting member of the Australian Parliament saying ‘There is no such thing as a good Jew.’

That statement by Hanson looks to me like a textbook case of ‘religious and ideologically motivated extremism and radicalisation’. The difference is that she is not facing jail for hate speech. On the contrary. She shouts it out loud and infects Parliament by insulting faith – and takes off in the polls as a reward, and is saluted by uncomely goons in dark places who don’t know any better.

And the lucky country stands indicted. And on a bad day we might feel with Milton that earth felt the wound.

Well, the categories of evil are never closed, even if, as someone said, there is nothing new under the sun. Perhaps the old French proverb stands vindicated – the more things change, the more they stay the same.

We are not as free of the primal slime as we would wish to be. We do after all live in a country where you can step into your garden paradise and die from the venom of a brown snake taking its repose in your bed of roses.

Populists