I have noticed that a popular issue to complain about online are labels. I have seen so many posts and videos by people asking the question "why do we need labels?". They argue that we should not label people, because when he label people we have a false image of the person, we think of a label and not the person.
I am going to challenge this view. Labels are like words that we create to describe the world. Sometimes our words are not the exact description of the world, sometimes they can be used as metaphors in poetic language, but they do describe the world in a helpful way. Being against labels sounds like being against words themselves. There are different kind of elements. They behave different and they have different properties so we describe them with words. The same with people. People think differently, act differently, so we come up with words that summarize what a person is so that we would not need to describe a person in a long essay. Take for example someone like Noam Chomsky. I dislike the guy, for the main reason that he is a hypocrite, he is no anarchist, he is an apologist for large governments, he only hides on the title of "anarchist". (Maybe I do a series called "Noam Chomsky Sucks" but that would have to wait, I just did one). If I ever have to describe Chomsky to someone who does not know who he is, I would say "he is a crazy Marxist". That one word "Marxist" is enough to say so much about the guy. While it is true that it does not describe everything about Chomsky, and there are still more questions that need to be answered, one word is enough to tell someone what another person is about.
The problems are not labels. They are necessary and helpful. It would be inefficient to argue with one another without having any labels. The only problem with labels is that people go too far. Richard Dawkins is one such example. He gets so crazy with the different kinds of atheists labels that I have once heard him describe certain atheists are "tea-pot agnostics". Labels should be a way give a quick summary of another person's ideas, they cannot be used as a substitute for what another person believes.
Yes, labels are necessary.
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Labels are necessary, no doubt. However, one of the dangers of labels is that they are often applied without proper justification.
ReplyDeleteThe other problem is that often different labels means different things to different people but use the same words. How is one supposed to understand what the other is talking about?
"However, one of the dangers of labels is that they are often applied without proper justification.
ReplyDeleteThe other problem is that often different labels means different things to different people but use the same words. How is one supposed to understand what the other is talking about?":
You can say the same thing about words. Words can be misleading too. But we still use them and communicate daily. Your concern for the dangers of labels is exaggerated.