I want to love, again.
Youth cannot be reclaimed, and I would not want to, but increasingly I feel a need—a calling, perhaps—to find a way to reach back and recapture one aspect of my youth: a willingness to be a little naive, to take people as they are, rather than as I believe I can classify them. It was how I lived before I became very engaged with politics and religion and chose labeling over loving.
Dorothy Day famously said to her Catholic Worker friends and followers, “Don’t call me a saint; I don’t want to be dismissed so easily.”
It is a statement that some take literally, going so far as to suggest that, as her cause gains momentum thanks to a recent vote of support by the USCCB, the bishops are moving against Day’s expressed wishes.
Well, the thing is in the hands of the Holy Spirit, now, but I think what Day had in mind was something along the lines of Søren Kierkegaard’s “When you label me, you negate me.”
When we label anyone, we immediately do them an injustice—even if the label seems accurate. We shortchange their story. We open them up to caricature and to the misunderstanding that comes with it. Labels reduce all of our complexities and beautiful human nuances into easily negated “types” and turn our efforts to communicate with each other into punchlines. Or outright swipes.
I wish I could say that in my online writing I have managed to resist the temptation to label others and thus turn them into discredited, ghostly cartoons that have little to do with their human realities, but alas, I have trod that path all too happily, only stepping off it when one of my sons challenged me to define the “thems” and “theys” of my rants. I could not, of course, but in making the attempt I discovered how readily—even eagerly—I had been discounting human beings about whom I actually knew nothing, and that my pre-judging of them meant that I was, yes, prejudiced.
Mindful of that humiliating lesson, I have been trying to break that habit of broad denunciation; I have come to detest words like “progressive” and “liberal” and “conservative” and “lefty” and “right-winger” and the ease with which we throw these divisive labels about for the express purpose of insta-discrediting one another. Our propensity to label-and-dismiss each other is quickly leading our nation and our Church toward dangerous cliffs, and though we have gleefully turned each other into cartoons, we will not be able to reclaim solid ground from the thin air, once we’re launched. I accuse myself of assisting in this careening madness, and I want off.
Kierkegaard’s “negating label” was brought home to me recently, during an exchange with a friend that grew a little testy when he insisted that I accept his labeling of me as a “right-winger” and allow him to therefore frame my ideas according to script. He seemed to think it very unreasonable of me to refuse, but refuse I did, for two reasons:
First, because if people are going to insist on labels, I want to reclaim “classical liberal” from its dustbin. To my way of thinking, it gives voice to the Church’s own interest in the protection of civil liberties; similarly it champions neither the sort of rampant capitalism that ignores the dignity of the human person, nor totalitarian ideas of governance. In seeking balance, I think it most accurately reflects those of us who are imperfectly striving to move beyond any label but “Catholic.”
Secondly, I am myself done flinging about the “thems” and “theys” in order to buttress my opinions upon the foam of easy caricature. Because of that, I will resist being labeled, which only encourages others to travel that treacherous path. When I see the sins and errors of one newsmaker or one church, or one politician or one political party being obsessed over while similar sins of their opposite number are excused or ignored, I will speak up about it, and when I suspect the public is being handed an agenda-laden bill of goods meant to promote dubious policy, I will say so, and I will not consent to anyone declaring what that “makes” me, so they can therefore ignore me.
Like Day, I will not be so easily dismissed.
But I will work toward doing better. I will forego the expedient labeling that permits others to wink and nudge and roll eyes at someone and therefore negate them.
A few weeks ago I wrote that if we wish to help the world come to rights, we must “bring on Apocalypse.” This is a step in that direction—a baby step—but it is the only real hope we have of saving our country and our Church.
Dorothy Day also said, “I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least.”
The labels are tiresome and played-out; they have brought us to a desolate place.
I want to love, again.
Elizabeth Scalia is the Managing Editor of the Catholic Portal at Patheos and blogs as The Anchoress. Her previous articles for "On the Square" can be found here.
RESOURCES
Elizabeth Scalia, “Begin the Apocalypse”
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Comments:
But examining labels is always good too. After all, it's all it takes not only for people to dismiss others, but to vilify them and rationalize their persecution - something that liberals constantly promote against social conservatives on this site and elsewhere. How are you going to address the issue without labels?
I can't stand the words either; they're so vulgar, if you stop and think about it. But who's going to blink first? Well I say it is on "us" to stop first and to display a courage that is sorely missing in this culture. We are more than the labels we put on each other. It's very hard to stop using them and its a shorthand for dismissal but we're going to have to try.
God bless and best wishes.
It breaches all barriers that we have built to separate each other.
We are - each, every and all - CHILDREN OF GOD.
There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
Rick, this is a common cognitive distortion of humanity. We make all sorts of logical inversions, translating all (most, or most promiment) terrorists are muslims to all muslims are terrorists to when we go to the doctor and are treated and we are told "there's no evidence of disease" but we hear "evidence of no disease".
Author Nassim Nicholas Taleb discussed these logical inversions in his book "The Black Swan", which is a discussion of our epistemic limitations, especially as they apply to the unanticipability of significant events that with one single occurrence, upends millenia of experience. (it's named for the discovery of Black Swans in Australia by Europeans, who previously had never observed a Swan that wasn't white, and who before had a common rejoinder of obviousness of "aren't all swans white")
In short, I doubt labelling will ever go away. No matter how we are chided otherwise, we will do it. If you don't think so, imagine yourself working in the human resources department of a company. Based on the presence of "buzzwords" on a resume (that your screening software will find) you will judge prospective employees. Should you be working in a bank or some similar enterprise, and discover in an interview that a candidate has a criminal conviction, you will be looking to terminate the interview and if you deny that, here's another label for you-liar.
1. A disclaimer: I, as other commentors, use labels. The world is more complicated than I can comprehend. To cope, my mind puts ideas into categories. But I strive to be ever mindful that these categories do not necessarily reflect reality; they reflect my ability to COPE with reality.
Thus, I may say, “Light is a particle” or “Light is a wave.” Ideally, I’d say, “I have difficulty understanding the behavior of light. Sometimes I find it useful to compare light to particles, and sometimes to waves. To the extent that the particle metaphor and the wave metaphor conflict, that merely reflects the weakness of my metaphors, but not necessarily the weakness of our scientific understanding of light.” But that’s a mouthful, so I often revert to the simple “Light’s a particle” labels.
In short, convenience has its benefits, and its costs.
2. I sometimes wonder about the early names of God: YHWH, or Yahweh. This translates as “I am that I am,” or “I shall be” or somesuch. Similarly, I wonder about Jesus’s reluctance to accept titles. (“Are you the King of the Jews?”) Perhaps these texts reveal something about the burdens of labels, and a divine effort to spare humans the problems that inevitably result from them.
3. That said, what makes the label “Catholic” different, such that a person might want to embrace that label, unique among all labels?
How useful is that label? Among fellow Catholics, I know it's easy to congratulate each other for wearing the label; this promotes in-group solidarity. But is that really the goal? I humbly suggest that the label is both too broad and two narrow.
Too broad: I suspect we all know a wide variety of people who have worn the label “Catholic.” Yes, *I* may impute some rigorous meaning to the label (“People who use birth control are NOT Catholics, no matter what they call themselves…”), and using the “Catholic” label may provide me with a feeling of superiority. But so what? I suspect everyone who wears the label “Catholic” might have his or her own idiosyncratic definition; I’m no different than they. And even if my definition is the RIGHT AND TRUE definition, so what? Does it help me to walk humbly with my God if I brandish a label designed to reinforce my feeling of smug superiority?
Too narrow: While some of us know the broad range of people who wear the label “Catholic,” others may associate that label with the crudest caricature. Does it help me relate to these people by wearing a label that needlessly distances me from them?
Moreover, what conclusions am I tempted to draw about people who do not wear the label “Catholic”? Can I conclude that they do not act justly, or love mercy, or walk humbly with God?
This leads into larger questions about exclusive paths to righteousness (and heaven?). Consider: If I have the antidote for a lethal and spreading condition, how should I communicate this to others? If I conclude that I have the EXCLUSIVE antidote – no one else could ever possibly develop a comparable antidote using a different name – then I might want to say, “Get Xotrium, which is available only from me!” The label may help people find what they are looking for. On the other hand, if I’m not quite that confident – and if I really want everyone to find a workable antidote, even if they may have a personal aversion to something about me – then I may want to broadcast the formula for the antidote rather than the label.
I know that C.S. Lewis seemed to embrace the label “Christian.” But I also recall the final Narnia book, in which a character that had acted justly, loved mercy, and walked humbly in the name of a false god was ultimately embraced by the true one. (And those who had done evil in the name of the true god were condemned.) It was the acting, loving, and walking that mattered – not the label.
Be that as it may, if we have no "labels" we have no language. Is not "label" a label?
I'm afraid this comment will haunt me for a good long while.
That's a good thing.
"We repeat, there is nothing we can do but love, and, dear God, please enlarge our hearts to love each other, to love our neighbor, to love our enemy as our friend.”
Dorothy Day
I come from a grass-roots, working class family background (rural Okies, on my mom's side), and I remember hearing sentiments from the older generation long ago about the strange uniformity in appearance of black people. Our faces have individual character, you know, but you can't tell one black person from another. They all look alike.
It was with a deep sense of delight, therefore, that I sat one day with my friend Yanda, a dedicated university student in Zaire (now Congo), and listened to him explain that it was a very common attitude among Zaireans that all white people look alike. He hastened to add that he really knew a lot of us, and he didn't agree with the idea, but many Zaireans couldn't tell one white person from another.
I had a strange feeling of having come full circle.
"Joseph Marshall is wrong about this matter, he is usually wrong about most matters of this kind, and the more important a matter such as this becomes the more likely Joseph is to be wrong about it. But Joseph has never been quite so wrong about anything as he is in this matter, and these are the reasons why."
There you go. No labels of any kind other than the one I attach to myself every time I use my monetary credit. No denigration either, as far as I can see. The simple key to the whole matter is the one the Census uses: self-identification. If someone calls themselves a Democrat, then you can call them that as well. If all the people who call themselves Democrats are involved then you can call them "all Democrats", too. And you really don't even have to take the "all" all that literally. As far as any serious intellectual function a label may serve politically, this is it.
So why do we shrink from doing this? Because when you put my name out there as a label, you have also put your own name out there in relationship to me, even if you actively try to conceal it with an alias, and if you keep doing it, someone will eventually unmask your handle and attach your name to it in due course.
This is the true source of all denigration: fear. It is not the labels we use but the fact that we are unwilling to name our targets in the way that they name themselves, and unwilling to come to grips with the fact that they are more, personally, than any opinions we may think they have, or even than the withering things we have to say about them and their opinions.
This is a far more elemental and simple matter than "loving". "Loving" is one of those Big Words, and it is surely not "a willingness to be a little naive". Certainly no one is asking us to "be a little naive about thy neighbor as about thyself". What is required in order not to denigrate someone is personal acknowledgement of who they believe themselves to be, even if we think they are deceived about it.
Beyond acknowledgement, before we can get anywhere near something like "love", we have to cultivate tolerance of what a person believes themselves to be--no more quotation marks around "African-American", for example. It is, in fact, the level of this sort of tolerance which is corroded by the hatred and contempt that leads to denigration, whether it is the gross one of abusing labels and not individuals or the subtle one of presenting an individual's self-identification in eyebrow raising quotation marks.
But, even beyond both acknowledgement and tolerance there is still something further we must undertake before we can seriously "love" anyone or anything, and that is understanding. One of our principal uses of denigration is to absolve us of making the effort to understand, and allowing the denigrated to remain unresolvedly alien from us, justifying our fear behind all of this, and converting that fear into active hatred and contempt.
With such obstacles in the way, and such unrewarded efforts of acknowledgement, tolerance, and understanding required, how can we even think about "love", or at least not about our callow infatuation with the wishes we project on others that we miscall love?
To love thy neighbor as thyself. One of the Big Words no one can actually undertake until they can acknowledge the way their neighbors self-identify. Neither can it be even thought of until we are willing to tolerate the labels our neighbors use to self-identify. Nor can it be accomplished until we make the effort to understand our neighbors, and sustain the effort even when our understanding leads us to something we reject, whatever good reasons we may give for rejecting it.
Love? To love thyself, thee must know thyself, and to love thy neighbor, thee must know thy neighbor. And, in either case, we must love even when our knowledge leads us to something that makes us searingly and irredeemably uncomfortable.
I, personally, don't remember being capable of anything remotely like this when I was young. But, then, when I was young I always lived east of Eden. And anyone who came from Eden when young has far more right to try to do so than I, even now.
Abba Dorotheus says, “Never say, ‘he is a thief.’ But, rather, ‘he stole,’ for otherwise you condemn his whole life”
I like that. And note, this principle applies even to the man who calls himself a thief. A man may condemn his own whole life, but I don't have to participate in that. This is not a matter of being nice and respecting a person's wishes; it's a matter of respecting the person -- respecting the truth -- REGARDLESS of his wishes.
We are all more than our labels, no matter how much we may embrace those labels.
None should say, "he is damned" for no one knows what God might do. But one can say, "we are all damnable." For apart from the grace of God, we are all subject to God's just condemnation.
I have not read the comments yet but what I have read here from you, I must say "Congratulation" for having heard "The Holy Spirit" telling U>S (usual sinners) that we're all only as strong as our weakest link.
Go Figure!
Really?
Who said that? :)
Peace
The otherwise sweet and gracious wife of a Baptist minister commented to my wife recently that "all muslims are terrorists," including, presumably, the ones in Morocco who offered me such generous hospitality and kindness. And then there was the young Russian who worked with me on a joint US-USSR team in both Soviet Armenia and Washington State, who said that he was amazed at the cooperative volunteer labor he was seeing in America. He had been raised, he said, to believe that we were all self-centered capitalists who would never do anything that didn't involve a personal profit.
Congratulations, Elizabeth. Let the label-free revolution begin!