The Danger of Labels

The human mind uses labels, general headings, to help "manage" a reality that is full of incredible diversity of detail and complexity. This is of course a good and helpful thing.

The problem comes when we forget that the labels are only aids because our human minds cannot manage the infinite. They are helps to thinking and processing reality. But when we turn them into stereotypes, into self-fulfilling realities, they can service falsehood and evil.

The easy example is prejudice: "all black people" ... or "all 'white' people" (what's a white person anyway? I'm part Dutch, English, Scotch-Irish, and who knows what...).

These are the tools of a demogogue. Hitler used the label of "Jew" to kill a segment of his population. Notice the technique that occurs all the time in much less serious ways: 1) you identify a characteristic that you map to a label, 2) you villify or stereotype or praise the label, 3) then you either intentionally or unintentionally sweep any other good, bad, or ugly out of the picture and let the label itself take over with whatever new connotations you have assigned it--once you have attached the label, the label can determine the meaning regardless of reality or complexity. So the category "Jew" was a fixed category, but Hitler used the significance he attached to the label to justify their elimination.

As a much less harmful example (and, please, I am not intending to compare Bush's war tactices to Hitler's killing of the Jews) the Bush administration tends to do this slight of hand with the word terrorist and with the phrase the war on terror. If the Bush administration can attach this label to something--Iraq, for example--then they can transfer the feelings of 9-11 etc to a different situation. It's why the rhetoric is warming up as the election approaches, counting on the possibility that people will blur things together and vote their emotions.

But actually none of that is what sparked this entry. What sparked this entry is the way I fear some are treating terms like "emergent" or "post-modern." Frankly, these labels are so diverse that they don't really have much meaning to them at all. And that's what makes them dangerous. If you can attach the label "post-modern" to something, then you can dismiss it lock, stock, and barrel. Indeed, at this point "straw men" come into play. You pick the most extreme example of a "post-modern," get a congregation or radio audience angry at it, then you can transfer those emotions to something that is actually valid or insignificant.

I tell you the truth (and so beware trying to use the label post-modern on me in the fashion I just mentioned)--I am not the most intelligent or most informed person. I could give you names of people in academia who regularly make me feel stupid. I do not write what I write now out of arrogance. But the level of logic that passes for thinking from so many Christian pulpits out there and in so many pews is simply pathetic, riddled full of so many holes that it embarrases me as a Christian.

Here are some more reminders (again) on absolutes, relativism, and post-modernism: first, there is a difference between these terms in ethics and these terms in knowledge. The first has to do with morality, the second has to do with truth. They are related, but don't confuse them. They are separate issues.

Second, at least from a pragmatic perspective, all people are both absolutist and relativist in both domains at the same time. If you believe in convictions, you are a relativist on some questions of morality. And even the most extreme professed postmodernist gets out of the way of moving traffic. And clearly Christians can have different perspectives on the same issue when there is not a clear cut answer either from the Bible or Christian tradition. To say that doesn't mean that there are no right answers to many questions. Sheeze, get a brain!

Bottom line: stop beating up on the label "postmodern" or "emergent"--you don't know what you're talking about. All it does is get irrational, feeble minded people to go burn things down. The real questions are these: what moral actions are exceptionless, which ones are universal with exceptions, which ones are relative, which ones are not even a matter of morality? What is the degree of certainty we have on various questions of truth? Which ones require blind faith and which ones are demonstrable on the basis of evidence.

Oh American Christian, please, please stop being a disgrace to the God of truth. Develop the brain He hath given thee.