Recently, I am interacting w/ one of the Ph.D’s at my college Alma Mater. Dr. Schenck and I are about as polar opposite as one can imagine in our belief systems and our notions about the nature of reality. Recently, he wrote a brief bit about the dangers of “labelism” that you can read below. It suspiciously reads like it was a treatise born of a liberal and post-modern agenda. Now, certainly some of what Dr. Schenck wrote was true. It is absolutely true that we all need to be careful about hasty generalizations, false compositions, and false divisions. However his piece struck me as one that could as easily been written concerning the opposite dangers of “Label-phobia” (my new word to be submitted to the Webster Dictionary people) to describe many of Dr. Schenck’s positions.
I interact w/ Dr. Schenck’s material because I still have a soft spot for the Wesleyans in my heart. Nothing will ever change how much the Wesleyans did for me in my first 22 years of life. As such, I’d like them to be as orthodox as it is possible for Wesleyans to be. Dr. Schenck is dragging them away from that Wesleyan orthodoxy.
I am coming to have a growing admiration for Dr. Schenck for I find him to be a person who can get my creative juices flowing. Perhaps, I am finding in him a muse?”
Dr, Schenck wrote,
I have a suggestion for a new word for the dictionary:
labelism: The tendency to skew diverse particular ideas, events, people, and so forth by grouping them under overly generalized labels in the service of argument.
Examples:
* Those who favor women in ministry are liberals because radical feminists push for equal rights and pay for women.
* True conservatives are opposed to gun control because gun control is generally pushed by Democrats.
* Allowing the government to manage some area of its citizens’ life shows that we are becoming socialist like China.
* Taxing us to support the health care of the elderly shows that we are becoming communist like the Soviet Union.
* Making decisions that are unpopular shows that President Obama is a Fascist like Hitler.
* You can’t believe in the idea that Mark was a source for Matthew and Luke because that is an idea that comes from higher criticism.
* The students at Oberlin were transcendentalists like Emerson who didn’t believe in a personal God because they put a high emphasis on religious feeling like the Romantics.
All these statements are logically fallacious, even though they are the stuff of common rhetoric. They take diverse realia and oversimplify them because the human mind has difficulty processing complexity.
Logical fallacies involved: 1) hasty generalization, where differences between one observation and a general conclusion are ignored in the midst of argument; 2) fallacy of composition, where a whole is assumed to have certain characteristics because some parts have certain characteristics; and 3) fallacy of division, where all parts of something are assumed to all have certain characteristics because of some characteristic of the whole.
Explanation: The human mind is generally unable to process large amounts of particular facts without grouping them together into schemata, as Piaget called them. In deductive reasoning, where all the data can be accounted for and where all the data is usually of a simple nature, universal groupings can be fully coherent.
In inductive thinking, however, which is the nature of our lives in the world, all the data can rarely be accounted for, and the data is almost never a simple nature. People, events, and various other particular data are extremely complex and interwoven together. Simple ideas thus can hardly represent them without skew of some kind.
Beware of generalizations bearing fallacies! The Devil is in the details.”
Bret responds,
I have a suggestion for a new word for the dictionary:
Label-phobia: The tendency to skew related particular ideas, events, people, and so forth by refusing to properly generalize them in order to put them in the service of argument.
Further, this would be the state or condition of refusing to see patterns or the refusal to speak in generalities unless 100% compliance was held in each and every generality. Un-labelism or Non-Labelism or Label-phobia would flinch at Universals preferring instead to see the world only in terms of mass and total differentiated individuation. Label-phobia, Un-labelism or Non-labelism would be something consistent w/ a kind of post-modern reading of reality where, if universals exist, they only exist on a (you guessed it) an individual by individual basis.
Examples of such would be,
* A refusal to label those who hold to women in ministry as “liberal” since the un-labelists refuses to see that generally speaking people who embrace women in office also embrace a confluence of other liberal positions.
* A refusal to label Obama as a Marxist even though his past associations, his past employment, his administration appointments and his current actions all testify that Obama is a Marxist.
* A refusal to label the current government as socialist even though there has been a long and decided trend in US government (which has displayed Fabian waxing and waning) for 100 years. This refusal to label is defiant even in the most egregious of evidence to the contrary such as the State taking over much of the Financial infrastructure, the Auto industry, the health industry and the student loan industry.
* A refusal to identify and label neo-orthodoxy and higher criticism even when people clearly embrace a distinction between geschicte and heilgeschicte.
* A refusal to label the Oberlin College of the 19th century as Transcendentalist even though Finney had clearly drank deeply from the Transcendental / Romanticist zeitgeist. (Indeed, so deeply had the man quaffed from the spirit of the age that when you read his systematic theology you realize that it is all ethics and no grace. All what man does and none of what God does. There is no personal God in Finney’s theology.)
All this refusal to label might be seen as endemic to the post-modern mind which refuses to see universals or organize material into universal universals. Indeed, label-phobia might be seen as the mark of the post-modern.
Beware the refusal to generalize, and to label and recognize the presence of the Universal. The devil would love for us to be forever knowing but never coming to the Truth.
Beware of non-labelists or Un-labelists who create words like “labelism” in order to demonize those who do not have a post-modern bent mind.
Simple ideas such as label-phobia can hardly represent truth without skewing of some kind.
Labeling is just pattern matching, which is something we humans do exceptionally well. There are tests to check how young children are progressing, and a lot of the tests are pattern matching.
People say stereotyping is bad, but it, too, is just pattern matching.
I sometimes fear that many times our labels, mainly those we use to categorize people: world beliefs, religious orientation, political, race, and other forms of identification, have been used without proper analysis. Labels themselves don’t seem to be the problem here.
What seems to be the problem is various forms of political and religious Labelism….
I’d say the Un-labelists has found parts of him in so many different categories that ONE word to describe himself is unjust and the creation of another label seems (currently) to be diversionary on the political and religious spectrum.